Buried Treasure

Well its been a lovely summer so far. We have been really lucky with the weather and have had some nice days up on plot no 5. The sunshine has been very kind to both us and our plants.

The boys were really very excited to go and dig up the spuds. They were like pirates looking for buried treasure. Jack did the digging and it was Harrys job to put the potatoes in the bucket. They were so lovely when they came out of the ground just like tiny gold nuggets .We had a really good crop from our early potatoes and they were lovely mashed.

Our main crop potatoes are looking good.

We pulled our garlic and then left it to dry. The one organic clove that we bought seemed to do really well and produced 12 new cloves that tasted delicious.

We had a good crop of onions. About 12. Dan has already put these to good use.

We had to cover over the broccoli plants as they were being eaten. Since we did this they are growing in size and doing well. All of our other things that we planted are also thriving and we hope for some good crops. 

We have had the last of the broad beans and peas from our plants. we only planted a small amount of both this year but will defiantly be planting a larger amount next year. The parsnips, runner beans and beetroot are all doing well. Its amazing what you can grow from such tiny seeds.

Can you spot the caterpillar

We are looking forward to our blackberries this year. Our bush has an abundance of them. Just hope we get to them before the birds do.

Its slowed down a bit for us now up on the plot with planting. Time is taken up with weeding and tidying around. Dan has been visiting after work weeding, strimming and collecting our chard. We seem to have lots of this.
 Our next move is what will we plant next and how we will use the space that our harvested crops have left.  Talking about weeding,  a lovely friend of mine left me a lovely present on my door step. If only this was true. She also left me something nice to drink my brew out of after i have finished the weeding.

Fast forward not magic

so!! my last post had been written a few weeks ago but not posted till now so what you are seeing in this post isn't magic but just follows on from the last post.

How exciting it was to have our first proper pickings from the allotment. Dan had been up to do some weeding and came back with these little or not so little beauties. we were very pleased that we had fleeced them and that they hadn't been eaten by slugs or birds. They tasted very very nice indeed.

Our second pickings came from our broad bean plants. We had a lot of trouble with blackfly but we sprayed them with a soap solution which helped and ended up with some very nice tasting beans.

Our chard seeds did very well and we have an abundance of chard plants. This is really nice when cooked quickly with a sunday roast or in a stir fry. The boys really love it as well which is a bonus.
Another thing that seems to have done well is our peas. You cant beat the taste of a pea fresh from the pod and i have to admit that i was the first to try one. I just couldn't wait till i got home. Took me back to when i was a little girl picking them in the garden with my dad.

We have been very lucky so far with our pickings. We have had some lovely fruit and vegetables and its so nice to think we have grown them. The boys especially Jack think that it is great that we can just walk up the road to collect our ingredients for tea. Harry is always asking to go to the allotment.

Our early potatoes seem to be ready but i wasn't sure so i had a sneaky peak. This is what i found.

We are going to go up with the boys and dig them up so i covered them back over for now. Our main crop are growing well and hopefully we will get some good potatoes from them.

While i was weeding and watering one night our friend who gave us a lovely book before came along with another one. Its so lovely to read and the pictures are amazing. Who knows? maybe one day this could be us. Till then, we will just keep weeding as there is always weeding to be done.

Been a while

A lot has happened up on plot 5 since I last wrote the blog. It has been over a month and everything is changing. Our plot actually looks like an allotment believe it or not. Compared to what it looked like this time last year. A lot of hard work has gone into it and we are really happy with our efforts. We are being rewarded with some lovely looking fruit and vegetable plants.

2014

2015

Visiting the allotment is now done in shifts. This is really because Jack and Harry haven't learnt about not treading  on the new seedlings and that not all plants are like herbs and can be pulled up straight away. Having said that they are enjoying growing things in our mini greenhouse at home. They were really excited to see the beans emerging that that planted. They both help water them and enjoy checking on them every day. The bean seeds were given to us by one of our allotment neighbours and they originally came from his grandfathers beans.

Dan has been visiting the allotment in the evenings on his way home from work and I will visit when the boys go to bed. It is really lovely and quiet up on plot five and the other night I was kept company by the swallows. They did a lovely dance for me. Our early potatoes have been doing well and we have been earthing them up. Hopefully we will have a good crop. Dan put in our main crop last week so we are all done planting and just have to keep our fingers and toes crossed.

The beans that we started at home in our mini greenhouse have all gone in now. Dan made some supports and the beans seem to like their new home.

We planted broccoli seeds and we were rewarded with some lovely plants which have now been planted up on the plot. We have also planted parsnip plants which my dad kindly brought from warwickshire for us.

In keeping with the recycling theme up on the allotment we brought a push along lawn mower from our local recycling centre for a £1. A bit of oil and a sharpen and it was as good as new. It does a lovely job.

The strawberries have been emerging over the past few weeks. This was the first signs of them.

We put some fleece over them to protect them from the birds. So glad we did. Here is our first strawberry

I was a little sad to see that something had been eating our beans and peas think it may be pigeons. May have to cover them over but we will see how they go.

The garlic and onions seem to be doing well as do the strawberries. We already have some signs of fruit so think the next job will be to put some straw around them and cover them with netting so the birds won't eat them.

Spent a good two hours weeding the beds on Friday and even plated some more peas. Really pleased with what we have done so far and every time we visit we love to see the new things growing.

No time for resting. Keep weeding.

A new princess and a pea plant

It was lovely to hear the great news about the safe arrival of the new princess. Congratulations to Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge. A lovely little sister for Prince George.

We have some exciting news of our own as well. Our very first peas have appeared. We were really pleased to see them coming through. Jack couldn't quite believe it. So satisfying .

Everything is growing fast now, including the weeds. Our broad beans are doing well and seem to like their new surroundings.

We managed to get an hour of weeding done in between the rain showers. It was really muddy so not that practical but we were passing and couldn't resist a visit. The boys were in their element . Rain, mud, spades and clean clothes. Not a good combination.

Due to all the rain we have been having we had a nice full water butt. We have started to save the water as we do not have a water supply other than our water butt. We will need lots of it come the summer. These old recycled milk bottles do the trick nicely.

On our way home we noticed that the apple trees in the allotments are just starting to flower. How lovely they look. Should have some nice apples soon.

Sunshine and a nice surprise

What a glorious week it has been. The weather has been fabulous and the sunshine always makes things better.

Easter Sunday brought lots of chocolate eggs and some broad bean plants. Dan's dad had kindly potted us up some plants for our allotment. In only a couple of days they had gone from seedlings to a nice sturdy plant. We are going to let them  grow a bit bigger before we plant them in plot 5.

Dan went up to the plot after work this week and planted our early potatoes, chard, and sweet corn.

We have bought our main crop potatoes and have opted for Albert Bartlett Rooster. We bought a 2kg bag for £2.50 from Wilkinson's. The beetroot we are planting is called boltardy it is supposed to be a very popular bolt resistant variety. We will soon see.

We also bought some herb garden mix from Aldi for £1.49 it includes common dill, chervil, black mustard, caraway, coriander, rocket, fennel, parsley and lastly sweet basil large leaved and fenugreek. It says it contains over 10,000 seeds and covers an area of up to 25m2. Not bad we thought for the price. We have planted some next to our strawberries and Jack planted some in his patch. All we need now is a good mixture of sunshine and showers.

Talking about strawberries. Our allotment neighbour kindly gave us a few more plants . we had some that we found in the undergrowth last year but we were glad to receive some more. We weeded around the plants and put the new ones in place. Dan put a dressing of manure around them.

One of our other neighbours gave us some lovely purple sprouting broccoli which dan used today  in our lovely roast dinner. It was enough for two adults a small boy and an even smaller boy. It was really delicious and tasted even better knowing that it had only been picked ten minutes earlier.

Dan cleared out the old compost bin today. Nearly all of the wood was rotten apart from one piece, which we are going to use for shelving in the shed. We used our old water tank that had been left on the plot for burning the rest of it. We found that this really did a good job and also found out that it gave off a lot of heat. Dan is going to use a metal grid on the top so we can cook or boil our kettle on it. Maybe we could use it for a nice summer evenings BBQ.

The nice surprise that we found was another rhubarb plant which had been hidden under our wheelbarrow. It looks a good plant and will be ready in a few weeks. Any one for some crumble?

The last job of the weekend was to plant some peas. A little late but fingers crossed they will be ok. Jack really enjoyed helping put the peas in the holes. Think he may of put two in some of them as we seemed to have misplaced a few. All in all we had a really productive and enjoyable weekend.