After quite some time away from the allotment for various reasons, it was lovely to spend the day there again getting lots of work done on our own little Victory Garden!
Unfortunately, the new roofing felt Dimas had put on the shed came away after some storms we had recently. So the big job this time was redoing that roof, which he did a great job of. Now fingers crossed, it stays as it is. Since coming home, we have had some very interesting ideas for the interior of the shed that we may hopefully get to do over winter while there is less planting to do.
Our potato plants gave us a lovely little harvest a few weeks ago, so we decided to try planting a few more to see what we might get during the end of summer/autumn. My big job was to reinvigorate the potato patch, which involved a good few trips to the ever fragrant horse manure pile just outside of the allotment fence… Still, its worth it in the end for some yummy chips!
As before, I laid down newspapers to prevent a lot of weed growth coming through. However this time I wanted to give the plants more good soil/manure above the newspaper, so I removed a lot of the clay soil before laying down the paper and then building up a good mound of manure and then a layer of top soil on top of that. Hopefully we my get a bigger quantity of potatoes from each plant as there will be more room for the roots and tubers to spread out.
After doing the roof, Dimas decided to turn over our onion and garlic patch to treat the soil and to make more room for new onion and garlic plants. He did a great job in making rows and troughs for each type of onion, we are trying white, red and spring onions this time and what was left of our garlic clove. Lets see how they get on!
The courgette plants are doing well, and we should be able to harvest a few of those soon and see if we get any others from the blossoms. The broccoli, carrots, peas and parsnips that we’ve tried out seem to be growing nicely as well – our very own Sunday dinner veg garden! We haven’t got many of each, but its been so cool to see the few plants we do have grow so well and to know that we should be able to grow more next year once we’ve got the rest of the plot under control.
That will be our next big job – to attack the back part of the plot that’s still quite wild, and get it prepped in time for spring sowing. Though we were pleased to find a huge blackberry bush there this afternoon that we will be foraging through over the next few weeks.
Nicola Cañaveras 