Monday, January 1

Changing harvests 2017

At the start of a brand new year, I thought that I would look back at how our harvests have changed throughout 2017.

The photos show the variety of crops that we have harvested each month but don't include all the herbs and things such as watercress that we have gathered in small quantities as we have needed them

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As usual I am linking to Harvest Monday which is this week hosted on Michelle's blog
 From Seeds to Table

By the way Martyn put together a video summarising a year on our allotment. I have already shared it on Facebook and Twitter. Martyn posted it on his YouTube channel  but in case you missed it and have about 46 minutes to spare it is also posted on our vlog here.

Just to finish may 2018 turn out to be everything you would wish it to be.





Posted by Sue Garrett at 9:50 am 28 comments

Wednesday, December 27

End of 2017 on the allotment










Posted by Sue Garrett at 10:31 am 14 comments

Monday, December 25

Christmas harvest

We made the most of a couple a mild dry afternoons last week to spend some time on the allotment.

Our first visit more or less focused on gathering some vegetables. Most or our crops are what you would expect for this time of the year. We did, however, have one huge surprise.

We have been rather tardy at removing dead tomato plants from our plot greenhouse. This has proved to be very fortuitous as some of the tomatoes that were hanging on to the dry withered stems had continued to ripen.

Some were a bit squishy but I did manage to pick a few good fruits.
Never would I have expected to be picking tomatoes from a neglected cold greenhouse just before Christmas!

Our main harvest was typical for this time of year.
The red cabbage was huge and weighed in at 5.2kg (about 11.5lb).
Germination of the first sowing of parsnips was patchy and so I sowed more seeds to fill the gaps. The outcome was that the size of our parsnips is variable. Some are very small and some very large.
The one above left its tail behind.

The leeks are smaller than usual maybe due to a lack of moisture.
As for the carrots, some are large but also extremely wonky and many have been attacked by slugs or split. They are not a pretty sight but after quite a bit of preparatory work are still very tasty.
It's nearly Christmas and so we had to pick some sprouts. The last lot that I picked needed quite a lot of the outside leaves removing but that still left some for dinner.
Our first plot visit of the week was mainly to harvest but on Friday we tackled some of the neglected areas on the plot.

I started rescuing a very overgrown clump of rhubarb. It's only a small area but hardly a small job.
Martyn is trying to reclaim another overgrown bed. Quite a large area.
When you consider how it looked last month I think he is making really good progress.
Excuse some of the image quality as it was fairly dark when some were taken. Roll on longer daylight hours!




Posted by Sue Garrett at 2:02 pm 14 comments
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