General
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We are starting to get to the point where there is something to eat from the allotment every day. Today we picked a lettuce, some sugarsnap peas, a carrot and some salad onions for our salad tonight, some strawberries for our pudding, and a carrier bag full of redcurrants to make into redcurrant sorbet for tomorrow night’s pudding.I’d better get planning my food preserving and storing because it won’t be long before the allotment is chucking out more that we can consume on a daily basis. Peak Veg!
Written by The Little Green House on July 3rd, 2006 with 2 comments.
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This carrot was meant for last night’s salad, but I think it had other ideas!
Written by The Little Green House on June 29th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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I am so disappointed. My garlic crop has got rust, again! It happened at around the same time last year, and despite rotating the crops, we’ve got it again. My initial thought was that I should pull out all the garlic before the rust spreads to the onions and leeks in the same bed. Then I thought, to hell with good intentions and organic gardening, I’ll be damned if I let these beautiful plants fall foul to this fungus. Off I went to a local garden centre. The manager told me that there wasn’t an organic fungicide that I could use and recommended Dithane 945. I bought it and took it home.
The symbol on the back of the packaging tells me that this product is dangerous for the environment. How can I even consider using it? I’m glad I have the receipt still, I’m going to return it tomorrow. Then I’ll go back down to the allotment, pull up the garlic and bring it home to hang up on the fence to dry in the sun. Small garlic is better than no garlic at all. No garlic is worth d
Written by The Little Green House on June 28th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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The first of the first earlies. The fast is over!
We had our first ‘full’ allotment meal; Broad beans and boiled new potatoes tossed in butter and flat leafed parsley.
That small bag (you only dig earlies up when you want to use them) was two plants worth.
Written by exmonkey on June 25th, 2006 with no comments.
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Quick note on the morning of a great discovery.
If you home compost or collect organic waste for the allotment heap, then you probably have a steady stream of fruit flies in your kitchen.
They are supposedly harmless, but are a real nuisance and very hard to get rid of. Until now.
I would like you to meet the nemesis of the fruit fly. The Vacuum Cleaner.
Try it - it’s fun. They don’t stand a chance.
Written by exmonkey on June 24th, 2006 with no comments.
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Until I read the latest post by Little Green House.
There seems to be an endless cycle of sowing, watering and weeding (always weeding - when I close my eyes I see horsetail) and yet all I’ve eaten so far is some salad and some lovely spinach.
I was begining to dispair that I would never get a decent crop, and when the stuff did get to the point where it was ready to eat, there wouldn be enough. Actually I still worry that the crops will be small - the garlic, which is almost ready seems very small and I am concerned that my courgette plants will provide but one meal.
Anyway - I think this is just my paranoia and I need to be patient. The broad beans are almost ready, the new potatoes must be ready to dig soon and I have high hopes for the greenhouse-shaped block of tomato plants we seem to have.
Makes you wonder how people survived late winter and early spring. Pickling I suppose.
Written by exmonkey on June 22nd, 2006 with 3 comments.
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We had the very first of our carrots, sugar-snap peas and salad onions as part of a salad with our Summer Solstice barbecue last night. Our lettuces are also ready to tuck into, the strawberries are starting to ripen, and I will be harvesting bucketfuls of red-currants this weekend. Does anybody have a good red-currant sorbet recipe?
Written by The Little Green House on June 22nd, 2006 with 1 comment.
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There’s been such incredible growth at the allotment over the past few days, some of the plants have literally doubled in size since Monday. I took some photographs this morning when I went down for my daily watering session. From left to right we have peas, lettuces and sugar snap peas, courgettes, cabbages and sweetcorn.
It seems that a good thunder shower can really get your plants growing. The tomatoes in our home garden have also grown amazingly, and we have the first tiny tomatoes appearing on the tumbling cherry tomato plants that we are keeping in pots on the back patio.
Written by The Little Green House on June 16th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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The jury’s still out on whether the washingup liquid helped with the black-fly, but we do have a lot of these black lady-birds. I’ve never seen one this colour before, but I’m glad I’m not an aphid.
Written by exmonkey on June 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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While down at the allotment today I noticed something strange about our broad beans. The stems and leaves of some plants appeared to be black in colour. On closer inspection it became clear that we were being attacked. The colour was being caused by an infestation of black fly. Thousands of them sucking away happily. It isn’t only the broad beans but the runner beans too. Thankfully there seems also to be a healthy population of ladybirds. But not enough of them. There’s a lot of eating in several thousand black fly when you are the size of a ladybird, so the ladybirds might need a little help.
Our allotment is a chemical-free zone, so we will have to do it natures way - with perhaps just a little help from Proctor and Gamble. Planting some marigolds between the bean plants might do the trick. Marigolds attract hoverfly, which, after feeding on the pollen, will lay their eggs on the black fly (and green fly). When the eggs hatch the larvae will eat the black fly. While this might work, it will take a while to get going and we are being attacked now. So some water with a drop of Fairy Liquid might work if sprayed on the plants once a week – so long as it doesn’t scare off the ladybirds.
We planted our beans in spring but it seems those in our allotment area with more experience plant their broad beans in the autumn so that by the time the aphids arrive in summer they will already have been harvested, so the aphid damage is limited. As we are experiencing, planting in spring risks an attack.
Written by stephen007 on June 11th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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