2 years ago
Wednesday, August 16
Monday, August 14
Time to dig the potatoes and pick the beans.
At the beginning of last week I lifted all our onions and shallots. We always struggle to find somewhere to dry them. This year we constructed some makeshift drying tables using wire mesh and boxes which were positioned under our greengage trees. Of course it then decided to rain but at least the bulbs won't be sitting on damp soil and the trees will have afforded some protection.
Our rhubarb struggled in the prolonged, dry conditions so we gave it a good soak which revived it and its now on its second wind.
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| 7 August |
The thornless blackberry - Loch Ness is producing large juicy berries. I'm really happy that this replaced a previous thorny variety which fought back with venom when I tried to pick the fruits.
The blueberries are keeping up a steady supply. The fruit on our third bush is now ripening. The berries are plentiful and a good size so it is a pity that I don't know the variety.
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| 12 August |
All three varieties of runner beans - Celebration, Lady Di and Firestorm are producing well. Two of the climbing French beans - Cobra and Cosse Violette are also providing a harvest. The yellow Coronna d' Oro is so far beanless although it is flowering. Cosse Violette is just starting to come into production but Cobra was the first of our beans to 'fruit' and is still going strong. We had a freezing session after picking a box full of beans.
I am continuing to pick peas on every visit to the plot. Our second and third sown rows are now in production. So far none of the pods have harboured any unwelcome guests.
Some fruits have harvested themselves. Shortly after photographing the fig below, it fell from the tree and shortly after that it was on our plates. We shared it of course.
A couple of peaches fell off the tree in the greenhouse. Fortunately they didn't spoil so we enjoyed them too. The taste indicated that we should maybe start harvesting from the tree.
The tomatoes in our garden greenhouse have started to ripen. Last week we picked some Gardeners' Delight ...
... and Sungold.
The Sungold fruits tend to split but it doesn't stop us enjoying the taste.
We picked the first of the apples from our apple hedge. We think that the variety is Discovery and the ones peeping from behind are likely to be Golden Delicious.
A few berries were added to our fruit salads - the first few all Gold raspberries and probably the last of the Malwina strawberries with a few alpine strawberries thrown in to the mix
Martyn has started digging up the potatoes. The ones shown below are Casablanca. We haven't watered any of our potatoes all season so they have had to cope with very dry conditions. Despite this Casablanca produced a good crop of damage free potatoes.
In the photo below the top box of potatoes are Amour which also produced a damage free crop. The lower box Orla did have some nibbling slug damage but still produced a reasonable crop of usable potatoes
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| 13 August |
We have moved on from the Oullins Gage plums and are now harvesting Victoria. So far no wasp activity - could my waspinators be working?
Next to the plums in the photo, taken on 13 August, is a punnet of Mannings greengages. Greengage's colouring belie their true nature. We usually associate green fruit with sharpness or a sour taste but greengages are very sweet and delicious.
The sweet peas are now in mass production mode. The batch below was just the flowers picked on Saturday. I am pleased that the stems are still very long as I've found that normally the stems shorten after the first few pickings.
The perennial and annual flower beds are also providing a plentiful supply of cut flowers. It's like being a kid in a sweet shop.
To complete our Harvest Monday roundup, Martyn put together a video showing the digging of the Casablance potatoes. Excuse the heavy breathing, he isn't worn out, the microphone was just rather keen.
The video is about 7 minutes long.
The video is about 7 minutes long.
Friday, August 11
Plot perennial border
This year has been a year for much needed renovation work on the allotment. One such project was the renovation of a large flower bed at one edge of our plot.
Regular readers may be able to cast their minds back to the beginning of the year when the bed looked like this.
It was swamped with couch grass, bindweed and all manner of other weeds.
This was the allotment so we didn't want to spend a fortune, rather it needed a cheap and cheerful look. With this in mind we spotted an offer of 172 perennial plug plants at a very reasonable price. It was a pot luck collection which meant that we couldn't choose the plants to be included.
These arrived at the beginning of April. They were tiny plug plants and so they were potted up with three or more plugs to a pot.
By the 4 May we had removed as many weeds as possible. The black elders and roses had been severely 'pruned'.
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| 4 May |
Couch grass and bindweed are persistent and so I kept going over the bed to remove any pieces that were reappearing.
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| 11 May |
Plants that we wanted to keep were dug up, tidied and replanted.
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| 14 May |
These included centaurea montana - perennial cornflowers, some penstemon and some bearded irises.
We then planted out the potted perennials which although they had put on quite a lot of growth still didn't make much of an impression. We guessed that this year the bed would look sparse.
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| 14 May |
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| 30 May |
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| 3 June |
The new perennials grew surprisingly quickly and in June lupins and poppies were flowering but the bindweed was also making an appearance sometimes courtesy of the tiniest fragment previously missed.
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| 10 June |
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| 13 June |
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| 7 August |
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| 7 August |
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| 7 August |
I still keep spotting bits of bindweed but I am determined to stay on top of it - wish me luck.
If you have about 20 minutes to spare you may like to watch the video that I made showing this and other flower areas on our allotment. I recommend viewing in full screen. There is a commentary so turn your sound on.
Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/
author S Garrett
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