It was a busy (and warm!) day at the allotment today, but we needed to do a lot of planting out and protecting crops from birds and slugs, but the allotment is taking shape. It’s great to see plants starting to fruit, areas clearly defined and the greenhouses empty of young plants!

Brassicas

Our brassicas are now covered with a fine netting that hopefully will stop the cabbage white butterflies from having a feast.

Potatoes

We grow our potatoes in these 30L pots, its so simple and you don’t end up having to dig deep into the ground to harvest them. This year we’re growing Pink Fir Apple and Charlotte, but we’re also trying to “earth up” the Pink Fir Apple as they grow by adding more compost to the pot once they reach a certain height.

Beans

When the beans go in I really start to feel that we are getting into the season, we’ve built these supports to let the beans climb, but their shape also helps us with harvesting as the beans hang down and are easy to pick!

We also grow broad beans at the plot, they are a great crop to grow as they are easy to grow and taste great. If only the blackfly would leave them alone! We’ve grown them in batches, the idea being that the larger plants will crop earlier and the smaller plants will crop later, giving us a longer harvest.

Greenhouse

It’s quite full in the greenhouse at the moment with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, brassicas and chillies all growing well. A lot of this will move out into the main plot in due course but for now they are safe from the elements and pests.

Along with tomatoes in the greenhouse, these ones have already been planted out as they were getting too big for the pots.

Raised beds

This is something new we are trying this year, it’s called the “no dig” method and the idea is that you don’t dig the soil (surprising, I know). We laid cardboard down on the existing soil to supress weeds and then added an initial batch of compost on top. We then plant directly into the compost. It’s early days but so far it seems to be working well for the onions and garlic.

Trees

I have taken a few photos of the trees, but they are doing well. We have a fig tree, an apple tree and two pear trees. Whilst walking around the plot, I saw the start of apples!

Next time

I think that’s about it for today in another blog post, I’ll try to show some of the wildlife that we see at the plot and also draw the top-down layout of the plot, we’ll see.