Clearing up the plots

As the days get shorter, we are now spending less time at the allotments. There are still plenty of jobs to be done though, but we tend to go down just for a couple of hours with a specific job to do without having our usual lunch or cups of tea.  Beds are gradually being cleared and then weeded and manured. It's a busy time trying to get them ready for winter.

The peas and courgettes have all been cleared and the climbing french beans will soon be finished with. The cabbage beds are quite full of produce still.  Kale, Brussels sprouts, sprouting broccoli, red cabbage and Calabrese will keep us going through the winter.

The summer cabbage and cauliflowers are now all done with and we have planted some garlic where they were in one of the beds on plot 8. In the roots beds there are still plenty of beetroot and some tiny celeriac. They will probably be left there for a while.

As they start to look messy, we pull up the flowers in the cut flower beds. From a distance they look good but close to we can see that most of them are not good enough to cut now. The dahlias however are still going strong and we are cutting as many as we can before the frosts finish them off and that may not be long off now.

At the weekend we cleared all the tomatoes out of the polytunnel. I was glad to get them out and the place cleaned up because I think there are mice in there. We have found holes in the soil and teeth marks in the tomatoes which had dropped off the plants onto the soil.  It looks very empty now and we are thinking about what we can grow over the winter.  At home I now have tomatoes all over the place, so I need to make something with them.

 

Autumn treasures

When our children were young I always used to take a polythene bag out with us when we went on walks.  This was to collect treasures.  You know the sort of thing, shells and pebbles if we were going to the beach, pine cones, leaves, conkers, etc on country walks. Our children have grown up now and probably outgrown that habit of collecting things. But I don't seem to have, because I still collect things when out walking.  On the other hand maybe it was me all the time who wanted to do the collecting.

I love everything about autumn, the colours, the falling leaves, the spider's webs in the hedges, shiny conkers, walking on crunchy beech nut shells, the seed heads of  summer flowers, berries in the hedgerows. And so I am often to be seen at this time of year, whether it is just strolling back from taking the grandchildren to school, on longer walks, or down at the allotment, clutching a handful of brightly coloured leaves, a bag of conkers, seed heads, rose hips, hawthorne berries.  In fact just about anything which catches my eye and looks interesting.

I press the leaves to preserve them, they can then be used for craft activities with the grandchildren. This year I have decided  to make some Christmas pot pourri so I will have plenty of natural ingredients to hand.  I might spray some of them gold.

They look good also left as they are and simply arranged in a bowl  next to a vase of berried branches for an autumn display. I have a table in the front porch where most of these 'treasures' are displayed. It's like a nature table and it changes with the seasons.

Autumn jobs on the allotment

As we move into Autumn, the work on the plot changes. No more is there a rush to get things in the ground, no more sowing, planting, staking and netting. Now we are harvesting our produce, clearing the ground, tidying up and manuring. Now is the time to start thinking about those jobs we didn't have time to do in the summer, like laying paths, cleaning out the shed, clearing that overgrown patch of ground.

The leaves are starting to fall from the big sycamore trees which overhang both our plots. Soon I will be gathering up the leaves. That's reminded me that I need to sort out the leaf bin. I recently found bindweed growing in it coming from the plant which is growing along the fence between ours and the plot next door. After I have cleared out all the bindweed roots, I will give the bin a turnover to see how well composted it is. I hope to be able to use the leaf mould to cover some of the beds over the winter. Then I will start to add this autumn's leaves to the bin. The compost bins need turning too and the manure bins will be topped up.

This week I have been pruning the gooseberries and blackcurrants. I managed not to get too many scratches from the gooseberries.  Before I tackled the pruning I first pulled up the nasturtiums which had been planted behind them to climb up the fence. They had given a lovely display through the summer but it was time for them to go and they were getting tangled up in the fruit bushes. They were easy to pull up but left a lot of seeds behind, I think we will be seeing them again next year! Having got rid of the nasturtiums and as many seeds as I could get hold of I could then see how well the climbers were doing which we had planted last year to try to cover the wire fence.  The honeysuckle, ivy and clematis are scrambling away along the fence,  the cotoneaster has berries on it which is providing both food for the birds and some welcome autumn colour. Once the fruit bushes had been pruned I weeded the fruit bed. It looks very tidy now.

There is plenty of autumn colour from the apple tree on plot 8. The tree has done really well this year after it's re staking and pruning last year. The cut flower beds are also providing colour to the plots, but they are coming to an end now. Soon we will be pulling them up.

I'm always sad to see summer come to an end, but once we are into autumn I love the colours and changes that the season brings. I love the clearing away of all the dead plants, preparing the beds for their winter sleep and having a good tidy up  It's still a busy time yet as the autumn clear up continues, but soon there will be time to slow down,  time to rest and reflect, time to think ahead and plan for next year.

Rose hips, sloes and a lovely walk

According to those who know these things, this year is a bumper year for foraging. Well there are certainly lots of blackberries about in the hedgerows. I always pick the blackberries from the lane down at the allotments. This year there have been lots and I also found some at the top of plot10b where we haven't cleared yet. I've made a mental note not to cut these down when we eventually start to clear this area.

My freezer is quite full of fruit now from the raspberries, rhubarb and gooseberries grown on the allotments this year, but I managed to find room for a few pounds of blackberries.

I mentioned before on my blog about how I like to make fruit gin and vodka with the blackberries, raspberries, and rhubarb from the plot.  The one thing I've also been wanting to make is sloe gin and as  I haven't found any sloes in the area around the allotments, we had to look elsewhere. So on a lovely sunny afternoon recently Richard and I set off walking in the direction of our local scout camp where I had been told there were plenty of sloes. It was lovely to get out walking on such a beautiful autumn day, it's quite a steep walk, but the views are fantastic. As we walked up the lane we noticed that the hedges had been cut, so if there had been any sloes here there weren't anymore. There were plenty of rose hips though, so I collected those I we walked. I like to dry these for Christmas decorations, so I gathered a bag full, leaving some on the bushes for the birds.

The path went through the scout camp and onto the fields, where we spotted what looked to be sloes in the hedge. We weren't disappointed, we picked nearly 2lbs of them. I was well equipped for foraging with plastic boxes and bags.  My rucksack was a bit heavier as we set off back over the fields.

The sloe gin is now prepared and will be ready for Christmas. I also made damson vodka using damsons from a friend's garden and gooseberry gin with allotment gooseberries, which at the moment looks a bit like frog spawn. I'm sure it will taste good.

Path work on the plots

Last week we were busy doing paths/storage /sitting areas on our two allotments. We were fortunate that some paths were already in place when we took both plots on and also there was a variety of stuff left by previous tenants, paving stones, bricks, rubble, wood, all useful materials. The paths which were already in place determined the layout of the plots. The other paths and seating areas have been roughly laid out by us but no  surface material in place. This meant that weeds were constantly appearing and the areas became muddy and slippy in wet weather.

We decided that now we have got the growing areas up and running we could spend some time sorting out these other areas. We ordered 5 tons of crushed stone from a local tippers. It cost £30 which we thought was very reasonable.  The areas we were planning to cover were the path up to the polytunnel and a seating area on plot 10b and a seating area on plot 8. (all hard working gardeners need somewhere to sit and rest with a brew!). We used some of the wood and bricks to define the edges of paths then covered the ground with membrane or old compost bags before putting the gravel on top

We were really pleased at how far 5 tons of stones went. After covering these areas, we still had loads of gravel left. Richard  came up with a plan to gravel the water butt area on plot8 as it gets very muddy and slippy in wet weather, so that got done too.

That was phase 1 of our  path making plans.  There is still more to be done, but both plots are looking better already.  As well as making the place look much tidier and easier to walk on, the gravel should help to suppress the weeds. I'm looking forward now to the next stage in the developments. In the meantime I'm enjoying taking well earned lunches and cups of tea on our gravelled sitting areas.

A summer of flowers

I've always liked to grow flowers in the garden which are good for cutting, but quite often don't have enough blooms to cut without spoiling the display. My garden also has a lot of shade so some flowers don't do well. So now we have the allotments I decided this year that I would try having a cut flower bed.

We decided to use  two beds, one on each plot which weren't going to be used for growing vegetables this year. I ordered seeds from Higgledy Garden, then I rummaged through my seed box and found a few packets of seeds which had been given free with gardening magazines. Also, tempted by the pictures on seed packets in the garden centre I bought more.

On Plot 8 the prepared bed is  triangular in shape and has a bit of shade from a big sycamore tree late in the day. Here I sowed calendula, ammi majus, escholzia, poppies, cornflower, lavatera and nigella. The bed on plot 10b  is in full sun. Here I grew, echium, larkspur, bupleurum and sweet peas. All of these were annuals and could be sown directly into the ground. I started off some half hardy annuals in the growhouse, some of these were a bit temperamental and had poor germination. I didn't have the time to give them any special attention, plants have to be tough to grow up here in the north. But the ones which did grow were zinnia, cosmos, aster, rudbekia and candytuft. Everything had to be easy to grow because I have two allotments of vegetables to look after too. I also bought some dahlia plants from a plant fair, no labels so I had no idea of colour, height, type. Surprise dahlias!

My enthusiasm for flowers took over and eventually we had more flowers to plant than we knew what to do with. So some got planted amongst the vegetables. The flowers grew and grew and the triangular bed became a tangle of colour. I forgot to support the flowers early on so I stuck in some twiggy sticks which helped a bit. We hadn't expected the sweet peas to do well as they looked a bit weak and weary when we first planted them, but they really took off in the sunny bed. We had put in a cane and netting support for them but they outgrew that and toppled over.  We rescued them by shoving in more canes and hoisting them up. Some of  the flowers planted amongst the vegetables took over a bit causing some shade. The dahlias were amazing, they were planted in a separate bed and I remembered to stake them! The zinnias were stars, standing upright, needing no support and such variety of colour. 

 I made some mistakes--getting carried away and sowing too much, not staking, but generally I was pleased with the results.  Next year though, I will probably not grow as many, I spent a lot of time on the flower growing when I needed to have been doing other things on the allotments.


So here we are in September, the flowers are still in bloom and  I have had a constant supply of cut flowers for the house all through the summer.

Back from the holidays

Whenever I return from holiday, although I always look forward to getting back to the garden and allotment, I'm usually a bit worried as to what sort of state they are going to be in. We've recently returned from two weeks away and I was quite pleased that everything looked quite good on our return. 

Before we went away I had a good weed and cut back in the garden and all that hard work seems to have paid off.  I was expecting to see plants flopping all over the place and lots of dead heading needing to be done.  Instead everything was looking quite perky, some of the plants I had cut back had bounced back to produce more flowers and the borders were full of late summer colour from the rudbekias, heleniums, sedums and phlox.

Down at the allotments the vegetables were growing well. The tomatoes are now ripening daily, the courgettes are growing faster than we can pick them and the french beans are growing fast too.  There are cabbages, cauliflowers, swede, kale, leeks and raspberries all ready for picking. And lots of flowers too.  Everything seems to be ready all at once.

The sweet peas which we had not expected to do well have been flowering for weeks now and had grown so big that they had toppled over.  We hoisted them up,  fixed some more canes in place and tied them all up with thick string. I'm hoping they will sort themselves out, at the moment they look a bit trussed up, but they are still producing flowers so it seems a shame to pull them up yet.

The rest of the allotment just needed a good weed and we started with plot 10b doing all the raised beds and the paths during the week. This weekend Helen and I started weeding plot 8.  We didn't finish but it's all looking much better.