Pulling up the onions

The onions have had a lot to put up with this year.  Soon after planting the sets, the moles moved in, that must have been a bit traumatic for them being pushed up out of the soil before they were ready, but they seemed to recover and carried on growing.

Then as time went on the weeds arrived and took over. Now I know that onions don't like competing with weeds, they like their own space, but we were busy moving house and so the poor onions got neglected, but they continued to grow.

At this time of year it's now time to harvest the onions. All around me on the neighbouring allotments I can see racks of onions drying out in the sunshine. So I decided it was time to pull my onions up. I have to say that although I did try to do a little bit of weeding in the onion patch over the last few weeks, the weeds won. So when it came to pulling them up, I had great difficulty in finding them amongst the weeds. But I managed and I was amazed to find big onions.

I laid them out to dry in the sunshine on the greenhouse staging which we dragged out from its summer storage behind the shed and also in the cold frame.

And so, despite all the trauma of bad growing conditions, the onions have done well and seem as good as in previous years. I'm pleased with my harvest.

Clearing out the pond and bog garden

The allotment pond has been much neglected in the last few months and every time I have been down to the allotment recently I have looked and thought I really must do something about it. The plants in the boggy garden around the pond needed deadheading and the weeds were growing tall around them obscuring the pond. The pond itself was completely covered in pond weed so that I couldn't see if the tadpoles were still living in there.

My time on the allotment has been limited recently so the most important jobs have been getting vegetables in the ground and looking after them.  But I recently found myself fairly up to date with the jobs and having an hour to spare I decided to tackle the pond.

I started by weeding around the pond and deadheading the plants. The irises, trollius, candelabra primroses and marsh marigolds had all gone over, so they got cut back. But the lovely pink lythrum was flowering away and I was so pleased because I only planted it last year and then earlier this year decided I had planted it in the wrong place so decided to move it. At the time I wasn't sure if I had done the right thing, but it seems to like its new place.

The rodgersia has lovely red leaves, but is still quite small. This plant should grow really tall when it gets more established.

Once the weeding and deadheading had been done I could find my way to the pond and using a small metal tea strainer I scooped the pond weed off the surface of the pond, leaving it on the stones at the side so that any little water creatures could get themselves back into the pond easily.

 I put this water soldier in a few months ago.  When I bought it from the garden centre it was quite small and I nearly bought a couple more.  I'm so glad I didn't, it has grown quite big and I have since heard that it can be quite invasive and may not be suitable in a small pond. So I will watch it carefully.

The pond and bog garden looked much better after this tidy up and peering into the water I could see that the tadpoles were still there swimming around. I was even more delighted when I spotted two huge frogs next to the pond and when I moved and disturbed them they both took a big leap into the pond and disappeared. At least I know there is plenty of wildlife in there.