Look at the hedge on that!

The Allotment Association was fortunate enough to get a grant for a hedge cutter earlier this year and I finally got my hands on it a couple of weeks ago. Harder work than I thought it would be – truth be told my arms ached for several days after, but that may have something to do with my nice comfy office job and not being used to manual labour! However, I’m quite pleased with the results. Even the hedge inside the plot isn’t looking too bad, but you’ll have to take my word for that!

Nice bulbs!
Those of you struggling with onions and garlic this year, look away now!

Plot no. 1

Plot no. 2

First onions

Shallots

Garlic, almost ready for plaiting

This is the ‘reward’ for our summer up here, apart from a few weeks in June it’s been wet enough for them to grow very well, possibly my best year yet. Well for the white onions anyway, reds are a bit disappointing. The kitchen has been home to a tray full of shallots and another of garlic drying for the last couple of weeks too – as it’s been far too wet to dry them outside. It does mean we end up waking to an onion/garlic aroma though and the bad news is I haven’t dug up many of the onions yet…

Elsewhere on plot no. 1 the sunflowers are looking good, although they may be getting a bit too big to support themselves now and they could do with a bit more sun so they actually come out!

However, after that it all starts going downhill… The bottom of the plot has been ‘lost’ again and will need to be reclaimed so I can eventually get the greenhouse up.

Erm, wildlife area…

There should be a greenhouse here!

Continuing on the weed theme…

There’s some Brussels in here

After a couple of hours I ‘re-discovered’ this bed, reclaiming it from the weeds, planting some Purple Sprouting Broccoli (a bit late I know), giving them all some seaweed meal and re-netting the whole bed. Sadly no pics of this hard work, but I’m hoping to mulch the bed with leafmold later today to keep the weeds down – hopefully with camera in attendance.

Up on plot no. 2, the lettuce are going to seed (must try successional sowing…), the courgettes (aka marrows – must not go on holiday in summer again) are growing like mad, getting plenty of peas (all of which are eaten before ever seeing a saucepan), even some carrots (!), beetroot (which makes a great chocolate beetroot cake!), french beans are coming along well but could do with some sun and the pumpkin patch is giving the bindweed a run for its money.

The apple trees are loaded with fruit too, although a bit small still.

 And finally, the reason why I can get away with spending many a long hour on the plots…

… keeping Mrs D supplied in sweetpeas!

Mulch = slug party

So now I’ve declared summer, I planted out some of my French beans: Borlotti to climb up the newly assembled netting and Major, a dwarf, yellow bean. I started both of these in toilet rolls a few weeks ago so they’ve established good roots now and with my new found confidence in the arrival of summer, they were good to go out. To grow up the other side of the net I planted a row of tall peas (Alderman).

Since it’s so dry and my water supplies are running low (I’m going to be forced to walk to the tap at this rate!) so my thoughts turned to mulch for the beans, following on from the fruit. So I put a good layer of leaves around the newly planted Borlotti beans. Some time later after I’d returned home I couldn’t help but think I’d just created the perfect environment for slugs to get to the bean plants. Hmmm, didn’t really think that one through when I put the mulch out did I? So today I popped to the local garden centre to get some slug pellets, hoping it wasn’t too late. Unfortunately I asked Mrs D if she’d like to come along, so it turned into the most expensive trip to get slug pellets I’ve ever been on!

Fortunately only one plant seems to have been attacked and the whole row has now handful of organic slug pellets to keep to little ******** away from my plants. It also has a couple of ‘windmills’ I nicked from the kids to help keep the birds away too.

Since I’ve got plenty of leaves, I mulched round a couple of rows of broad beans as well, lord knows they could do with all the help they can get to start growing.

The strawberries have far more flowers on than ever before. This weekend I’ll be ‘putting them to bed’ with a good covering of straw around them before the fruit starts to set, and I need to put the chicken wire over the top as well.

The loganberry is doing its best to take over the allotment. Whilst you can’t see it so well in the picture, what started as just a 50cm plant 3 years ago has now spread about 5m along the wall, and possibly over the wall too!

And this year it looks like it’s going to be covered in fruit.