I actually bought some charcoal today.  I went to the garden centre in Albrighton and was going to go on to David Austin Roses but I never got there because of time.  I also bought a big tub of chicken manure and another of blood, fish and bone.

I took them up to the allotment and put some of the blood fish and bone into a tub.  I filled up about half the tub with neat comfrey liquid and then added the charcoal almost to the rim of the tub.  I didn’t bother to grind up the charcoal - it was barbeque lump charcoal.     Now the theory is that the charcoal will soak up the nutrients and hold it within the pores and on the surfaces within its structure.  This will enable the nutrients to be released slowly over many years without it being leached out of the soil.  I doubt that there will be any spectacular increase in the yeald or the size of the vegetables.  This is something that has to build up over many years.

I will continue to do this for as long as I have the allotment now.  I would be particularly interested on its effect on the new soil at the bottom of the allotment.  The soil is particularly infertile and needs a lot of added organic matter.  I have been adding quite a bit but when the brassicas eventually come out I will add a lot more.   The peas will be going into this soil, so I think that charcoal and nutrient mix will be spread along the rows.  I will take out a spade width of soil about 2cm deep when planting the peas.  The mix can then go at the bottom of this mini trench.   I will sieve the soil back on top and this will remove quite a lot of stone which is still in this soil.

I will also use the charcoal mix in the dibbing holes for the brassicas.  I usually water them in with a mixture of seaweed extract and comfrey so it will not really be any different.  I am going to avoid putting any fertiliser on the brussel sprout area.  They seem to like a poorer soil and it keeps the brussel sprouts very tight buttons.

I put some shredded paper onto the third compost heap.  I made these compost heaps with old pallets and wired them together.  Not a nail to be seen in any of them.  I will put anything onto the compost heap that has once been alive.  They are all grist to the mill.  It is a bit like the leaves I am burying under the ground where the old greenhouse used to be.  They are very dirty and full of plastic litter.  It does not take very long to get rid of the litter so that the leaves can be put into the trench.  I would like to put in good clean leaves that have been composted for a few years, however I do not have the time for this so they go in willy nilly.

I have been given a wormery.  I just said that they were a bit of a time waster, however if you are given one then that is a different matter.  I will have to put a tap on this one and I will use the tap from the big comfrey bin.  The big comfrey bin has now got a big split in the bottom so I cannot store comfrey liquid in it anymore, however it can still be a digester with a bucket or tub underneath it to collect the liquid.  I will use the this tap on the new bin.   Now, I thought that maybe the comfrey could be recycled even quicker by putting it into the wormery rather than the digester.  I suspect that this year I will have to use both.

The sweet peas have been devastated by the cold weather.  I have lost over 50% of them.  Rather than potting them up I will plant the straight into the allotment.  This means that I will have to put the canes up fairly soon, which also means that I will have to finish the digging as soon as possible too.

You know I  really do have a great respect for the agricultural and horticultural knowledge of the ancient South  American  indian civilizations.    I think that  the jury is out as to whether the terra preta soils were deliberately produced or just resulted from  humans throwing out their waste materials.  I would  like to think that they were making these soils consciously.

There seems to be some  advantage to  adding composted activated charcoal to the soil.  Looking at the  properties  of activated charcoal, it  seems to be able to adsorb large amounts of organic compounds and this  characteristic seems to allow it  to  contribute to the fertility of the soil - for  hundreds if not thousands of years.  This interests me because apart from contributing  to the fertility of my allotment it would also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Now previously in these blogs I have berated people for  lighting smoky fires  and  allowing  the  smoke to  blow over my allotment.   However, do I have to modify my opinion of fires now?  I don’t think  so.   Charcoal burning  may well be a good way of increasing  and  sustaining  the fertility of the soil but not near my allotment.

I am told there are charcoal producers that prevent noxious fumes from  venting  to the atmosphere.   I  am dubious… However, in the spirit of scientific or at the least horticultural exploration I will indeed try composting some activated charcoal  and see  if  it adds to the fertility  of the allotment when I dig it in.  Maybe  I  will also  put some under the peas because it  seems to help with the nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Snow  has gone now and I am looking forward to  digging on the allotment again.  I will continue with my Montezuma method because I think that this will also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Charcoal and compost I can cope with.   I doubt very much if I will make my own especially if it involves burning fish and  bones.  How about mixing it with blood fish  and bone?  Worth thinking  about Tone…

Well  this  is  interesting.  We  have not had  a winter  like  this for  years in  England.  When I started to  garden  seriously - when I was about eight years old,  winters were like this.  The soil was like iron  and water froze  solid  in the butts.

Well I cannot get the leeks or the parsnips out of the ground at the moment.   During the Christmas  break, however,  we had fresh  parsnips,  a few leeks, brussel sprouts, beetroot and  brocolli.  We also  used  frozen  peas, maize, beans,  carrots and stored  pumpkin,  onion and potatoes.    That  is twelve  vegetables for Christmas  lunch…

Some nutter has  been  pulling  out my winter cauliflowers  for  some reason  and  I  have  lost  about  a  row of them.   Not  to  worry because I  have another two  rows.

What  can  you say?

All  the winter digging has  stopped.

The  four large silver birch were taken down by friends in November.   There was a large amount of brushwood and branches which I took down to the allotment.  I also  took down  the  large 5-8 cm branches.  I  would  have taken the  trunks  as  well  but they wanted them for their  log fires.  I took  out a line of gooseberry bushes and buried them as  well.  They keep on getting American mildew and I want to buy some resistant ones.  I love gooseberries.  I took out several of the blackcurrents as well and buried them with the gooseberries.  They were very old varieties that I was given ages ago when I first got the allotment.  They were not really producing very many fruit so I have replaced them with cuttings I took  of the new varieties.

I dug pits three spits  down carefully making sure that the layers of soil were not mixed.  Now  you can believe this or  not  but  I still had  top soil at this depth.  The top spit was  exceptionally fine  and  friable because  I  had  sieved it  several times over the  years.   I put quite a layer of  brushwood,  leaves and  compost in the bottom of the  pit.  The  larger branches  at the very bottom and the finer  pieces  nearer the  surface.   My son had cut the smaller pieces into approximately  5cm pieces so  a  lot  would fit into a small  area. I replace  the soil carefully mixing each  layer using the conical pile method.  If you make a pile of soil into a cone  shape  then each time  you put another spade full of soil on the top of it, it  mixes down the sides.  This  is how I used to mix potting composts when I worked  in tomato glasshouses.  Each  layer  was  mixed  like  this when  I  put the soil back  into the pit.   I did not mix the layers though.

Now the conventional  wisdom  is that this  addition of high carbon to nitrogen material  will  deplete  the soil  of nutrients.  After doing this  for  many  years,  I  question whether  this  is true in  all circumstances.   My new stainless  steel  spade  has a blade about 12 inches which means  that I am  going down about 3 feet.  At this level would  decomposition cause nutrient loss?  Nitrogen  is used both by bacteria  and  fungi to make their bodies.  This  nitrogen must be  obtained  from the  soil  some how or other.

The bacteria  could only get the  nitrogen from  the decomposing  material  itself.  The  fungi on  the other  hand  could stretch out mycelium into  the surrounding soil in  search of nitrogen.  The most  likely  place  that  they would find  it is  in the top 6 inches of topsoil.  Would  this be  feasable for  fungi  to  grow  mycelium  this  long.  Well in  this  though experiment,  I  have to say there  is evidence that mycelium do  grow remarkably long and this would not be unusual.  So,  I  want  to  find  out  next  year if the onions  suffer  with  nitrogen  depletion - although  I  have been  given  some  free  blood,  fish  and  bone and have already put it on the winter  onions,  shallots  and  garlic.   I  don’t really think that burying brushwood this deep will affect the plants growing in the top soil significantly. I would like a harvest of onions that is  not affected by Napomyhza gymnostoma, the onion miner fly, which  is a much more pressing problem than  worrying about nutrient depletion.  To that end I will be covering the  winter onions  with enviromesh  as soon as the cold whether has gone.

The effect  of burying brush wood  like this is to raise the allotment soil up at least 6 inches or so.  The theory is  that the brushwood would keep the subsoil  open and porous to  excess water.   Where the soil has  not been able  to fall through the brushwood, there would be  voids which water could pass through with little obstruction.   This would cause  the ground to be  much better drained.   There has not really been a water problem on this part of the allotment since just after I took it over,  however I would like to make sure that  the  water that  is on the rest of the allotment has  an  easy route off, and this  route will also include this  area now.

Another  reason  I  think that this  is will be  advantagous  is  that the decomposition  will produce heat  and  warm  the soil.  This is the theory behind the  ridge  for  ridge  cucumbers.   I must admit that when I went up and tried to dig this  area at the start of  the very cold weather it was just as hard as any other part of the allotment.  Maybe the heat had not penetrated across to the area that I was digging in.   Maybe I need to wait until  the  spring  before the bacterial and fungi start doing their job.

I must admit that the  pumpkins  did  well  on the  manure pile (that  I  left because  it was contaminated  with  aminopyuralid herbicide) possibly because of  the heat the manure  generated .

Moreover, a layer  of decomposing organic  matter like this could also  help   to  prevent  water loss during  the  summer. Evaporation from the  top of  the  soil  would cause water to  rise during  periods  of hot  dry  weather due  to  capillary action.   A thick layer of  brush  like  this  would  slow this process  down with  any luck.  Whether  this  is  infact  what  will  happen  remains to  be  seen, although I  think  that  this  is  the  theory  behind  digging  a  bean  trench and  putting  lots  of compost at  the  bottom  of it.

I am  encouraged  by finding  out that the South American early civilisations used this as a method to make terraced fields and also to  drain  fields  around  lakes.  These  are the  peoples that bred  potatoes, beans, tomatoes, maize,  cucumber,  marrow,  squashes,  and many more  food  plants.  Respect…

As my back  has  improved a lot,  I  will probably be down at the allotment as soon as the  weather improves.  I really hope that this cold  weather will have seen off a lot  of  pests on the allotment.   With that  in mind the only reason that  I  want to  go  to  the allotment at the moment is to replenish  the bird feeders.

The sweet peas seem to be holding up in the greenhouse.  I would have liked to transplant them  into their opend ended  pots before  the cold weather  really set in but I  haven’t so we will just have  to  wait and hope they will  survive.   There is  no  heat  in the greenhouse.

I am looking  at catalogues and  websites at the moment because I will have  to order my seeds soon especially if I want the  varieties that work on the allotment.   I am going to go for kestrel and Sante potatoes again.  They worked fairly  well even though they had the contaminated horse manure on them.   They have decided to use aminopyuralid again after banning it last year.  I cannot see how they can keep it out of the manure.  Still I  will get some  horse manure  from  Tony in the next few weeks.  I have left a space on  the  allotment to pile it  on.  I will  put it under the potatoes again because  I  see little benefit  to  leaving  it  to  rot  down  for  a year on a pile.   I have  always dug in manure fresh  or not -  it  might as well rot down in the soil as on a heap.  By the time  I get around to planting the potatoes in this area the manure will have had  at least threee  or  four months to decompose.   I  never find that it is so hot that it  damages the  plants.  The only manure that I would be  very careful with is pigeon  because that can seriously damage  the  soil if  put on  neat.   Pigeon  manure  will  be  put onto the compost heap  as an accelerator - not that I  have a  compost heap for any lenght  of time.   I  like  to dig stuff in  straight  away if I have a space on the allotment.  I  dig  it in at least two  spits deep  so  that it  does not affect the top soil.

I will put most of  the compost that  I  have collected this year onto the bottom plot.   It still needs to be raised up a lot - it has still got running water on the surface.   With the very poor new soil that the council have given me, there is a big need for  organic matter to be incorporated into it.  It will be the area for the peas this year and this will give me the opportunity to add lots of manure and compost into the trenches before planting.  I doubt that I will get such good peas this year as  last.  We will  see…

Other jobs that I would be doing if the weather was a little more clement would be to move all the raspberries to their new home and to straighten the old path.  As the  allotment has been raised up, where I am going to straighen the path is about 2 feet below the soil surface.  I will have to dig away some of this bed,  move the  soil retaining  paving slabs across and  then replace the  soil.  There may be some soil  left over so I will use it to raise the  ground where I took the old greenhouse down.

Now that my daughter has returned from Hong Kong, I seem to have less and less time to go to the allotment.  She has just passed her driving test and, although I would rather she did not drive and add even more  CO₂  to the atmosphere, it does relieve me of taxi duty - or so I thought.  Now she wants me to accompany her when she goes on the Motorway.  So it looks like next Saturday cannot be spent down the allotment. 

I am not worried because lots of the allotment have been cropped and they are laying fallow.  The area where the potatoes were is now covered with mustard and I have cleared off the onions, pea plants, sweet corn and courgettes. 

I dug a trench two spits deep.  (A spit is the length of the side of the spade blade).  All the weeds and the plants that had gone over went into the trench.  This included the sweet pea plants.  I double dug putting the soil from the new trench on top of the previous one.  Now I have another big trench to fill.  I will clear off all the tagetes from the onion bed and the old rocket that has gone to seed and put them into this trench with some lawn cuttings left by the gate of the allotments.   I will also weed between the leeks and take out the companion planting because all the annuals have gone over now.  (gone over - died or going in that direction) .

I am not sure whether I am going to plant Japanese onions this back end (back end - autumn or, if you are from the USA, fall).  I have this blooming (blooming - a word I use instead of swearing) onion fly,  Napomyza gymnostoma, and despite the cold wet summer I am not sure whether planting overwintering onions is the best strategy.  It gives the fly an opportunity to survive the winter as grubs deep in the leeks or onions. 

The second problem is that I would like to plant some garlic towards Christmas time and I would like to think that the fly would not attack it.  Some hope!

What I will do is plant some winter greens.  This will include some lambs lettuce, rocket and winter lettuce.  I will start them in the greenhouse because I am a little late for this.  It looks like it is going to be a really good end of September so I may be lucky. 

I think that I have had the last  of the beans.  I only picked about 2lb on Sunday.  However, the Aintree runner beans have done me proud.  It may have been the dampish weather throughout the summer but it does not seem to have done the beans any harm. 

The carrots and beetroot are also cropping very well.  These are the best carrots I have had for years.  I will plant these fly away varieties again.  They are just as sweet as ordinary carrots and I cannot tell any differences. 

The brassicas have been well and truly eaten by cabbage white butterflies,  Pieris brassicae, catterpillars.  It has been a good year for cabbage white butterflies but that means it has been a bad year for cabbages, brussel sprouts, cauliflowers and broccoli. 

Never mind.  I have been cropping the broccoli for about a month now so I cannot complain too much.  I am not going to pick them off and spraying would not be any good at the moment.  I am hoping the birds will take most of them.   The brassicas will recover eventually and I don’t expect a big reduction in yield. 

So,  I am trying to put the allotment to bed for the winter. I will clear off and dig as much as I can.  I will also try to plant as much green manure as I can too.  Some of the allotment will be covered in horse manure and other parts will be covered in spent compost, lawn cuttings and straw.  The bottom 1/3 of the allotment soil is being removed so I thought that I would dig in as much greeny stuff, manure and leaves as I could get my hands on before they bring the new soil.  They are taking off and replacing 60cm of soil over quite a big area. 

I still haven’t moved the comfrey and I will have to do that sometime next weekend.  It is still growing though and, due to the weather, it continues to produce a great deal of valuable leaf.  Nevertheless, it will have to come out or be carted away by the council lorries. 

By the end of the winter I should have new soil, the new carpark and a new shed. 

Soon I will be planting sweet peas.

It is that time of the year, Tone.  Lots of large beetroot are forming so I bought about 8 home.  They will be cooked and put into preserving vinegar.  Loads of carrots coming so I brought home a large bunch.  Runner beans cropping well.   I bought about 6-7lb of beans home.  I will top and tail them and then put them through the bean slicer.  Some I will eat and most I will freeze in old margarine tubs. 

Too many courgettes so I am leaving some to grow into marrows.  I took off some sweetcorn cobs but they were not properly formed yet.  I am just a little worried about the wet weather and whether they will be affected by it. 

I picked the last of the Early Onward peas.  They have cropped particularly well.  The Meteor peas have been hopeless.  I will leave them in but they are very disappointing. 

I am cropping quite a bit of broccolli now.  I am cutting it quite hard and this seems to encourage it to send up more buds. 

I sprayed the leeks and the onions with an aspirin and derris mixture.  I am hoping that this will keep the onion fly off them.

Overall, regardless of the weather, I think that I have had a quite successful year. 

Now to plan for next year. 

I will choose my sweet peas with a lot more care this year. �

For my 100th post I thought that I would put some photographs of the allotment on here.  Yesterday I got my first handful of beans off the Aintree runner beans.  I got a couple of buckets of sweet peas off as well.  That is why there are not many on them.   The weather is very overcast but not cold.  22^oC in the shade - not that there is much sun today.   

As you can see the allotment is beginning to become very green and there has been a lot of growth.  This lower half allotment is new this year.  I had to clear quite a lot of weed off it before I started to plant.  I double dug it all right up to the Onward peas. 

Comfrey growing well in the foreground and beans and sweet peas in the background.  You can’t see the pumpkins between the beans and the comfrey.  This is number 26. Number 25 starts by the shed. 

Carrots are under the enviromesh, beetroot next then two rows of annual flowers as companion planting. 

Then there are 10 lines of leeks interspersed with companion planting. 

You can just see the pumpkin in the foreground. 

Courgettes are big but not producing yet.  Lots of flowers but no courgettes.  Kelvedon Wonder peas are nearly finished now but you can see the Early Onward in the background starting to fruit.  Running alongside the sweet corn is a row of nigelia as a companion plant.  The shed is on Eric’s allotment not mine.  The plum tree is mine though. 

Sweet is corn growing well.

Please note that the weeds are on a public path between allotment 25 and 26.  Number 25 is my old allotment.  Behind the rhubarb there is a new blackberry plant and along the supports are a new line of raspberries.  If you look at the post that you can see going into the ground, there are two grape cuttings that are growing really well.   In the background you can see Florence fennel, radish, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach.  There is also poached egg plant.  Not much yellow on these flowers though.   There are quite a few apples on the Granny Smith.  You can see how much I have raised the allotment using concrete slabs.  In the far background there are the brassicas.

And here they are winter cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, cabbage and broccoli.   I have left the nets over them to keep the cabbage white caterpillars off them.  I will have to drag some more soil around the stems at the weekend because they are getting quite big now and might start falling over.  I don’t really want to stake them because I have used all my stakes for the peas. 

The Sapo and Sante potatoes.  There are some Kestrel potatoes in the foreground and these are starting to go over now.  The tops look good but this is no indication of how big the potatoes are. 

The Kestrel potatoes are just going over.  I will have to start to harvest them next week.  I will plant Caliente mustard here after they have been taken out.  In the background you can just make out the blackcurrent bushes.  They have cropped very well this year. 

In the foreground are the Meteor peas that replaced the winter onions.  In the background are the onions interspersed with tagetes and a row of chamomile as companion planting. 

 

The onions are growing much better now but there is still some distortion in the foliage.  You can see two lines of parsnips in the background.  Not many weeds at the moment. 

This is what you can do with double digging, horse manure, chicken manure and comfrey liquid. 

I will be raising the new allotment up as high as the old one.  I will use turf, leaves and lawn mowings initially but will also continue to use horse and cow muck.�

I knew that there would be a lot of sweet peas because I had not cut any during the weed.  Well I filled a bucket with them.  I am getting exhibition standard blooms now but I doubt if I will show them.  I just like the fun of growing them.  They certainly smell wonderful.  The scent is everywhere in the house.  Well,  they have filled four vases. 

I took out the first row of Kelvedon Wonder peas completely.  I took the chicken wire off them last week and put it around the Meteor peas.  I gleaned the rest of the peas on this row and pulled out the plants.  The roots were all covered in nitrogen fixing nodules so I think that they have done a good job.  They have added nitrogen to the soil and I think that I have got quite a few pounds of peas off just this one row.  I have another four rows coming on well.   The rain has helped them to grow this year.  Several of the roots had mychorrhizal fungi on them so adding them to the soil seems to have done the trick.  Also I planted them directly under a small apple tree and they still did very well. 

I sprayed the onions and leeks with derris and aspirin.  They are still suffering with leek miner fly.   Tomatoes are fruiting but they are still very small.  They are in the greenhouse too so I think it is the rainy weather that is not letting them grow quickly. 

Courgettes are flowering well but the only courgette that they produced rotted. 

Several people on the allotments are taking out their early potatoes.  I was thinking of having a look at a root of Kestrel.  The tops are still very green so I think that they are still growing.  There is no sign of blight this year thank heavens.  I got a crop last year but I would not say that it was good.  Still it did last us quite a while. 

The beans are coming very well.  It will be the earliest that I have ever had runner beans.  The wet weather is to their liking I think. 

Some of the companion planting I put in is flowering now.  It looks quite good.  The convolvulus, poached egg plant and tagetes are making quite a show. 

Took a look at the grapes in the allotment greenhouse today.  There are some grapes on the black one but nothing on the white grape.  I doubt if they will ripen properly with all this rain we have been having. 

Most of the March lettuces have either been eaten or have gone to seed.  I have just started eating the April ones.  I will have to clear the seeding ones away and leave the ground to the winter cauliflowers. 

Not many plums on the plumb tree and not many apples on the apple tree.  Maybe Granny Smith was not a good choice for my allotment but Victoria plums have been very good in the past. 

The strawberries have finished more or less. However, the raspberries are certainly still producing prodigious amounts of fruit. 

Good job too because I eat so many straight off the canes.�

There is something very thereputic about shelling peas.  I like to shell mine outside on my wooden seat but today it was raining when I came home from the allotment.  So, I had to shell inside.  I have an old arm chair in the conservatory that looks out onto the garden and I used this today.  I have got a few pound off this first serious harvest.  I did not take up the pea plants like I usually do.  I have left the small ones on the plants and I will be picking them through the week.  I do need the chicken wire supports though because I planted some new rows of Meteor pea where the winter onions have come out. 

This was another case of: ‘I can’t do this before I do that’.  The winter onions tops had fallen over, which meant that they would not get any bigger. I made an exective decision to harvest them all and store them on the staging in the home greenhouse.   They are not too bad but they are affected by the leek miner grub.  This meant that I could plant the Meteor peas. 

Checked to see if there were any more gooseberries ready to pick.  I got another couple of handfulls off them.  Then I remembered that the blackcurrents were ready to be picked in earnest.  It is amazing how much time it takes to strip blackcurrent bushes.  I have now ended up with bright pink fingers.  There were more strawberries and more raspberries. 

I am getting a little fed up of eating these so I might start freezing them. 

I took the enviromesh off the carrots and weeded them.  I pulled several of them for salads, finally I put the enviromensh back by burying the skirt in the soil.   Picked some of the rocket for salad.  We have got plenty of lettuce so I did not bother getting one of them.  I had a look at the March sown lettuce and it is going to seed now.  I will pull them all up tomorrow and go onto the April sown lettuce. 

I did general watering and weeding and finally put in the Meteor peas.  They got a dose of mychorrhizal fungi.  I really think that the jury is out on whether this makes any difference to the peas, however it guaranteed to do nothing in the packet. 

I gave away a big bunch of sweetpeas.  It is amazing the goodwill a gift like this generates.  I was just glad I could get shot of them.

And the weather people got it wrong, it was windy but not raining.  Every time I put pea plants in it is windy.�

I think that there is a lot of mystique about the making of jam that is uncalled for.  The black currents that I bought home yesterday are now boiling away in the big pan. I like to use a very big wooden spoon - mainly to impress everybody.  I do not add any water at all.  Then I add the same weight of sugar as fruit - more or less.  Next, I bring this to the boil and wait until enough water has evaporated from the fruit to make it set.   You can tell when it is ready by dribbling some off the wooden spoon.  If it starts to set on the spoon then it is ready to put into the jars.  I think that mine is nearly ready now.  It has taken less than an hour to do it. 

I am going to mow the lawns now.

Oh dear I have broken the lawn mower.  I think that the motor has burnt out.  I will get some petrol for the motor mower tomorrow. 

Got down the allotment at about 1 o’clock and there was a heavy shower of rain.  I just wanted to pick some raspberries and strawberries so I carried on regardless.  After a while it stopped raining and the sun was very warm.  I picked the first of the sweet peas to take home.  They are smelling beautiful. 

I think that all gardens should have something to look at - colour; something to smell - scents; something to hear - chimes; something to taste - raspberries and something to touch - the soil. 

I spent some time washing the black fly off the runner beans.  I just used the sprayer and water.  I expect I will have to do it again next week.  I got them fairly clean though.  I watered peas, beans and sweetcorn with comfrey. 

Started at the bottom of the allotment and hoed the whole allotment.  The rain has started all the weed seeds germinating again. 

Finally, I took another cutting of the comfrey to put into the butts.  I have now filled two butts and have cut almost all the comfrey. 

Ate a dinner that included a salad of lettuce, peas, carrots, rocket and radish of my own.  My tomatoes have not started cropping yet so I had to use bought tomatoes.  Then I had strawberries and ice cream.  Lovely jubbly…

I have had a bit of a head cold this week probably because of the weather.  I still do things but with much less vigour. 

I have been down the allotment several times this week mainly to harvest and pick.  The strawberries are doing very well this year.  I must get some new ones for next year though.  I have taken home one of the winter onions. 

The strawberries are ripening well but I tend to eat these before I can pick any for the house.  I also picked about 5lb of blackcurrents.  I am amazed at this because I cut them back hard during the autumn and I thought that I would not get any.  Lettuce, rocket, carrots, radish and some peas were all harvested for salads.  I had some this evening and they were lovely. 

The allotment is full at the moment and I do not have any room to put anything else in.  I am going to put some peas where the autumn onions are at the moment.  I only harvested, weeded and watered but this still takes a lot of time.  I sprayed the runner beans with water to wash off the blackfly.  They are starting to get on my nerves now.  I will keep washing them off until they get the message.  It looks like it is a bad year for blackfly this year. 

I have bought some new canes for the sweet peas.  The winds this year have made growing them up strings a little difficult.  So I have been undoing ties and putting sweet peas onto the canes. 

I cut some more comfrey for the butt.  It is amazing how much of the comfrey I have used this year.  I water the peas, beans, sweetcorn and onions with it at the moment.  They all seem to like it.   There is still a lot of comfrey to be cut because it it producing a lot of leaf this time of year.  The rows I did not cut last time are still flowering.  They are covered in bumble bees. 

I did not cut any of the nettles today but I might tomorrow.�