Last year I experimented with growing some of my beans from seeds in old toilet roll tubes. It worked well and I just planted the young plants straight in the ground still in their tubes. Not only did the plants do well but the tubes also composted down into the beds and now there's nothing …
Potatoes are away!
Hot on the heels of the garlic I planted in the week, I decided the best way to celebrate the Good Friday Bank Holiday was to plant all the potatoes for the year. We bought the seed potatoes after Christmas as a new year treat and they've been chitting away in the back bedroom for …
The Asparagus Lives!!!!
I noticed that the a couple of the asparagus plants were starting to grow new tips a few weekends ago so I panicked and thought I'd get on with weeding the bed before they really kicked off and topped them up with compost. Then the 2 spears that had been showing through died! I thought …
Garlic 2019
The first planting into the allotment of 2019 - the next generation of the Red Duke garlic we grew last year and have been watching grow on our balcony through the winter. I tried 3 methods of propagating this - bulb cloves, bulbils and trying to allow the flowers to set seed. None of the …
Allotment in an envelope
All the seeds for the year are finally here! It's really fun looking and sorting through them and imagining the year ahead, thinking of spring and summer.
Welcoming in 2019
We thought we'd kick off the new year with another long term planting on the allotment on new year's day. Just before heading home from my parents', with the help of my dad I pilfered a filbert tree from their front garden (where they seem to pop up like weeds!). I snuck it into the …
December
It's December and nothing much is going on at the allotment. We're missing going down there and it feels weird after spending so much time there in the summer. On my last trip down though, the cold frame had been blown open in the winds and I just wanted to share what can happen in …
Blackberries’ bedtime
Now you see it... Now you don't... It's turned into a beautifully warm September day so I decided to cut out all the blackberry canes that held fruit this year so the plants are ready to hibernate over winter with just the new canes that have sprouted up this year. Now it's done though there …
Aubergine Progress
I started off the aubergines so late last year (naively thinking that, even though the packet said sow in March, July would be fine!) that the plants only got to about 8cm tall before autumn. This year, given the heated propagator we got for Christmas I decided I'd really go for them as they're one …
Collecting Chive Seeds
This seemed a quick win in my 'collecting seed from crops to grow for 2019' ambition for this year. Although I'm not sure I'm really counting my herbs as crops.... but anyway.... I left a lot of the flowerheads on the chives and they've dried in-situ and you can clearly see the little black seeds …
Bean Allotmenting 