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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That’s the truth, every day I take the camera with me when I go down to the allotment to water/weed/sow/tend but I get so engrossed in what I’m doing that I only realise that I haven’t taken any pictures once I get home and find the camera still tucked into Piper’s pushchair.
We spent a few hours on our plot this morning doing some much needed tidying. Pete mowed the paths between the beds and I weeded thoroughly under the nets (over the brassicas) that I don’t usually take off during the week because it’s much easier to put them back on with another grown-up to help.
Most people at our allotments are complaining about the germination rate of carrots this year. Ours have been rather pathetic too, although those that have come up are looking great and will soon find their way into our bellies.
I’ve sown a third lot of beetroot seeds and am crossing fingers and toes that something will come of this lot. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I’m sure we’ll beet it!!
We’re also trying some leef beet and silver beet leaves. Our friend Ilse in Dorset grows loads of this sort of salad leaf, and makes terrific salads, so I’m going to be trying these and reducing the numbers of lettuces that I grow this summer. They were sown last week, I’m hoping that in this warm weather they’ll put in an appearance by the end of next week.
There’s very little left in the coldframe at home now. All of the tomato plants have been planted out onto the allotment or into our home garden, and the first batch of leek and cucumber seedlings have gone in on the allotment. We have a second sowing of leeks gathering strength in the now always open coldframe, as well as a couple of newly sown cucumber seeds.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some photographs to share!
Written by The Little Green House on June 10th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Down on the allotment today I was rather suprised to see that everying seems to have doubled in size from yesterday. The most suprising thing, though, was the spinach - which had started to flower.
So up comes all the spinach - 1.2kg of leaf (once the stems and roots had been removed) from a 2.5m2 bed and my problem of where to put the extra tomato plants is solved.
I’ve just eaten some of the spinach (the rest is frozen), wilted in some butter and garlic - lovely.
Written by exmonkey on June 4th, 2006 with no comments.
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I don’t know if we are winning the battle, but I have noticed one thing that makes me feel encouraged.
Although our main strategy has been to dig out as many of the roots as possible, inevitably new shoots appear and grow rapidly all over the newly dug beds. So our ongoing solution is simply to pinch the tops off them as they appear (time consuming I know, plus it has the unfortunate side effect that when I close my eyes at night all I see is horsetail!). What I have noticed, though, is that when I pull at a shoot that the pinched off plant send up a couple of days later, the tap root will normally come with it. This leads me to suspect that pinching off the above ground portion of the plant seriously weakens the roots.
I reckon another two years of crawling around pulling out horsetail stems and I may have it under control.
Written by exmonkey on June 1st, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Quick update on our allotment, now that the bean poles are up:
Flash animation
Written by exmonkey on May 30th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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