Showing posts with label plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plan. Show all posts

Sunday 5 March 2023

Just a Little Bit Longer

It may be meteorological spring but brrrr it’s been a cold weekend with temperatures of about 5° and no sunshine both days. Needs must though so we got a few hours of plotting done both days.
Primrose
There are signs of Spring, with these pretty primula and grape hyacinths giving a little colour in the dullness. The hedgerow is full of song from the robins, tits and finches and this weekend the first signs of new growth on the hawthorn (or possibly blackthorn). I had to use the macro, they’re very tiny buds.
My tiny hazel tree is also in bud. I know the bud isn’t in focus, but the stem is rather interesting especially compared to the smooth hawthorn.
Hazel bud
The perennial flowers are beginning to emerge. Poor little things; it’s due to go much colder with possible snow this week. This is a lovely silvery delphinium that Aimee let us take from her plot last year.
I cleared our iris bed and the stems will need a bit more trimming after the cold snap is passed. They’ll also appreciate a bit of potato fertiliser.
We’ve been pulling lots of grass from the beds and have buried it deep in the bottom of holes that we’ve dug and manured. One is for a Jack-be-Little pumpkin and the other for a green bush courgette on Plot7. We have our planting plan worked out now and just a few more seeds to buy…
Not quite as fancy as some of my plans from previous years, but it serves its purpose 🙂 Of course, I fully expect to diverge from this as other plotholder’s spare become available - it’s so hard to resist!
There’s a lot of clearing and prepping happening all over site and we’re at that point where we just want to get sowing, but we’ll wait… just a little bit longer.. Thanks to Maxi Priest for the song title. (I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve used the Jackson Browne song before)

Saturday 13 April 2013

Potato Day - Rained Off

I collected the well-chitted spuds from my mum's. Some had great little chits (like this photo of  a kestrel) Quite alien looking isn't it?!
but some of the others had some crazy long chits, especially the Bonnies and Orlas.
Never mind, the plan was to get them all planted up today. You can see, however, from our printed plan below that it was a very wet day... I'll upload this plan to the Crop Rotation Plan page later - with an explanation of why it looks so involved!
We only got one line planted - a trench with well-rotted manure in the bottom. Then we sat in the car watching the rain and drinking a coffee and couldn't face doing another row - it would have been more tricky without the path alongside us and the ground was too wet really :-( Disappointing, not sure whether they'll get done till next week now as this weekend looks like it's going to be rained off completely. Boooo
 
 

Saturday 30 March 2013

Know your Onions

Our onions were delivered today! A bag of Santero F1 from Thompson & Morgan. So this afternoon we planted them up. They were very successful last year and are mildew resistant which is a good thing as our onions have suffered badly from that in previous years. This picture is planning where to plant them  - they're planted so only a tiny growing tip is above the ground.
We planted two rows of 16 - even that is too many for us really. We still have half a bag left - we're bound to find someone who wants them. We covered them with netting - only to protect them from the blackbirds (and pigeons) who will pull them out of the ground continuously if they're not protected.
Our alliums quarter is the busiest part of our plots at the moment - with shallots, onions and garlic in now.
We've also changed our site plan. We're going to put the carrots and parsnips in that quarter instead of with the beans. That was our intention for our crop rotation plan but we got out of synch last year. I'll update the plan in the next couple of days.

We left site just as it went black and started sleeting!

Saturday 9 March 2013

Return to Grey

It has been very grey and wet since our lovely day on Tuesday - there had been 17mm of rainfall and temperature has gone from 13° to a low of 2° and it was 6° while we were at the site today. However, it's from tomorrow that it's going to get really cold again - apparently...

We were pleased to see our grape hyacinths (free bulbs planted on 13th Jan) have started flowering, so they should provide a bit of colour on the plot quite soon.
This is the photo I forgot to take last week - our path between strawberry plot and tomato pots area.
We weren't actually working our plot today. We had to do some HAHA (Hungerford Allotment Holders Association) stuff. There are a few empty plots on site which the committee (and other volunteers) are going to rotavate after some glyphosphate weed killer is applied.

Personally, we (Jamie and me) are not keen on rotavating; it kills worms and can encourage certain weeds to propagate. Having said that, some of the plots are in a bad state and we aren't convinced that a new plotholder would get very far with them without some assistance. Particularly as, at present, we're still not able to say that we've got the site beyond next April... still awaiting agreement between Hungerford Town Council and the Landlord - REALLY WISH THEY'D SORT IT!!
As an aside, after our recent failed star-gazing session, there's a chance to see the Pan-STARRS comet this weekend- with the naked eye. Got to be worth a look if the weather plays ball... I remember Halley's Comet 15 years ago and it was interesting to see an unusual object when you're so used to seeing the stars that are always there!

Saturday 2 March 2013

Planning (Part Two) and Potatoes

Another very cold day, no rain though! We didn't get a chance to go to the plot but went to collect our shallots from my Mum's for planting tomorrow.
 
We spent some time looking through our seeds and doing some more planning. I've updated the plan for Plot 7 - it's changed a bit since the plan in February.
We've also worked out a rough plan for Plot 8B, which is the plot we took over last year and didn't fully use. This year it will hopefully look very full, as we plan to put quite a few sweetcorn on there, with jack-o-lantern pumpkins growing around - well, fingers crossed!
We're not too sure that big empty space will be there, as I haven't measured the areas we need for the various crops but that's a rough plan...
 
While at my Mum's we checked on our spuds - chitting nicely in the cold, light room... There's been quite a lot of growth in the last three weeks. A couple of the Orla at the front were upside down, with white chits pointing the wrong way, so we flipped them - that should help :-}

Sunday 3 February 2013

Planning for this year (Part One)

We didn't make it to the plot yesterday - shame as it was a sunny day but we've just got too many germs between us to bear going out in the cold!

So, we did a bit of planning. We've drawn up part of this years plan - the basics for Plot 7.
We're going to be moving more plantings to Plot 8B - the sweetcorn will be over there, with the jack-o-lantern pumpkins growing through them...
The celeriac will also go back on Plot 8B - possibly in the same spot as last year but this year I'm growing from seed. Ditto for fennel; I need to read up a bit about how/where to grow it. Last year I sowed it in the herb bed, because I didn't realise the difference between herb fennel and the big bulb type I want for soup.

On Plot 7 I'm thinking of having some sort of trellis for the Uchiki Kuri squash - but this definitely needs a bit more work!

Another new vegetable for us this year is salsify. I've seen that it doesn't need a lot of work and stays in the ground till October/November so I'm not too sure where that will go yet - maybe in with the parsnips - but that is a very busy quarter already!

Hmm, writing this has made me realise we need to do a lot more planning - I'll call this blog entry 'part one'!

Tuesday 9 October 2012

HAHA Seed Night

We held the HAHA Seed Evening & Get Together on a wet Monday evening. Not many turned out which was a shame but we had a good time up the legion. I had arranged a quiz but that's been saved to be used another time when there are more people to make up teams!

Instead we had a few drinks and a nice couple of hours of chat. We had an interesting discussion about the best potatoes - so many different opinions and this year was such a poor year to base a decision on!
We picked up the 2012/13 Kings Seeds catalogue - they've printed in colour, it looks so much better than the black and white one and is surely more enticing to buy from :-)
As members of HAHA we get an excellent 40% discount off all their seeds.
So, Jamie and I now need to go through that and decide what we want. We have so many old seeds at home but many of those will be from 2009 when we first got the allotment and bought everything we saw :-) It's time to actually start planning...

Sunday 18 March 2012

Potatoes - more chitting

Robert on the allotment gave us some unwanted Chopin potatoes - so they've gone to join our other spuds which are still chitting in my mum's spare (cold) bedroom.
We hadn't heard of Chopin potatoes and couldn't find them on the Potato Council website, but found this article about them and they sound like a good one to try.
Chopin Potatoes
9 weeks on our other potatoes are looking healthy, with the chits not getting too long - they've got another couple of weeks before we intend to put them in the ground.
We've planned out the potato quarter now, so I can't accept any more potatoes from anyone! It's so hard to say no to freebies though!

We've muddled the varieties in the rows a bit because we want to clear the belana when they're very small and some of the others to make room for our leeks. Because we're going to be planting the leeks at the bottom of the quarter we don't want to make it too acidic but the top two rows we are going to be adding Thompson & Morgan "Brimstone Rapide" to the soil. This should hopefully result in the potatoes which are staying in the ground for longer not being as scabby as they have been previously. Not that scabby potatoes taste bad, but they don't look very pretty!

(I've updated the plan on the Crop Rotation plan tab)