Penellype's Allotment

[Penellype]

The new freezer was scheduled for delivery between 7 and 11am so I had to stay at home until it arrived. It actually came at 9.30 which was good. I left it to stand for a couple of hours as recommended before turning it on, and went to the plot to get some veg to make soup. There was a large kohlrabi that has been annoying me for weeks because it really wanted using but I had nowhere to freeze soup. I harvested the kohlrabi, a courgette and 2 leeks and some carrots from the garden and made the soup in time for lunch.

After lunch I went back to the plot and set about tidying out the wood shed. There were various bits of wood and netting that were leaning against the leylandii hedge that needed rehoming, and some old bits of plastic packaging that had been the gutters on the shed which needed to go to the tip. I put them, an old bucket of rubbish, a rusty rake head and the old can of creocote (almost empty) in a pile ready to take to the tip on Friday. I reorganized the wood shed, rolling up a large piece of weed matting that had come out of the tunnel and some netting that has been hanging around for ages so they could be stored more neatly and I moved the white piping that leans against the shed so that I could put the biggest pieces of wood behind the wood pile out of the way. The white piping was then replaced, leaving everything much tidier. There are still a few bits of stuff (mostly plastic and some metal mesh) leaning against the west hedge - I'm hoping that once the leylandii is gone there will be room for them behind the shed.

Finally I picked a few beans and watered the plants in pots (lettuces and fruit bushes).

I was just on my way out when a lady I didn't know came in through the gate with some tools. She told me she had taken over the plot next but one to mine. This probably shouldn't be a surprise as I have only seen the previous plot holder about 4 times since January, usually strimming grass which seems to occupy most of that plot. It will be nice if she is around a bit more often than that.

[Penellype]

No time for gardening yesterday.

This morning I wanted to get all the rubbish from the plot to the tip, but there were a couple of things I wanted to do before I went. I quickly dug over the onion bed (and found just one piece of horsetail root), then carefully scraped off the filling from the tomato bed and put it on the onion bed. There was loads of horsetail, which I pulled out as best I could to take to the tip.

Next I trimmed back the hawthorn in the west hedge, which was bulging in the middle. I cut it back by up to 4 inches in places, and it looks much better. More rubbish to take to the tip, as I don't like thorny wood in the compost. I took a cucumber and some lettuce home with me for lunch.

At the tip I was pleasantly surprised that almost everything I took could be recycled - the mesh fencing went in the scrap metal, and even the bits of plastic packaging that made the old gutters on the shed was allowed to go in the plastic recycling skip.

After lunch I went back and started digging the tomato bed, which was riddled with horsetail roots. I got about 1/3 of it dug before I felt I'd done enough. I cut some calabrese for tea and went home.

The evening was very clear and with almost no wind, and I decided to go back and cover the tomatoes with some netting in case of frost. It might just help keep them a degree or so warmer than they otherwise would be.

[Penellype]

Very chilly yesterday morning, with the local weather station reporting 2.2C. I went to the allotment fairly early and found that the tomatoes and cucumbers had survived the night, but the runner beans didn't look too happy. These have almost finished now, with just a few small beans left, so I may wall remove the plants this weekend.

For now I wanted to finish digging the tomato bed. I soon warmed up and wondered why I'd thought I needed a coat. Some of the soil under the path was very compacted and hard, and there is certainly loads of horsetail root that I have missed, but I've made a start.

There wasn't time for much else today so I picked a cucumber, some lettuce and a beetroot for lunch, a turnip for tea and a few tomatoes and went home.

[Penellype]

Not as much got done yesterday as I would have liked.

Having spent the morning in my friend's garden, after lunch I set about digging over the tomato bed again to see how much more horsetail root I could find. Not surprisingly, there was loads of it. As the soil was no longer so compacted I dug the whole lot in one go. By the time I had finished I felt really tired, but I wanted to get some weeding done in the tunnel before I went home. I did a bit, but hadn't a great deal of enthusiasm, so I went home.

On the way home I met the lady who has just given up the next but one allotment. She said she had a set of shelves from a small blowaway greenhouse and a small plastic tunnel which I could have if I wanted them. I said yes please, as I could do with more shelves in the tunnel and I collected them in the evening on my way to the stables. Now I just need to make room for them somehow...

[Penellype]

Tomorrow I will have had my allotment for 9 months. As I have a busy day tomorrow I decided to take some photos of it this morning.



Starting to look quite bare in places. The french beans have finished, and the runners have just a few beans left, all of which are at the bottom, so after the photos were taken I cut these down to the level of the nasturtiums, which are growing very fast at the moment.



Tomatoes under their temporary net have survived the cold nights so far. I removed the net when things had warmed up a bit, to give the plants some air. The courgettes in the hotbed are still producing a few fruit. Behind them is the tomato bed I have been digging horsetail roots out of all weekend, and the white net covers the parsnips and some beetroot. The other net at the far end covers kohlrabi, a huge savoy cabbage, turnips and swedes.



The view from the other end. As an aside, notice the clear deep blue sky. It started clouding over at lunchtime and light rain arrived around 6pm. I may have mentioned this before.



Another view of the brassicas under the net.



The compost area, with rather fewer overhanging branches than previously. The scruffy bit of hedge in the corner has now been trimmed (I also removed some horsetail regrowth from the road side of the hedge).

Continued in next post.

[Penellype]

The tunnel



The view from the doorway. The new shelf unit has now swapped places with the gooseberry bush, which will be going outside as soon as it has dropped its leaves (avoiding sawfly at present). The tunnel is pleasingly full of brassicas, leeks, beetroot and cucumbers, which have survived a lot better in here than at home.



Lettuces in their mushroom boxes are growing well (winter mix on the left, Warpath on the right). Between them are some fennel and spinach seedlings growing in loo roll innards.



From the other end - Romanesco, Brokali, cucumbers and gooseberry.



The experiment with the turnips has not taken too long to produce a definitive result. Turnips with copper rings and slug gone are undamaged, 2 of the 4 plants that were not protected with copper have been eaten. Copper rings alone are not 100% effective, but the combination of copper and slug gone seems to work well.

Apart from the photos, cutting down the beans, trimming the hedge and pulling the horsetail, I pulled out a few more weeds in the tunnel and brought home a courgette, some lettuce and 3 tomatoes.

[Penellype]

Nothing doing yesterday as I was visiting my sister, so I took her a box of tomatoes.

This morning I cleared up after a breezy day yesterday, removing plastic rubbish from the hedges and clearing some of the leaves. One of the compost bins has no lid and the plastic sheet I use to cover it had blown off and needed replacing.

Having done that I dug over the pea bed again, removing all the horsetail roots I could find. There were not that many and those that were left tended to be in patches that I had clearly missed when digging before. This is why I am digging each bed over several times. I was tired by the time I had finished, so I took a cucumber home for lunch.

Later in the afternoon I went back for a while and cut the grass, which I wanted to do before it rains. I also sorted out some better shelves for the new shelf unit as the ones it comes with are too flimsy to support mushroom trays of lettuce. When I got the plot there were some "useful looking" pieces of black plastic, which appear to have been cut from some sort of box (possibly a recycling box), and 2 of them were exactly the right size to sit on the shelves in a way that will give rather more support. I will probably split the shelf unit into 2 lower shelves so that I can cover the lettuces with a cloche, but that will be later when I have space to do it.

Finally I picked another couple of large tomatoes and went home to freeze some of the riper ones.

[Penellype]

No gardening yesterday.

This morning I went down early as I wanted to get the tomato bed dug over again before it gets too soggy - we are forecast quite a bit of rain tonight and tomorrow. I dug out all the horsetail root I could find (again) and then replaced the folded back path and (feeling slightly foolish) swept the soil off the weed matting paths as I don't want them getting too muddy.

The other job today was to move the gooseberry bush to the shed end of the tunnel, where there is a space, so I could split the new shelf unit in two. I did this, but found that I had miscalculated the number of joints I needed in order to give the 2nd set of shelves some "feet", so I had to go back home to get some. I brought my spirit level back with me as I could see that the shelves were anything but level, and got the job finished properly.

By this time it was threatening rain, so I removed some dead leaves from the PSB and calabrese, harvested a bag full of ripening tomatoes, 2 small cucumbers, the remains of the runner beans (3) and 2 small heads of calabrese, and went home.

The calabrese was somewhat disappointing, the heads being infested with aphids. I really don't much care for eating aphids

[Penellype]

Just 2 short visits to the allotment yesterday, the first in the morning to deliver a bag of compost, put the rain water in the water butts and collect up slugs and snails for the chickens. It was still raining slightly and really chilly.

The 2nd visit was in the evening, in bright sunshine, but also noticeably cold. I'd decided to cover the tomatoes with their net again to try to keep the frost off. I haven't yet been down this morning to see if it worked, but the local weather station temperature was down to 0.2C last night. Things look ok at home, which was probably a little warmer than that, but we did have a white frost on the rooftops for the first time this autumn.

[Penellype]

Very little time today as there was no point in an early morning visit with the ground wet from yesterday's rain and temperatures near freezing.

I went down briefly at lunchtime to find out if the frost had damaged anything - a few leaves on the nasturtiums look a bit sad, but everything else seems ok, touch wood. I planted the spinach seedlings in one of the mushroom trays and put them on the new shelving - these were becoming urgent as their roots were emerging from the bottoms of their loo roll innards. I decided to leave the fennel, which is not looking particularly happy - I think I will plant it in one of the potato buckets rather than using up precious shelf space in the tunnel. I don't want it in a raised bed as these are in line for digging shortly.

Having watered the spinach in, I picked a cucumber and pulled 3 summer leeks for soup and went home to tackle the increasing queue of tomatoes for the freezer. I froze 3 portions of tomato sauce and 5 of tomato, leek and spinach soup today (spinach has been in the freezer from the huge spring harvest, waiting for an opportunity to make soup). The addition of tomato to spinach created an interestingly coloured, almost black soup when blended, but it tasted great.

[Penellype]

I went down to the plot fairly early as there were several things I wanted to get on with, the first being to remove the net from the tomatoes. There are no more cold nights forecast for now and keeping them covered probably makes blight more likely by trapping humid air.

Next I wanted to trim off the long bits of grass that the mower can't reach, which were getting quite long in places. Having done that and picked up some leaves on the way round, I then planted the fennel seedlings into one of the buckets of compost from the potatoes, freshening it up with a bit of bfb. I put the bucket on the hotbed for now, where it should get a reasonable amount of sun.

The courgettes on the hotbed which looked ok yesterday were looking very sad today, with brown and wilted leaves. The frost has clearly done more damage than I thought. There were 4 courgettes of useable size plus a couple of little ones that have not yet flowered. I picked the 4 and cut back the worst of the leaves, but left the bulk of the plants to see if they will recover enough for the remaining courgettes to develop. Somehow I doubt it. Interestingly the 3rd courgette plant, which is next to the tomato plants, had been partly covered with the net I put over the tomatoes. The leaves that had not been covered were damaged, although not as badly as those in the hotbed, but the ones that had been under the net were still green. There are some tiny courgettes on this plant too, but I have no idea if they will get big enough to eat.

As well as the courgettes I harvested 4 tomatoes that were starting to turn red, a small cucumber and one of the Warpath lettuces for lunch. Then I went home and made yet more soup (tomato, courgette and sweet pepper this time).

The afternoon was taken up with work and sorting out some of the strawberry runners at home, but after tea I managed a 2nd trip to the plot. For some time I've been meaning to dig the horsetail out of the path between the compost bins and the tunnel, but I've been putting it off due to tree roots and it being compacted from having been walked over all year. However, if I am ever going to stop the horsetail creeping back into the tunnel I am going to have to clear that path, so I decided to get started today. Left much longer, if the weather turns wet I could see myself making excuses not to do it all winter.

I started at the road end, where the soil was reasonably soft having already had several large geranium plants dug out of it. I was pleasantly surprised that there were not that many tree roots to contend with and surprisingly little horsetail, by which I mean that there were individual roots rather than a solid network of them. Of course it could be that I simply haven't dug deeply enough! Anyway I managed to dig far more than I expected to, about 1/3 of the length of the tunnel, before poor light stopped play. I will continue with this tomorrow.

[Penellype]

Today I spent most of my gardening time digging the rest of the path next to the tunnel. I did 2 sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and got the whole path dug. There were rather more tree roots at the shed end of the path, but nothing that made digging impossible. I was glad I had got it done as the forecast is starting to look really quite wet after tomorrow - the hurricanes in the atlantic have shaken things up somewhat. Tomorrow I will probably put down some weed matting to stop the path from becoming a mud bath, then once things start growing in spring I might lift the matting and see what the state of the horsetail is.

The only other things I did today were harvest a beetroot for lunch and water the salads on the shelves.

[Penellype]

Yesterday was a gorgeous warm sunny day and I intended to make the most of it. I spent a couple of hours in the morning finishing off the path next to the tunnel and putting down weed matting. I won't have got all the horsetail out by any means, and the intention is to lift the matting next year, so it is only held in place by bricks, but I wanted to get some of the horsetail out and make a decent path before the rain arrives.

Having done that I decided to dig over the tomato bed again, this time including what I could get at of the path between it and the hotbed. Before I started I removed the 2 courgette plants from the hotbed as they were clearly not going to recover from being frosted. I dug over about a third of the bed and path before I got tired and went home for a bit.

After lunch I went back and finished the tomato bed. The path part was really hard work and I had had more than enough by the time I'd finished it. I put the weed matting back on the paths and picked the last 2 small runner beans and a few bits of calabrese for tea. The calabrese again had aphids in it and also some caterpillars which might be hoverfly larvae, as there didn't seem to be any damage to the florets. I have a problem with these grey cabbage aphids both at home and at the allotment, and I'm not at all sure what, if anything, I can do about it. They are right inside the florets, even the tightest ones, and despite soaking the florets in salt water and putting them under the tap at full blast, the wretched things would not come out.

Any ideas?

[Penellype]

The main job yesterday was to take the horsetail roots to the tip. Although I only had 3 trugs full, the shortest route to the tip is closed all next week for resurfacing and the weather today looks appalling. I didn't want to have to battle round the worst section of the York ring road due to lack of planning!

To make the journey worthwhile I had a large box of plastic tubs and trays which they will take at the tip but not at the gate (barmy as it goes to the same place). As the forecast rain hadn't appeared, I also spent some time chopping bits off the blackthorn and hawthorn hedge to straighten it a bit better and added a trug of these to the load. By the time I'd queued to get into the tip (very busy) and been shopping (also very busy) it was lunch time.

After lunch I went back and spent some time tidying up the edge of the grass path at the side of the plot and removing any weeds. Most of this path has lawn edging between it and the raised beds but the bit at the rhubarb end doesn't yet. I cleared away all the rhubarb leaves that had died down, but I need a few more to go before I can easily finish the edging. I will also edge along the grass by the roadside hedge, but I could do with the tomatoes out before I do that.

Next job was to cut down the finished runner bean plants. This bed is full of nasturtiums and a few straggly florence fennel plants, and is probably the next in line for digging.

Finally I tidied up some of the fallen leaves and picked up several pieces of plastic rubbish which went in the litter bin by the bus stop. Every time I tidy up like this I try to do a little more to make progress - this time I cleared up a small pile of turf that I had dug up when planting the raspberries and left to rot near the hedge. The grass had died and there were a few horsetail roots to remove, and the resulting soil went into one of the spare potato buckets for now. I also put away the nets that had been covering the tomatoes, as the plants are not looking great and probably won't survive much longer, and I wanted to keep the netting dry. I picked 12 tomatoes that were turning red.

Finally I checked that everything was weighed down with bricks where necessary and put some water in the watering can to stop things blowing about in the gales, then went home.

[Jungle Jane]

Yesterday was a gorgeous warm sunny day and I intended to make the most of it. I spent a couple of hours in the morning finishing off the path next to the tunnel and putting down weed matting. I won't have got all the horsetail out by any means, and the intention is to lift the matting next year, so it is only held in place by bricks, but I wanted to get some of the horsetail out and make a decent path before the rain arrives.

Having done that I decided to dig over the tomato bed again, this time including what I could get at of the path between it and the hotbed. Before I started I removed the 2 courgette plants from the hotbed as they were clearly not going to recover from being frosted. I dug over about a third of the bed and path before I got tired and went home for a bit.

After lunch I went back and finished the tomato bed. The path part was really hard work and I had had more than enough by the time I'd finished it. I put the weed matting back on the paths and picked the last 2 small runner beans and a few bits of calabrese for tea. The calabrese again had aphids in it and also some caterpillars which might be hoverfly larvae, as there didn't seem to be any damage to the florets. I have a problem with these grey cabbage aphids both at home and at the allotment, and I'm not at all sure what, if anything, I can do about it. They are right inside the florets, even the tightest ones, and despite soaking the florets in salt water and putting them under the tap at full blast, the wretched things would not come out.

Any ideas?

Does a boil wash get rid of them? Supermarket cauliflower sometimes has a greyish area on the florets,it could be staining from their waxy honeydew? I’d eat it still,whatever it is it’s healthier than from the shops