Brief update

I'll try to put some photos on here of the massive marrow (or courgette, the subject of much debate for about a fortnight), and a purple carrot soon.

The broad beans and mange tout have finished now, but there was a fairly good crop from these. It would be good to plant more of these next year. The spinach is still going.... it has been doing well for a good few months now. A few runner beans were spotted on Sunday, and hopefully they will continue grow. The first set of runner bean plants all died, probably due to a lack of water and not very good soil. The second set are doing better, but still not great. Maybe some runner bean research is needed.

Potatoes - after a few plants were dug up with a very disappointing crop, the rest have done well :) I am yet to find out whether the inside of the blue potatoes is blue.

And finally plums. I made two jars of plum jam a few weeks ago. It set, so I was pleased about that on my first jam making mission. And the freezer is almost full of plums, and apples and pears from the garden. It is a good time of year!

Allotment digging and planting.

Today was the first day that Helen and I have done any work (apart from the felting of the shed roof which I helped Andy with) on the allotment.

We were given some lettuce and some sweet corn seeds by Helen's dad - it may be a little late for the corn but we thought that we could give it a go. They will either grow into a great crop or not grow at all.


Here are some pictures ...

Andy watering the poppies of the neighbouring allotment (not sure why).

The four canes in the picture (above) show the lines in which we planted the crops. The first two on the left are lettuce. The two smaller canes on the right are the corn.

Andy and Pam watering in the fresh crops - lets hope they grow.

Fresh carrots and a bunch of potatoes found from the small plot that we turned over to make way for the lettuce and sweet corn (if you enlarge this picture it actually looks quite cool with the droplets of water and the light). 

Some tasty looking fruit in there somewhere. They will be nice in a crumble - if you like crumble.

After investigation (a picture message to my mum) these are Victoria plums (above and below) and will be ready towards the end of August (looking forward to making some plum wine with some of these, some crumble for those that like crumble). 

Hope you like what we've done so far. We'll have some cucumber, beetroot, radish, some more lettuce and some spring onions to plan next week.

Matt and helen plant so stuff

Matt and helen came down today and planted some goodys in the plot shown! I'll let them tell you what they planted!

Cockchafer (May bug) insect in HD

http://m.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&hl=en-GB&client=mv-google&v=-8x1RfzjeMM

Found this awesome footage of the may bug

Cockchafers

Howdy allotmenteers pam and I have Weeded and watered this eve have also removed most of old felt and tacs from shed roof! New roofing felt and tacs bought and in shed the felt was £18.48 and tacs £3.28! So that's £21.76 all together so divide by 7 and that's £3.11 each! Matt and I plan to be down there sunday afternoon to re felting if any one want to join in! While we were down there this eve pam got scared by some maybugs/billywitches/Cockchafer that swarmed round tree at dusk!

More Carrots Planted

The original Carrots seem to be growing well and we have thinned them out!
Pam has now planted some more carrots for a later harvest! In the plot pictured to the left, between the blue and white string.

Our first fruits/vegetables

Spinach and rhubarb have both been enjoyed at home. Our spinach is doing well, and hopefully will continue to do so for a while. We were pleased to discover rhubarb already on our allotment. Is this a fruit or vegetable?

The mange tout and courgette plants are slowly emerging but don't seem to have liked this dry weather. The leeks and nasturtuims have failed, so we are trying again. Parsnips and carrots have been thinned out (it is very sad throwing away these little plants!), and a couple of potatos are starting to flower, so it will be time to discover how good our potato crop is soon.

Pinched

Has anyone seen one of these?
Its not where it should be on the tap!
Someones pinch?borrowweed this converter from the tap at allotment and not returned it! Need to get one to keep in shed!

Planting potatoes

In the first few weeks of March, we got all our potatoes planted. Most were bought from the East Anglia Potato Day. We were advised to stick with early potatoes rather than main crop potatoes due to the increased risk of blight. So we will see how our first and second early potatoes get on. And the very exciting blue ones :)

Carrots, spinach and broad beans have also been planted.

A very long list

We are hoping to fir somewhere on out allotment (along with a barbecue space and some flowers)...

Runner beans

Courgette

Carrots

French beans

Celery

Broccoli

Peas

Parsnips

Potatoes

Sprouts

Broad beans

Mange tout

Tomatoes

Onions

Garlic

Lettuce

Peppers

Leeks

Herbs

Allotment plan to come when we have done it...

A paper version of the allotment plan is in the shed - feel free to electonic-ise this.

EAST ANGLIA POTATO DAY 2011

EAST ANGLIA POTATO DAY 2011

will take place on

SATURDAY  12th FEBRUARY 2011

9.30am - 1.30pm

at

Mid-Suffolk Showground

Stonham Barns, Stonham Aspal

Nr Stowmarket, Suffolk, IP14 6AT

http://www.eapd.btik.com/Home

Gist on You Tube

If you haven't visited our You Tube Channel recently, take a look. We now have 10 subscribers (yay 10 - so impressive lol)! Admittedly two of those are Andy and Sharon, but the rest are perfect strangers with what seems to be some excellent advice about how we can go about our first year as beginner "allotmenteers" :) Check out their videos too, there are some really useful ones.

Lots of love xxx

Three Pronged Cultivator Aparently

According to "vegetable growing month by month" by john harrison, this is a three pronged cultivator for losening and aerating light soil

Come back sun

We ran out daylight today at the allotment but it resulted in some pretty pictures, check out some of the new videos to keep upto date with the progress