Sowing the first seeds

The problem with having a new allotment and bags of enthusiasm is that there are never enough hours in the day to accomplish all the wacky ideas that go on in my head.

I want our plot to be as natural as possible, but at the same time as cheap or as free as possible. I have so far recycled old pallets to make compost bins and raised beds. I have also thinned out some local hazel branches to make my runner bean frame. All that is needed now is the time to dig the rest of the plot over, and to clear the weeds that have grown on the part that we have already dug over. It then all needs levelling out before planting can commence.

In the meantime it's time to start sowing some seeds. Brassica's mainly, but also some tomatoes.

Brassicas don't like heat to germinate but don't like to be frozen either. Too much heat will make them leggy and you will end up with sub standard plants that you are likely to have issues with later on. Instead they just need to be sheltered, and kept out of the frost. Mine are in propagators in the shed at the moment.

I have sown

Leeks - Musselburgh

Cabbage - Greyhound

Sprouts - Green marble

I have also sown 12 seeds of 4 varieties of tomato. These however need to be warm to germinate so are coming to work with me tomorrow to take advantage of the big sunny windowsill behind me.

The tomatoes I have sown are

Money Maker

Alacante

Gardeners Delight

Roma

With all of the seeds sown in propagators you need to keep an eye on them and ensure that you remove the lids as soon as the seeds start to germinate.

Exciting isn't it?

Adding the raised beds

How beautiful was it outside today? We haven't been to the plot for a short while, but boy did we pick the right day to spend some time on the site. The sun was shining, birds singing and the worms a wiggling.

The mission for today was to build two raised beds for our strawberries. These following our ethos for the plot were made from recycled materials. More pallets to be exact.

Both raised beds are 6' x 4.5' and each house 12 strawberry plants.

I constructed the beds whilst Philly sieved earth! We have three compost bins on the plot. Two that we inherited and one that we made. One of the original bins is full of soil and stones and other old gubbins as Philly discovered. This is a waste of composting space, but at the same time provided a good supply of soil to raise the soil level in the new beds.
The beds were dug over and the weeds removed, and then the wonderfully sieved soil and some fish, blood and bone fertiliser added. it was then smoothed over and levelled out.

We have three varieties of strawberries. Earlys called Elvira, a mid crop called Korona and a late crop called Florence. One bed has the first and half the mid crop and the second bed has the other half of the mid crop and the late crop.

That's the fruit end of the plot now sorted. We have strawberries, raspberries (Tulameen), yellow raspberries (all Gold), gooseberries (Hinnomaki), blackcurrant (Ben Lomand) and redcurrant (Jonkheer Van Tets) planted. We also have a Cox's orange pippin apple tree. I have a James Grieve apple tree in a large pot in the garden that I think I am going to move to the site also.

Now that the evenings are getting longer we are hopefully going to be able to spend a little time on site after work. This will allow us to start clearing some more ground, and start planting our first vegetable crops.

Planting the fruit

Well, after all this wet weather we finally managed to get back down to the plot. It was refreshing to feel soft earth beneath our wellies rather than the solid frozen ground.

I had managed to pick up some fruit bushes from Aldi a week or so back. We had a nice mixture of yellow and red raspberry, blackcurrant, redcurrant and gooseberry canes which all needed planting. I had also picked up a Cox's orange pippin apple tree. I love apples and had initially toyed with the idea of an apple tree but dismissed it due to the space it would take up, but when I saw this for sale for not much more than a couple of quid I couldn't resist buying it.

Saturday afternoon we headed to the plot and planted the apple tree and dug a trench for the raspberry canes. This was lined with manure and all the canes were placed in a bucket of rain water to soak over night.

This morning I dropped Phillipa and Fenn off at Philly's mums house whilst I popped over to the plot for a few hours.

All of the raspberry canes were planted, and then the rest of the fruit was placed at the end of the patch around some pre-existing canes which my neighbour informs me may well be a form of loganberry.

It's not much to look at at the moment as the canes are small, but hopefully in a years time they will be more established. We may get a few fruit this year but I'm not holding out much hope.

Here you can see the apple tree and the compost bin we built a week back. I need to stake the tree, so will harvest a stake from the woods at some point soon.

As the weather was being kind I dug over a bit more earth. The ground is nice and crumbly with lots of worms and turns over pretty easily.

This week I plan on getting another good load of horse manure to add to the pile, and maybe dig over some more of the patch.

Our kind neighbour also gave us some French bean seeds that he had saved from his last years crop. It's a great atmosphere on the site, and I'm sure this will only get better as the months go on and we start to see a few more people down there.

Snow Halts Play

We had big plans for this weekend. Well, we had planned on digging over some more of the patch at least!

In the week we found a nice lady advertising well rotted horse manure local to us, so I phoned her up and arranged to go and pick some up. We made a packed lunch for the horses in return for some bags of brown gold and set off in the car. Well the mound of horse muck was rather large, and the owner said it has been there for at least 4 years. Fresh stuff was on the top so I dug deep whilst Philly held the bags open for me to fill. We filled the boot, and the horses were given some fruit. We have been told that we can go back when we want which is great!

The manure, although well rotted, is rather wet at the moment, so I wanted to build another compost bin on the plot so that we could get it mixed with some newspaper and straw to try and dry it out a bit before we add it to the plot. It's a nice rich dark brown colour and full of worms so it looks like good stuff.

I then went out the following evening to see if I could pick up some old wooden pallets. My luck was in, and I delivered 5 to the plot Saturday morning.

After lunch, Fenn was dropped off at his Granma's house and Philly and I trundled off to the plot to build the new compost bin.
The ground was frozen solid, and as a result we were the only people mad enough to be at the site. We nailed together four of the pallets in a square and emptied the 10 bags of horsey doo doo's into the new bin. This was well mixed in with some straw and a shredded newspaper. The final pallet which had a solid rather than a slotted base was placed on top to aid heat retention.

Within the hour we were back at Granma's house to pick up the boy, and the rest of the weekend has been spent dreaming about vegetables and sheds rather than doing any work.

I have however managed to put together a rough plan of how I want to lay out the allotment, with a five year easy crop rotation system.

Fruit is to the left hand side of the plot; where I would also like to site a shed.

The first bed will be brassicas, then beans and peas, then potatoes, then onions and root crops in the final bed.

This is only a rough plan, and we doubt that the plot will look anything like as smart as this, but it should give us good use of the space. Suddenly what looked like a huge plot now doesn't look quite so big!

Oh and the spuds are chitting in the attic room ready to be planted later this month or early next.

Revival - New Allotment

Well haven’t we been slack? Last post in 2009!

A lot has changed since then. We’ve got married and have a little boy called Fenn for a start, and then last week, after a three and a half year wait we had a phone call letting us know that we had a half plot at the local allotment. To say this made us happy would be an understatement.

Saturday morning straight after Fenn’s swimming lesson we headed over to the allotments to meet Brian who was to show us around, and more importantly our new plot of land.Well we had struck gold. You hear of these horror stories of people inheriting a jungle of brambles, and shoulder high weeds when they take on an allotment. Well the gardening gods were shining on us, our plot was used up until the autumn, and pretty much just needs digging and some good compost added before we can start growing some goodies.

We have been itching to get our hands on an allotment for years now, and although the small patch of garden we had turned over to a veggie patch was great, it never really allowed us to grow more than a few spuds, courgettes and beans. We were hankering for more space, and finally we have it!

As we were marvelling at the newly acquired plot, and dreaming of fresh greens, chunky soups and eating fruit straight from the bush, the spirit of the allotment sprung into life. We met one of our neighbours, a veteran to the scene having worked his ground for the last 30 years. “A fool learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from other people’s mistakes” he said, “And I’ve made a few, so if there is anything you want to know just ask”, and that seemed to be the general spirit of the place. People were very friendly, and inviting to this new couple clutching a young baby, and I can see that the socialising will be as much a part of allotment life as the gardening will be.

We retuned the following day with our welly boots and forks after dropping Fenn off at his Granma’s house and digging commenced. Our plot roughly measured 60 by 20 feet and needed turning over and the grass and weeds removed. It gave us a good chance to take a look at what we really had inherited. There are three rhubarb plants that have been left behind which is superb as the one we had in the garden didn’t survive the snow of last year. There are what look like some fruit canes at one end of the plot, so hopefully one of our neighbours will be able to identify them.We also have a couple of homemade compost bins that have been made from wooden pallets. The compost in them is not actually compost yet, so we will have to see if we can get our hands on a lot of well-rotted horse manure over the next couple of weeks.

We managed to turn over about a third of the plot in a couple of hours. It was very quiet on the allotment today with just a few people showing their faces, mainly to harvest some winter vegetables before getting in their cars and going home. Hopefully that will be us next year!

We promise to update again soon!

Matt, Philly and Fenn

Cider making day - Kentish Scrumpy

How lazy have I been over the last few months. I haven't updated this is ages. There has been loads going on in the garden, but we've been too busy eating to blog. Loads of soups from the garden, and almost every meal has consisted of something from the garden. Its been a great year so far, and we have learnt lots for next year. I shall try to do an update later, but I wont promise anything.

We've also been making loads of country wines. Here in Kent we are incredibly lucky with the hedgerow bounty thats on offer. First we made a cherry plum wine, then blackberry wine, and then damson wine. We also have sloe gin on the go, and lots of it.

Whilst driving about I like to keep an eye on whats growing along the lanes. I watched the cherry plums grow, and then after we had picked bags of them I saw the damsons and sloes come along. At the same time I found that there are loads of wild apple trees growing in the hedgerows. There are also a few pear trees about. I had a good week of browsing google trying to find if there was any easy way of turning this into cider. Phillipa and myself do enjoy drinking the fermented apple juice, and making our own seemed like the best thing in the world. After evenings of watching videos on you tube I decided that making my own cider press was not really that stupid an idea.
I had a load of wood that I could make a frame from in the garden, and i managed to pick up some old beech work surface from a boot fair. I then bought a car jack from ebay, and I just needed a free afternoon to make the frame.

So, anyway the frame was built, and the story continues in pictures from here....

I had lots of trees mapped out all over Swale, and the first step was for us to collect them. This mostly consisted of me scarpering up trees, throwing apples at Phillipa. It was fun, its normally her throwing things at me...!!

Then when we got home, we quartered the apples, removing any bruised area, and any creepy crawlies that had made their home in the apples. This was actually quite frequent to my delight, as Phillipa screamed everytime she found a maggot or earwig. Actually it was not good finding them, but it was funny hearing Phillipa squark with fear everytime she saw one...!

As they were quartered they were put through the shredder on the food processor. We would then wrap 2 loads of apples in net curtain. We found that putting this in a cake tin made a good mold for pressing.



I had bought a cheap roasting tin. Drilling a hole in the side of the tin, and putting a length of piping ensured that the juice extracted could run out where I wanted it.



I then placed a small chopping board on top of the apples, and then the beech board ontop of that. A length of wood and the car jack were then added, and the car jack was pumped up.



After a few pumps the apple juice would start to run out of the pipe, and into the bucket underneath



Out it comes :)



I would tilt the whole contraption forward to make sure that I got all of the juice that had been extracted



It was suprising how much we would get out of the apples. Cooking apples give a much lighter juice than sweet eating apples. We used a mixture of about 45% each of these types of apples, and about 10 % pears. It tasted good as juice, and looks like it will ferment out at about 9% alcohol



This is a pressed apple cake after being pressed. All of this has gone into the compost bin



A few hours later and we had 2 gallons of juice reading for bottling.



I have added one campden tablet to each demijohn. They are currently wrapped in the heat belt. If in a few days they haven't started to ferment I shall add a little yeast.

This should be ready to drink at about Christmas, and seeing that Phillipa and I have set the tradition of drinking cider and eating cheese on Christmas eve this seems like perfect timing. I just now need to work out how to make cheese :)

As they grow, they start to show

Over the past few weeks I have been on slug and snail duty when it gets dark. I can't believe how many slimey buggers I have disposed of, and that the numbers still stay constant in the garden. I dont seem to be able to make a dent in the population, but it seems that I have in keeping the crops for myself, and not as food for the gastropods.

Our first crop of runner beans and peas provided excellent slug food, and much to our dissappointment they managed to munch their way through the entire crops. I however picked up some nice plants at a local grocers, and these now grow where there was bare ground. The slug hunting has seen the plants survive so far, but we are far from safe. I shall continue with my midnight duty with a kebab stick, and empty plant pot ;)



The broad beans were subject to a totally different pest, and the tips of the plants had become infested with black fly. There were disposed of with a good spray with water mixed with washing up liquid. I have been keeping a fine eye on them, and as soon as they start to reappear they get another blast from the sprayer.
The pods are now beginning to form, and we should be able to start eating them very soon I hope.



The broccoli and sprouts continue to grow. A few of the leaves are getting munched, but so far I haven't been able to spot the culprit. I hunt every night, but no signs of slugs, snails or caterpillars.



The onions are also doing well. We have had about 10 so far produce a small flower, but these we all pulled out of the gound and eaten straight away before any loss occured to the onion itself. Very nice they were too.



Some of the onions are looking quite large now too. I cant wait to string them up

A few weeks ago we potted a load of squash seeds. We bought a pumpkin last year at Halloween to carve, and made soup with the flesh. I also salted and fried the seeds in chilli powder, and they were amazing. A small handfull of seeds were kept to plant, and these have all sprouted. I also did the same with another small squash. We have also sprouted some butternut squash seeds.

During the sprouting process I moved all of the pots about whilst watering, and now dont have a clue what is what, but they are all now in the garden, so this will be an interesting new patch.

The courgettes, scalloppini's and a lone cucumber are all doing well. Well the ones that survived the slug attack are.

We are now getting some courgettes forming. Phillipa wimpered in excitement when I called her down the garden to see this...!! Exciting times.

The tomato plants are doing well. I have cut the bottoms off of lemonade bottles, and stuck the neck into the grow bags. These are filled with water to act as a reservoir, and so far it seems to be working.

And the tomatos are beginning to form. I must admit to getting very excited when I first saw these growing.

And the passion fruit is coming into flower. This bush looks magnificent in full bloom, and then produces really sweet tasty fruit.