Stocking up and another tick

We somehow managed a couple of afternoons on the allotment last week. What with appointments and the weather that was rather amazing.

We managed to get another two winter jobs ticked off. I managed to tie in the kiwi and finish tidying the gooseberry that had previous been smothered under a thicket of kiwi leaves.

Martyn managed to reduce the size of a laurel hedge. It's needed doing for a while but we have wanted to avoid when birds are starting to nest and usually they beat us to it. The blackbirds and robin weren't impressed but there is still lots of nesting opportunities in the much reduced hedge. The problem is that we now have a huge pile of tough laurel branches, which won't compost very well.

I did a bit of weeding before the small weeds, that had taken a foothold in our wood chipping mulch, sent roots down through the weed control fabric. 

Despite being in the middle of winter goosegrass/cleavers, or whatever you want to call it, was already trying to colonise one of our rhubarb patches  so I cleared that out too. It is certainly one weed that is persistent.

I also cleared and dug a weedy patch at the end of our brassica bed. To say it is the end of January, it dug surprisingly well. 

The same could definitely not be said for another area of the plot. For a couple of years now we have wanted to sort out a particularly overgrown patch. 

A year or two ago, Martyn started on it but had to abandon work when firstly the weather called a halt and then other more important tasks took precedence. Last week he started to tackle the job again and has made a start.

As you can see it is heavy going, we just hope this year the weather doesn't stop us getting the job done.

Whilst we were at the plot we harvested a few vegetables to replenish our stocks at home.

We tend to go through carrots quite quickly so we always come away with more carrots. This time the variety was Flakee. We also cut another Kilaton cabbage. That will mainly be used for coleslaw. These are really solid little cabbages. I peel off leaves as I need them rather than cutting into the cabbage and this way they last for ages in the fridge.

We also harvested what I think is our first ever properly round swede.

It's our one and only round specimen this year too, all the others have cylindrical roots. We've tried different varieties, this one is Tweed which is said to be a vigorous, club root resistant variety so should have grown well. I'm not sure where we are going wrong. Anyone any tips?

At least we can grow round beetroots, the variety of these is Wodan.

We've been busy away from the allotment too. A local garden centre held it's potato day at the weekend, so we went along to stock up on seed potatoes. We can buy the normal sized bags of seed potatoes at any time, but each year we like to buy small numbers of a few varieties of potato to trial.

We bought full bags of, Casablanca, Cara, Kestrel, Nadine, Osprey, Winston, Sarpo Mira and Vivaldi. In the brown paper bags are 4 tubers each of Apache, Jazzy, Rudolph, Premiere, British Queen and Elfe. We had decided to grow the same potatoes as last year, as we felt that last years seed potatoes hardly had a chance to perform to the best of their abilities, however not all those varieties were on offer. Maybe the growers had some crop failures as we did.

As if these weren't enough potatoes, we had already bought some Athlete tubers from another garden centre. These were recommended by one of the YouTube channels that we subscribe to.

We bought a couple of varietes of onions sets - Centurion and Hercules - and a bulb of Solent White garlic from the same place. I'm not sure whether the garlic will need planting now or will last until later in the year. It was bought on a whim as I hadn't been able to find a soft neck variety in our local garden centres earlier. So what do you think, plant now maybe in a tub, or hold off until later?

On top of all that our main seed order arrived.

We've just a few odds and ends to add, Martyn has posted our full list if seeds  to date here . We are going to be very busy once March is upon us.

This week I am linking to Harvest Monday which this month is being hosted on 

Michelles's blog From Seed to Table 

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett