experimenting in the fall

This year we have a lot going on this fall, Including some experiments.  For instance:

Here there are cabbage seedlings that were sown in place in big numbers so that we could then thin them out.  This is the first time that we have done this and it seems to have been really successful.  Usually we would propagate the seedlings and transplant them But this year we don't have anywhere to propagate them in the house So we decided to Simply sew them in place.  I think this will be what we do in the future too.

Meanwhile:

 next door we are growing corn salad and spinach between our glorious kale plants.  The corn salad was sown in place but the spinach was transplanted back in August.  Corn salad took a long time to germinate because of dry weather and the spinach plants were shocked when they were transplanted. But now they are looking pretty good.

Three days harvest

 Given that we had such a bad spring because we were so busy, the focus has been on autumn.   We have a lot in the ground right now and things are going pretty well.  Here is the harvest from the last three days:

 

Here are the last of our dwarf beans mostly, there is still one plant left.  And our broccoli plants that did not form heads this year because of the heat and dry conditions (the first time ever that we had nothing form heads) are now finally producing florets, so we will have a lot of these in the next month.  And we still have zucchini plants producing zucchini!!!!  Last, but not least, flowers!!

We also are still harvesting potatoes (we planted a second batch for the first time that should be done in December.  There is also kale and spinach and two radishes.

 Finally, even more kale and spinach and broccoli.  Another zucchini and a lonely radish and ... most importantly, the bright green leaves are the first lettuce leaves from a little patch of lettuce we have in the ground right now.  Not bad for the start of October. 

Productive little corner

 About a year ago our little boy and his friend were let loose on a bed that we had been using less and less because of trees on the edge of out plot increasingly limited the amount of sunlight it received.  Soil was good in the bed, but the sunlight meant that we always thought about the bed last when it came time to planting things.  The boys created a crater 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep.  

The advantage of boys who dig like badgers is that so much of the soil was dug up that it meant that the bed would now be perfect for carrots, since a lot of the clay was broken up.  We cut the trees back and now it is a productive little autumn, where a year ago there was nothing. 

 
 Here you can see carrots and our small group of fennel plants.  There is also a small row of lettuce on the right hand side, and you can't seen them but between the lettuce and the carrots are some spring onions.

tidy, but tardy

 Our plot looks tidy now, but just a few months ago it was a mess, we had so much work and so little time to get to it.  Now we're aiming for a winter garden but in the meantime we have broccoli and dwarf beans and two small squash plants in the front but behind the broccoli there are much bigger squash plants.

Our plot 7 years later!!!

Oh boy, we really have been out of the loop, maybe it is kids or that we know the ropes already and so documenting everything is not as essential, but it has been a long time, here is how the "old plot" looks:

 
 It's hard to make anything out really except for the enormous stand of wildflowers that are really a testament to the plot working on re-wilding itself rather than any effort on our part. 

A lot of things have changed in the way that we do things.  You can see that one of the compost "daleks" is on its side.  We have been very successful at making our own compost/mulch, and it's very fun to work with.  We now have 4 plus a massive pile on the new plot.  Also, the massive stand of wild flower in the center indicates a big change.  The beds are more fluid than ever.  We plant things whereever and the beds themselves are constantly changing form.  Some of this is about trying to cultivate more space, but part of it is that both M and I are both gardening now.  This means that things are constantly changing.  Sometimes its flowers, sometimes broccoli. 

broccoli!!

it was just a matter of time to see whether all of the pampering we have given to our broccoli plants would have made any difference, and the verdict is in:

 

YES!

Wow, so we have 12 plants all producing heads like this!  i can't believe it, but maybe it was the ...

• mulch
• netting
• strong seedlings
• daily watering
• slug collars 

i don't think that we could have done much more, and we have gotten good weather this summer, hopefully this means the start of about three months of non-stop broccoli ... smiley face!

best summer yet?

so things are going really well in the allotment:

our straw has helped us stay on top of weeds, we have had good seedlings, and now everything is growing really well, we have a lot of sun this summer so far, but we haven't had a good rain in about three weeks, so we have had to water a lot ...

all space on the old plot (pictured here) is now being used, we are growing in more space in the old plot than every before, its exciting!

its june!

so, i have been really bad about adding posts, once a month it seems, but june is here and there are a lot of exciting things happening in the garden (you can click on the pictures to make them bigger) ...

to start there are these:

our beautiful broccoli plants, last year we had 8 plants, none of the seedlings were ours and they were all planted at different times (three of which we thought were cauliflower), but these are all ours, they were very healthy seedlings, and are now looking great, if everything works out they could give us broccoli for months!

and then:

there is our corn and squash bed, the corn looks healthy and the squash plants (patty pan) are the healthiest squash plants we have ever had, i think it is the adding of manure to the seedlings when planting them, they look great!

then there is our strawberry patch, just transplanted last year, when it didn't really produce much, but this year there are a lot of strawberries, some not as sweet as they should be so we may have to thin the bed for next year, there are a lot of runners too so they will likely take over the paths around them as well ...

finally, you can see what a difference a month makes for our zucchini plants, they are huge with a lot of fruit on them already, we should be having fritters by the end of the week!  they were also planted with manure at the base as well, which seems to do the trick with squash ...

it's may!!!

actually, its the end of may, but a lot has been happening in the allotment, especially:

broccoli and winter squash, the incredibly pampered broccoli are under the netting, these were by far the best brassica seedlings that had ever come out of our conservatory, i couldn't believe how good they looked, and now they are the most protected thing in the plot!  the winter squash plants look much worse for wear, but hopefully they will produce at least a few squash, if i have time i will plant some radish between the plants ...

and then there are:

zucchini plants in the ground by the beginning of may and onions and beets ...  these we have planted in modules for the first time, we will see how this works, there are 18 onions in the old plot, but if these little modules produce more than that then we will do this in the future too ... slugs have been at war with the onions since they have been put in the ground, so that will affect how many we get ...

finally, slugs have been a big problem for everyone else, but with the exception of the onions, we have been relatively slug free, could it be the straw/no-dig?

weather ...

we have the earliest start of any year ever and this is what we're facing:

low temperatures and nothing but rain, sigh ...

Seedlings!

getting started early

Wow, what a way to start a new, but with the realization that you may have been doing everything all wrong the whole time ... well at least propagation ... for now at least, usually we begin to germinate things in early april so that we avoid the last frost in may, however, this year with some thinking about what we are planting in terms of varieties we have an early start that looks like this:

and what's that fan doing there? well every year our seedlings are leggy, but without a real green house what can you do? maybe ... use a fan, this is a little experiment and we will see if it actually works, but what do we have growing at the moment?

• Peas
• Spinach
• Lettuce
• "Microgreens"
• Beets
• Broccoli

This is hopefully will be a big year for broccoli because of all of the success that we had last year with simple florets, so far all 12 cells have germinated (100%), but we have never successfully gotten any broccoli from a plant that we germinated ...  

Shed shelves

finally i got to putting up new shelves in the shed:

the new ones are on the left hand side holding my new green caddy

 

old plot new beds

we have filled our new strawberry bed with strawberries finally! a badger was rooting around in their so i had to net it, but in general it looks like we could have a nice crop of strawberries this year even with these very old plants, i dug up three plants from under the black currents (probably around 8 years old) and their roots were a half inch thick and looked like tree roots (click to enlarge)!

 

meanwhile, just a little bit up the plot i have dug a little bed and put three zucchini plants in, we got these from the farm since our seedlings are late (which is a polite way of saying that we killed them and had to replant, oops), the plan is to get rid of the wood pile between this and the strawberries and do the same there:

 

 

matches

recently matches has been getting used to the warmer weather, he has crafted a lazy throne for himself by sitting on a patch of grass in the back garden (click to enlarge):

 

 what a cat, he sits there all the time! and when he gets thirsty he helps himself to the water in our water lily container ... make yourself at home matches!

 

mulching

one thing that we have been doing a lot of this year is mulching, it kind of goes with the whole straw things, m. has said that we have the only "shaggy" plot in the whole allotment, but i have been paying really close attention to fertilizing and mulching this year, our purple sprouting broccoli look great because of it, and so do our garlic:

although there's a little bit of rust on them the look good, next time we won't plant them so close, but here is a freshly mulched and weeded bed, and some shaggy straw in the background.

a new raised bed

here is the new raised bed that i constructed:

the top of the old plot is really getting tidy now, for this bed the sides are 10 inches high, which is higher then the beds we built last year, this bed leaves that strange empty area open, we will have to figure out a way to fill it, the problem with this space is that it is filled with plastic from trash that was on the plot when we first got it, so raised beds are really the only thing we can do here.

a new compost pile

i built a new compost pile "bay" from some pallets that we collected, we now have a place to but new compost (click to enlarge):

the compost from our two piles is really nice, it will make great mulch and we may use a lot of it on our potatoes ... yummy.

the slope: before and after

well there are a lot of projects that we have completed this spring, the most important of which was to get the plastic weed barrier off the slope in the new plot, since it was breaking down quickly, here is the before picture (click to enlarge):

we have been very serious about getting as much plastic out of our plot as possible, and this was a prime target, but what to replace it with?

the answer is a paper-based weed barrier, which looks like this:

yes, not an attractive color, but it seems to be lasting, it's like we have paper mache-ed out little hill!

that is a monstrous sage plant, btw ...

look at what i found hiding in the wild patch:

i couldn't believe it, i have never seen flowers there before!

it is in the wild bit just next to our garlic bed:

which has done really well so far, it is the first time in like 6 years that we will have garlic, and with more raised beds to come we should have more in the future!