On The Allotment

I have just finished re-creating my Cloche review site that has been down for the best part of a year following a move of servers. I just never got round to getting it back online. Anyway I have re-written the reviews of the cloches I use on the allotment and in the garden. Hopefully it will be some some use to people.

Some time ago I lost the allotment that I had held for three years, it was a private affair and the owners wanted it back. I suspect that they want to build on the plot which is a real shame.

I have been on the council allotment waiting list for over three years now, I know this as I got my name on the list 2 weeks after our Daughter was born, she was three at the end of March. There seems no hope that I will be able to get an allotment any time soon, so my Wife and I have decided to convert a small patch of the garden to being a Veg Plot.

A major reason we wanted to have an allotment, as you will have seen from previous posts on this blog, was to try and teach Eva about plants, food and where it comes from, she loved going to the allotment, and has been nagging me to go there for the last year, she does not understand we do not have it anymore. This added with the obvious fact that fresh fruit and veg are always welcome!

We do not have a great big garden, just 25 meters or so long and 8 meters wide, that combined with the fact we need space for a three year old and all the garden toys that come with her, there is not allot of space.

Last year for Evas birthday I created a play area for her with rubber play tiles and her house that she got from her Nanna and Gramps, I fenced this area off, which left an area between that and the garage that is currently pretty much taken up with pampas grass.

We have decided that we will take out the pampas grass, it is out of control, and the leaves are razor sharp, we have already had some cut little fingers so it will be best to take it out. I will carry on the fencing across to the end of the garage and then create two raised beds which will give me some planting space.

The area will be just 3m x 3m, and part of it will be taken up by the plumb tree which we will be leaving where it is. A small plot but I hope we can make some use of it. Too late for this year, but we may be able to get some winter veg and salad crops in if I can get on with it in the next few weeks.

I will keep you all posted on how it goes, I am quite excited about being able to get some crops in again.

I have just had an email from Amazon and it caught my eye, if you  are looking for some electronic Secateurs then the Bosch Ciso Secateurs are less than half price at £29 (Saving of £30.99). Bargain price… Just a note I do not own these, but I have used them and they are fantastic, especially if you suffer from arthritis or similar problems with your hands. Click here to go to Amazon

The allotment that I had worked so hard to nurture is now sadly no more. It was a private rent for the allotment land and the owners wanted it back so that family could garden on it. I suspect that they will be either selling the land or building on it which will be tragic as it is perfect ground, the owner (who sadly died) gardened it for years and years, so the soil is well worked, and looked after.

If you have tried to get to this allotment blog over the last few weeks you will have noticed that it has been down, this was due to the server being hacked resulting in a server failure. I have got most of my website back up and running, but not this one.

If the truth be told I had lost the enthusiasm for the site due to loosing my allotment. I am still on the waiting list for the Council Allotment but I have been on that for three years and I am loosing faith that I will ever get one of them.

We have also been busy. We have been building an extension of our home, most of the work I am doing myself. Have a look at my personal blog to see what we are doing. It has been a great deal of work, but the relevancy to this blog is that we have installed a full wall of bi-fold doors which link the house to the garden.

We will then be doing some work on the garden, not really an allotment, and probably won’t be growing any veg there as it is too small, but we will be making a patio area and re-designing the rest of the garden. We still need it to be child friendly for our daughter Eva so it will still be taken up by slides, swings, sand pits, play houses, bikes, and still have some grass for her to run about on.

We simply hope to make the garden have some more structure. Eventually hopefully the council allotment will come through, and at a time when I can dedicate some time to it. We really did want to get Eva involved. She enjoyed the times she went down to out last allotment, we want her to learn where food comes from and to be able to grow her own, cook it and eat it, an allotment is the only way we will be able to achieve this as our garden is too small.

This is a short video showing how the allotment is looking before we started work on Sunday 16th May 2010. I was joined by my Wife Cheryl and Eva my daughter who had great fun digging on the allotment.

We went to the allotment again this morning due to pestering from Eva, to be fair on her I did promise that we would go down with Mummy.

We have had another good short session on the allotment and Cheryl enjoyed seeing Eva getting excited and playing.

We did allot of clearing, and got another row of the Rocket First Early potatoes in, I also bought some more strawberry plants from Homebase and with help from Eva got another little strawberry plot started in plot three. She still can not understand why she cant eat them now, even attempting to take a bite out of the leaves, but its a start!

I also got some peas planted on the pea netting. This is slightly different to last year when I grew Mange Tout, however, the family did not take to them as much as I had hoped. I love them but never mind.

We then went back home and did some good work at home in the garden. I laid some turf round Evas little play house so now she not only has her own little house and garden but also has a neatly manicured lawn to go with it!

This morning when I got her hour of bed, I asked her if she had a good sleep, she said she had been dreaming about the allotment! I asked her what about, all she said was “digging!” That makes it all worth while.

Eva helped planting some potatoes at the allotment yesterday. I managed to get a little video of her doing it.

We have just finished bacon butties (our Sunday morning treat) and since Eva has just said she would like to go to the allotment again and and as we had such a great morning at the allotment yesterday and since mummy missed how Eva enjoyed the allotment we are planning to go down to the allotment today. I will get some more clearing up done and some more potatoes and onions planted.

We also went to Homebase yesterday after the work at the allotment, and bought some more strawberry plants. This excited Eva, although she wanted to eat them now, I explained that they had to be planted first and leave them for a while until they get flowers and then fruit but she still fancied eating them now rather than waiting! Anyway we will plant those today which means I need to dedicate another area of the allotment to some fruit. This will also mean that I need to make another fruit cage, although it does not have to b a walk in one like the other as this will only have strawberries in it.

We cannot spend too much time at the allotment today as we have some work to do in our garden at home. Eva was bought a play house for her birthday by Nanna and Gramps, I have created an area of the garden for Eva and fenced it off to give Eva her own little area. This is currently rather muddy so we are going to lay some turf. Homebase are doing an offer 3 rolls for £9 which I don’t think is bad although having never bought turf I really have no idea! I may post some pictures of the progress later both from the allotment and the garden here.

This video blog shows the progress on the allotment and reports on how we got on. The name of the potatoes we planted that I could not remember while making this film was Rocket which are First Early.

This video shows how the allotment was before we started our work yesterday and introduces what we intended to do for the day.

We have had a good day down on the allotment, glorious sunshine, both Eva and I were out in t-shirts and sunhats. Eva loved every minute of it.

We were up at normal time and had finished breakfast by 8am, mummy was at work so we sat down to watch some cbeebies and a coffee, during which time Eva pestered me wanting to get going to the allotment, not at all interested in what was on the tv, not unusual for Eva but she was very excited.

We took a drink and a snack along with Evas wheel barrow which was her uncle’s when he was a boy, her spade and her kneeling mat that her Grandma and Granddad bought her for her 2nd birthday last week.

As soon as we got to the allotment Eva started digging, getting very excited, she took to the whole thing as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She helped me with planting some potatoes, carrots and onions an digging the soil.

We made great progress, I managed to get two rows of potatoes planted, two rows of carrots sowed, three rows of onions, two red and one white.

We will be going to the allotment tomorrow morning again, just so that mummy can see how excited she gets.

I will post two videos of the progress once they have uploaded to my YouTube channel

I know it is late in the season to start planning your allotment year and to start your planting, but for one reason or another this is the position I am in. This weekend I intend to start planting and getting the allotment growing again. I am also looking after Eva, so it will be her first time at the allotment where she can actually ‘help’ with the gardening. I will get her planting a few potatoes if nothing else and the rest of the time she can potter around the allotment and dig in the soil which she will enjoy.

AT the start of 2009 I had a very good idea of what I wanted to do with the allotment, and I had plans drawn up of where I wanted everything to go, although the reality did not stick totally to this plan at least I had a rough idea for the allotment that year.

This year I am struggling, I have only been to the allotment twice this year, and I do not have a formal plan so it is really about time that I put some thought into it. This year I do not expect to be getting too adventurous with the planting, but I do intent to concentrate on the things that did well or that we enjoyed eating last year. After all that is what the allotment should be about.

What I know now:

We are still using the potatoes I grew last year, I will therefore be planting a similar number this year, probably a range of varieties like I did last year, some earlies (if it is not too late) some salads and some main crops. The things that I learned last year was that I needed to label them better, and then store them in bags for each variety rather than pooling all the earlies into one bag, salads into another and main crop in another. This way I will be able to find out which variety we prefer.

I will be planting carrots, probably trying to get more carrots in as we tended to buy quite a few, I did not pick them trying to wait until they were of a larger size, if I planted more then I would be happier to pick them when they were smaller knowing that there were more coming along to grow into the bigger ones that we can store or eat later in the season.

The onions are very much the same. I planted quite a few last year but nowhere near as any as we eat so I could do with planing probably twice as many. We also enjoyed the shallots and so I will be planting twice as many of those as well. Indeed the shallots did really well last year so are a good bet.

Last year I planted a long row of beans, although these grew very well, and fruited very well, I do not think I will grow as many this year. We simply did not eat them so 80% were wasted and went straight in the compost bin. I will plant some french and runner beans but I will probably limit this to a small wigwam of each.

The broccoli did not do anything nor did the dwarf french beans, but I think that I will try again with those as they are both vegetables we like to eat.  They may not do anything again this year but then not much will be lost. I will change the way I did the dwarf french beans and start them off in pots before planting them out to see if that makes much difference.

The leeks did very well last year, although many were wasted as they all became ready at the same time, I will try and stagger their planting so that we get some throughout the season.

The Fruit

Last year I was generally happy with the fruit, some of the fruit bushes were in their first year and as such they were just establishing themselves, we will see this year how they do.

We really enjoyed the strawberries, but there were not enough of them so I will be planing some more this year, although they will probably fruit better in their second year. The rhubarb did very well even in its first year after being moved, this year I will just leave them well alone and take fruit as we need it.

One thing I noticed about the fruit cage on the allotment was that although using the space on the ground for the strawberries was a good one for best use of space it proved difficult when harvesting the fruit of both the strawberries and the other fruits,a s you have to squeeze under the netting and do not have much space in the cage its self.

This weekend on the allotment

That all leaves me with the question as to what happens this weekend, my priority it to get the allotment beds prepared for planting, allocate an area in the vegetable plots for  the planting of some more strawberries, plant some of the early potatoes, get some carrots and onions in which all in all will probably be a tall order as I also want to do some plastering at home…

I hope to be able to report good things following the weekend.

It is Eva Birthday today and next week will mark the second anniversary of my application to the council for a council run allotment in Hessle. I did get correspondence back about a year ago saying I was number 14 on the list and did I still want to remain on the list.

I am in the fortunate position of having the private allotment that I rent, however it is not as large a a council run allotment plot and thus I wanted an allotment from the council as well or instead of the one I already have. I guess I should remember how fortunate I am! but still 2 years waiting… it just shows the popularity of allotment gardening and to some extent it has become trendy to own an allotment.

Eva is 2 years old today and is becoming more and more interested in the garden and doing things with Mummy and Daddy. We have bought her some gardening gloves and a trowel, she is walking around the house with her new gloves on trying to pick everything up! Hopefully this year she can become more involved in the allotment and planting, she learns things very quickly and already knows what the allotment is and where the potatoes and carrots come from. We hope to continue this learning with her over the next year, we hope that if she is involved in the growing she will enjoy eating the produce.

Many of you will already know that I have my fingers in allot of pies so to speak. As well as Allotment gardening, one of the other pies is web development, I have just created a niche site for Cloches which I thought I would share with you as it is relevant to allotment gardening.

The site is fairly simple but it aims to bring together as many cloche suppliers as is possible into one place to allow you to compare and choose the one that is most suitable.

I have several other gardening related websites in the pipe line and I will post them here once they are created.

Although I do need to spend more time on the allotment and doing some gardening rather than in front of a computer screen!

Take a look at my Cloche site, more cloches are being added every day. Get a new cloche for your allotment!

I have recently upgraded my car from a Volvo s40 saloon to a V50 estate equipped with a tow-bar. The first time down to the allotment was also the first time to the allotment in the new car and it was a delight to be able to couple up the trailer to collect sand and compost from Homebase and be able to throw the spade, fork and boots in the back of the car without any trouble.

I won’t use the trailer every time I go to the allotment but it is handy to have to collect things or take rubbish to the tip, the boot of the car will prove to be very useful.