When twenty really means sixty

As there was an improvement in the weather, we decided to have a couple of days out last week. We are sticking to wide open-air spaces. We are members of the National Trust and so far they seem to have protocols in place to ensure visits are as safe as possible. It does mean that booking an arrival date and time is required but, as members, entry to NT locations is free of charge so if the weather turns out to be poor we can just stay at home.

Fortunately, Ruby loves riding in the car spending most of the time eagerly looking out of the window but she does settle down on longer journeys.

Monday's visit was to Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Water Gardens.

On Tuesday we paid another visit to Clumber Park. This time we explored the far side of the lake. Despite our numerous previous visits, it's a new part of the park for us.

We all had plenty of exercise and some of us were  very tired when we arrived home.

The week before last, we planted some over wintering onion sets and cloves of garlic. I bemoaned the fact that garlic doesn't do well for us but at least it is off to a good start and has already started to shoot.

The question is will decent bulbs form underground? Only time will give us an answer to that question but it seems a good start.

Earlier in the year, Martyn saw an advert for overwintering onion plantlets. We've always grown our onions from sets so we decided to give this way of starting onions a go and compare the results to those grown from sets. The plantlets arrived last week. We ordered twenty onions of a variety called Element.  The onions arrived in a clump. Immediately it was apparent that there were far more than twenty onions.

I carefully teased the plantlets apart counting them as I did so. I counted over sixty so we planted four rows each containing fifteen plants.

In order to give them a good start, the onions were planted on shallow trenches of multipurpose compost.

Having already carried out major harvests of apples, potatoes and sweet corn, all of which are now in storage for use until we have new supplies next year, our latest harvests have been more modest.

17 September - raspberries, tomatoes, cranberries

We planted some San Marzano tomatoes specially to cook with and make tomato sauce but unfortunately many of the plants, along with other varieties succumbed to blight. This year blight even affected tomatoes growing in the garden which is usually a blight free zone.

We have two cranberry plants in tubs outside our plot greenhouse. Strangely, one always seems to fruit better than the other. Berries were starting to fall off so I picked those that seemed ripe enough. It's a bit like picking apples as the berries that are ready want to easily drop into my hand.

With the weather due to change we spent the weekend, weeding and tidying any empty beds that, Martyn then cultivated.

It was very satisfying to get this work done as last year we didn't manage any winter preparations. The weather turned very wet transforming, in a matter of days, what had been soil too dry to dig into too wet to dig. It made for a rather frantic spring.

19 September - blackberries, raspberries, runner beans, flowers, an overlooked onion. some green tomatoes

Of course we made sure that we left some time for a little harvesting.

20 September - carrots, cabbage, courgettes, rhubarb chard, French beans, raspberries, flowers

The rhubarb chard, French beans, some of the courgettes and some carrots were used in a turkey stir fry

Some other dishes the vegetables that we picked last week were used in were:

This dish was based on this recipe

I based this dish on this recipe.

Some of the runner beans were also used in a chicken and green bean curry.

Finally - will this be the last vase of flowers we pick from the allotment this year?

If you are interested we have posted a video plot tour here.

As always stay safe and healthy

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