Allotment 21/7/10

Last year I grew potatoes in a bag, I think I may have mentioned it, and my crop wasn’t very good. This year I grow them in the ground so that I could compare the 2 crops.
Ok, this wasn’t super scientific as I should have grown them at the same time, next to each other and treated them the same but it will have to do.
I dug out my Pink Fir Salad spuds on Saturday and it was a joyous experience. I am always a little anxious when harvesting spuds because you can’t see them so I don’t know if they are ready or not but you have to hold your breath and risk it. This I did and look at them,



Ok there is a bit of shadow of me, an odd self portrait if you will, but if you ignore that I think you will agree that it went quite well.
I will now no longer use the bags and will grow them in the ground.

I hate thinning. I don’t like to throw away good seedlings and so I try not to. Today I thinned some of my beetroot but I didn’t throw the thinnings away, oh no, I replanted them all and watered them a lot. If they take then brilliant, if they don’t then I’ve lost nothing. It worked with my carrots.

Allotment 12/4/10

I realise that I haven't had that much to say on the subject of allotmenting recently. This isn't because I'm not doing anything, much seed germination is taking place (except in the carrot and spring onion area), but it is a little dull and I have talked about it at length. Although I have just potted on my courgette seedlings which is coming along nicely.
Today I put my potatoes in. It is traditional to put your spuds in on Good Friday, which is odd as it moves each year, but this year it was throwing it down with rain so I didn't. It is sunny today so off I trotted with my trowel and my nicely chitted seed potatoes. Into the ground they went and not into the bags this year. I am seeing if I get a better yield as they haven't been very good in the bags (I blame the ants) and I'm am using the same varieties as last year, Pink Fir, Valor and Duke of York, in order to compare properly, so let's see what happens.
Picked some lovely purple sprouting broccoli as well today that was particularly nice with our dinner.

Allotment 1/3/10

Quick! The sun is out! Get outside and do stuff!

 As you may have guessed I got to the allotment and, finally, got those seeds in that I wanted to last week. Just to remind you, this is my attempt to grow early salad leaves and radishes under plastic cloches. I think it will work just fine as a few plants that were covered have survived the winter here. Yes I know that my winter wasn’t as bad as yours, I had much less snow, but it was cold so I am happy about the survival. Let’s see if it works.

 That is not all I’ve done today either (I love not working on Mondays) oh no. Off to the allotment shop to get onions sets (because they sell out really fast) and seed potatoes. I also got a little over excited and bought some early peas and some sweet corn seeds (yes I know I am supposed to be using ones that I save last year but I didn’t store them in correctly. I put them in a plastic thingy, so they were mushy when I looked last week, which was less then nice). I popped them in a mini-greenhouse thing as well.

 So now it is not just seed trays in the garden, oh no. On the windowsill of our dining room are 2 egg boxes that contain 3 types of potato that are “chitting”.

Chitting is one of those odd things that we allotment types do but we are not sure why. Basically you pop the seed potatoes somewhere sunny and warm until they start to sprout a bit. The theory is that this gives them a better start in life but there is some debate as to whether this makes the slightest difference. I am agnostic on this point.

  The 3 types of spud that I am going to try and grow are Pink Fir (a salad type), Duke of York (first Early) and Valor (main crop). Last year (and the year before) I tried growing them in bags but that wasn’t super successful so this year they are going in the ground. Let’s see if this works better.