Penellype's Allotment

[geepee]

^^^^^^^
So sorry to hear all this....!!
Its good that you can share on here though.
Do'nt be stuck ...Gp

[Penellype]

^^^^^^^
So sorry to hear all this....!!
Its good that you can share on here though.
Do'nt be stuck ...Gp

Thanks Geepee, I'm fine now (mostly). The lack of fridge space is an irritant as it somewhat curtails what I can do with the produce, but its only for a week and I am getting into a routine with the cold box. It wasn't just me that lost an internet router - I was talking to my neighbour yesterday and hers is broken too.

[1Bee]

Nasty, Pene. I'm glad you're feeling better. I know what you mean about cooking more and storing - I do the same with the freezer. A freezer loss would be an utter disaster for us.

Which reminds me. I need to start clearing space for the annual potato dauphinoise preparation... yum.

Hope you feel much better soon. Lots of cream on your raspberries, perchance?

[Penellype]

Thanks 1Bee. I'm feeling much better today.

I agree about the freezer - when this first happened I thought all the electric sockets had gone off and was on the phone to the electrician within seconds of realizing that it wasn't something I could fix myself. I'd forgotten that the freezers (kitchen and garage) are on different circuits to the fridge and my computer equipment thanks to a totally bizarre wiring system in the kitchen which has half the plugs on the main downstairs plug circuit and half on a circuit that used to include the boiler, which is upstairs at the other end of the house . I would be devastated to lose everything in the freezers, which contain almost nothing but garden produce.

[Penellype]

A much better day today. I walked down early and collected the overnight rain water and pulled the horsetail out of the onion bed before it was time to go home for the weekly work meeting. As soon as that was over I went back and set about digging out all of the rest of the strawberries, plus the annual weeds they were sheltering and any horsetail that came up along with them. This job has been getting increasingly urgent as little pink and blue flowers have been appearing in amongst the strawberries recently (willowherb and speedwell) and I don't want a massive annual weed problem if I can help it. I will deal with the horsetail properly later.

That done, I filled the last empty trug with horsetail from under the roadside hedge (plenty more where that came from), picked a beetroot for lunch and took the 5 trugs of rubbish to the tip.

After lunch I went back, intending to pull the horsetail out of the rest of the raised beds. The problem with pulling horsetail (or snapping it off, to be more accurate) is that it is a no-reward job. Its back just as bad if not worse within a day or 2. There is already some showing in the tunnel which I cleared completely the other day. I pulled out the few bits I could see in the raspberry bed and decided to get on with a job that has been lurking for weeks - putting the white boards in as edging between the raspberries and the grass. I've not been able to do this recently for 2 reasons - it has been far too hot and the ground has been too hard. I decided to make the best of a much cooler day and damp ground and at least get started.

The idea is to bury these boards (which were originally alongside the grass path on the east side of the plot) so that the tops are level with the grass, to make mowing easy. Hopefully they will confine any couch and horsetail to the grassy area, and any raspberry roots to the raspberry bed. That's the plan, anyway. I haven't measured the boards, but they are about the same depth as the blade of my (small) spade. There are 4 of them - 2 long ones, a medium one and a short one. This was a lot harder then I expected and took me a very long time to get one of the long boards in position. I was also left with an enormous amount of spare soil, which I am not sure where to put (its half sand and has grass and horsetail in it so I don't want it on the raspberry side). Maybe given a day or 2 the soil around the board will settle and take some more to fill in the hole - the board has a slight lip on one side which makes backfilling it hard. I called it a day at that point as there was no way I could manage another long piece today.

I harvested some beans, raspberries and a nice head of calabrese from the tunnel and went home.

You may remember a while ago a small cabbage white butterfly got into the tunnel. I've been checking for caterpillars regularly and I found several on the romanesco, which I removed. the trouble with small whites is they lay eggs singly scattered around, so the caterpillars are not in a group, or even on the same plant. I checked the calabrese plants and couldn't find any evidence of caterpillars, only a bit of slug damage. However, when I started to cut up the calabrese I found 6 caterpillars inside. They were quite big ones and had clearly been hiding in there, although they hadn't made much mess (they are usually extremely mucky things). Having removed them and rinsed the calabrese well, most of it was edible. This is a bit of a pain - I was going to give the other calabrese head to my Mum, but she won't appreciate it if it is full of caterpillars!

The brassicas in the tunnel are also suffering badly from whitefly (no surprise) and the ones under the debris netting outside, particularly the turnips, have a bad infestation of flea beetle. Neither of these particularly bother me, although they aren't ideal. Worse are the raspberry beetles which are becoming more of a nuisance on the raspberries. Short of spraying them with chemicals I don't know of any way of getting rid of these. You can buy pheromone traps, but the point of these is to find out if you have a problem early in the season so that you can spray. I'd really rather not.

[Penellype]

I wanted to get the rest of the white boards buried near the raspberries before the weather gets hot again. I therefore went down to the plot early and set about digging a trench for the 2nd long board. Having done this once I was better prepared for the potential problems and dug a wider trench to make it easier to get the soil out of the bottom. It didn't take too long to get the 2nd long board in place.

I had been going to take the boards right across to the tunnel, but thinking about it there didn't seem much point. The shorter board was just the right length to finish the rest of the row of raspberries and I decided to leave it at that. I was just finishing putting the soil back around the shorter board when I managed to tweak my knee. There is a lot of getting up and down in a job like this and whether I twisted it slightly or what I don't know, but it objected sharply and I decided I had better not do any more squatting on the floor, at least for today. This was a nuisance as I wanted to pull some horsetail out of the raised beds, and it was only about 9.30am. That job is about 100% squatting on the floor.

A sore right knee is nothing new to me - over the years I've had several minor accidents, almost all of which have involved my right knee, which is considerably larger than the left as a result. With a little luck this is only a temporary setback and if I go easy on it for a day or 2 it should be fine. I decided to give the plot a miss for the rest of the day and do jobs at home that I could do without having to get down on the floor - mowing the lawns, trimming strawberries (on a shelf), deadheading and removing some finished peas. There is plenty to do, its just not quite what I had planned.

[1Bee]

Ouch, hope it's better soon!

[Penellype]

Ouch, hope it's better soon!

Thanks, so do I!

Its not too bad today, but I am taking things steadily so I don't aggravate it.

[Penellype]

Today I really needed to pull the horsetail out of the raised beds before it took over completely. It seems to be growing faster and faster as the year progresses. I went down early again and developed a most un-ladylike stance with my bottom sticking out, so that I could reach most of the horsetail without bending or twisting my knee. It worked, and I managed to get most of the stuff pulled out or broken off without hurting myself. I also eased some of the onions out of the soil a bit as they had fallen over, and took a beetroot home for lunch.

After lunch I went back and found that the council had cut the hedge (road side and top). I was pleased they had as it was getting very untidy. I trimmed a few brambles and nettles from my side and raked up the bits that had fallen onto the grass path, as my push mower definitely won't cope with hawthorn and blackthorn trimmings. I then pulled out all the horsetail I could from the grass and mowed the grass paths. There were a lot of coarse long flower stems that the mower wouldn't cut, so I will have to get the shears out soon.

I'd taken my camera with me and took some photos of progress:











(continued in next post)

[Penellype]

A few more photos







I harvested some beans and a turnip and went home, but I was back to water in the evening, and dug some of the horsetail out of the tunnel (again).

[Penellype]

Not a great deal of time yesterday, but managed about an hour at the plot at lunchtime. Cut the long bits of grass where the mower couldn't reach and checked the tomato plants over for sideshoots, removing a few.

Started digging the strawberry bed again to remove some more horsetail roots, but the sun came out and it was soon far too hot to continue.

Back in the evening to water and harvest some raspberries for the freezer. While watering I noticed a couple of the Sarpo Axona potato buckets are becoming misshapen. After the huge crops of Nicola it will be interesting to see if these can beat an average of 1kg per seed potato.

[Penellype]

Apart from a quick dash down in the morning to pick some beans for my Mum, there was no time for anything at the plot yesterday as my niece was getting married in Knaresborough. I'd watered everything very thoroughly on Thursday evening and it would just have to cope with whatever the weather did.

As it happened there were a few showers, although nothing like what it did at the wedding, where we had about an hour of heavy rain and thunder before, during and after the ceremony. It cleared up almost as soon as we'd left the church. Typical!

I got back to York this morning and went down to collect the rain water - about a bucketful in all. Better than nothing, and at least the plants had had a drink yesterday. I was very tired and really only had the energy to collect the water this morning and do some watering this evening, when I noticed that the horsetail has popped up again in the tunnel, which I cleared on Wednesday. Some of it is already 2-3 inches tall. No prizes for guessing one of tomorrow's jobs then.

The raspberries are still producing plenty of fruit, so I ate some before going home.

[Penellype]

Better today and after a morning in my friend's garden I got some sticky traps from the local garden centre and put them in among the brassicas in the tunnel in the hope of removing some of the whitefly infestation. There are clouds of the wretched things every time I disturb a leaf.

I dug and pulled the horsetail in the tunnel again. There are a lot of very small, thin pieces and I wonder if these are seedlings from spores produced this spring. The stuff is relentless.

The other job I needed to do today was sort out the cucumber plants. These have grown very quickly and branched a lot and were all over the floor, which is not a great place for them. They are covered with flowers so should be producing some cucumbers soon. I put some sticks in to train them up and tied some of them to the tunnel framework so that most of the plant is off the ground. I knew those leylandii branches would come in useful .

The onions are all bent over now so I eased some more of them out of the soil. A few of the ones I did earlier are nearly dry and I'm hoping that I can get a few of them indoors before it rains mid week.

Harvested a beetroot, a courgette and some raspberries, and was back again this evening to water.

[1Bee]

Small, thin shoots suggests a weakened mother plant to me, Pene...

[bikermike]

A word of caution, it does slow down at this time of year, so it's not definite, but it is an encouraging sign.

Is there anyway you can cover more of it? One thing I have found is that although it spreads, it does like to keep poking it's head above ground. if you give it a big enough barrier (of eg plastic sheet covering), it really slows down it's advance. If you can put "firebreaks" across the plot, you might be able to get it in proper retreat in one or two locations. If it does try to come up under covers, it grows huge amounts in a spiral trying to get up, so it really wears it out.

Also, when you pull it out, it has a weakpoint at about ground level, if you can pull it off below that, it helps slow it down.