A week of two halves

Last week we shared our time between the allotment and garden. The first half of the week, we worked at the allotment. It was the drier part of the week so we were back to watering.

One job was to plant out some savoy cabbages - Cordesa. 

We had already planted annuals and sweet peas in the garden in a bed that was due for renovation. It had been previously cleared and we decided to use annuals as a temporary solution until we decide on how we want to replant it.

We also planted up the annual flowers that we didn't need in the garden. This included three teepees of sweet peas. Unfortunately this coincided with the weather turning, firstly very hot and then heavy rain falling accompanied by gusty wind, so I'm not too hopeful of their survival'

The peas that we sowed last week are now germinating well, however, as usual it is the variety Onward that is doing the best for us.

Towards the end of the week it was sunny and hot so we decided to work in the garden hiding in whatever shade was available.

The area around one of our bird baths was planted up for spring with tete a tete daffodils. The bulbs were planted in pots sunk in the soil. The idea was to remove the pots after flowering to make room for summer bedding. This was done last week. The pots of daffodils have been sunken elsewhere in the garden where they can live until the time comes for them to return when the summer bedding is over.

The bed has been planted up with impatiens 

Currently we are avoiding going into shops including garden centres. Unfortunately despite protocols being in place, too many people are not complying with social distancing so we prefer to stay away. (We had booked a ticket to visit the Yorkshire Wildlife Park on Monday but comments on Facebook relating to how people were ignoring protocols put us off going). People seem to be becoming complacent so I guess this is going to be an ongoing problem. A local garden centre offers a click and collect service whereby plants are ordered online and then picked up from outside in their car park. The only downside of this is that where there are colour choices of the plants offered, you have to accept their choices.

Anyway, we decided that we would just have to work with whatever we could get and spent a day planting up pots on the patio, outside of the summer house and outside of the greenhouse door.

Martyn, emptied the crate containing our International Kidney potatoes. In hindsight they were probably not the best variety to grow in a container that we intended to empty early. The variety maybe needed to be left for a while longer but the tops were enormous and getting in the way.

 There were plenty of potatoes but they were on the small side.

I reused the two tubs that had housed the potato plants, Casablanca had been harvested a couple of weeks ago. One crate has been sown with White Lisbon spring onions and the other with Boltardy beetroot.

I also sowed some wallflower, sweet William and sweet rocket in a large tub.

I had previously grown coriander (cilantro) in a pot in the greenhouse and this was now in danger of running to seed so I harvested it all and have frozen it. I use lots of coriander so I have sown a second batch along with more parsley and basil.

We picked lots of strawberries last week. We had been concerned that the spell of heavy rain would have spoiled any berries but we picked fruit on both sides of the showers.

We are also continuing to dig up the autumn planted onions as they are needed. We may as well leave them in the ground to carry on growing until they are needed in the kitchen.

23 June

As well as picking strawberries we have picked a few, tayberries, purple Glencoe raspberries and some redcurrants. We are disciplining ourselves by not picking punnet after punnet of redcurrants to freeze as we really won’t use so many and the birds will love their share.

22 & 26 June

We also harvested a couple more Regency cabbages.

27 June

If you have half an hour or so to spare, we filmed a tour of the whole of our plot which is interrupted by Ruby's antics. I'm afraid at the moment she is nowhere near as well behaved as Monty Don's furry assistants, hopefully one day!

Stay safe

This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

You don't have to have your own blog in order to join in conversations. It may seem that everyone who comments knows one another but bloggers always welcome new commenters, after all that is how we all started. 

PS: It's not just our gardens that suffer from blight. Martyn and I are currently suffering from an influx of blog blight. It seems that it is the season of the spammer. One in particular is persistently targeting our and what appears to be lots of other people's blogs. Most are sent to the spam or moderation folders as we moderate comments on posts over five days old. These spam comments are deleted and never see the light of day but unfortunately some do sneak through. I apologise for any that sneak through and end up being emailed to those who subscribe to comments, Please do not click on any links in spam comments which gives these nuisances satisfaction and encouragement. They can track where click throughs originate from and will target a blog even more if they think that this is causing more people to visit their site.

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