Allotment Update!

I realised that I haven't mentioned how things are getting on at our allotment for a little while, so here's a little update for you...

• the spuds are in as per this post and they're growing nicely. We earthed them up and now they're doing wonderfully. The rows are not terribly straight, and they're a bit weedy but who wants a straight spud?!!!

• our strawberry plants are doing fantastically. Last year we had loads, but sadly after our first batch was picked a pesky bird got in under the netting and scoffed the remainder. This year we've rigged up a pretty impressive netting system, looks like (fingers crossed) we'll have plenty of fruit this year, there are lots of strawberries under there, but at the moment not many that are the right colour.

• we've planted lots of seeds, carrots, parsnip and spring onion, plus lots of lettuce dotted around and even some pumpkin. There are some sweetcorn plants in and at the moment they look like they're doing well, but we don't have great history with sweetcorn, so I'm not holding my breath!

• we've moved a lot of our raspberry plants this year, they seem to be happy in their new homes, but I'm not convinced they'll fruit this year. We have some established raspberry plants, but they're autumn fruit, dark and delicious so they're while off!!

• the herb bed looks amazing!! Fresh and green and beautiful! I'm going to be making lots of use if the chives, sorrel, purple sage, mint and tarragon. Nothing beats fresh herbs!

• the gooseberry bushes have fruit! I love gooseberries, crumbles, pies, fools, yes please!! Plus if the gooseberries are ready then it means that it's time to pick elderflowers too (they fruit and flower at the same time) which means yay! More homemade elderflower cordial!! In fact I've already made ours for the year, expect a recipe coming this way very soon!

Do tell me how your gardens are getting on? Is anyone else growing the same things as we are? 

Mostly.....#5

I've been a busy little bee of late! And I haven't done a little round up post for ages, so here goes....

As I may have mentioned, and as you may have gathered my favourite friend in the whole world got married on Friday. We had rubbish weather, but a lovely day!! She looked beautiful. And for as long as I live I will never forget how funny it is when a bride in a big dress needs a wee!!! I think, personally, what I will remember the most from that day is how fabulously Biscuit behaved. She looked adorable and I was just so, so, proud of her.

Proud Mama

On Saturday it was our Village's Open Garden weekend. Essentially people with really very lovely gardens open them up for other villagers to have a nosey. I often feel a little weird about this and traipsing around strangers gardens can seem a little intimate, but it is very interesting! I helped my Dad out for about half an hour sitting on the gate of a beautiful garden, taking pennies and asking questions. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. 

My Mum goes to the local Art Group and they had an exhibition in the church of their paintings.  Because Biscuit goes along with Mum during the school holidays I suggested that she paint something for the exhibition.  She was thrilled.  She painted a little picture of a garden, with some birds, flowers and butterflies.  In the middle she drew a jail where the naughty babies go.  No comment!!!  Anyway, because she did so well, my Mum bought her a "prize" for entering.  She gave her a little pink bracelet and Biscuit was pleased as punch.  She wore it all day and told everyone we bumped into that she'd won First Prize!  It was the only "prize" but I'm not telling her that!

There was also a great Farmers Market taking place on our Common to coincide with Open Gardens. It would have been rude not to take a look.... We bought Homemade Damson Chutney, bunches of wild garlic, a bag of local onions and a big bunch of rhubarb. Lovely!! 

On Sunday we went up to the allotment, planted some carrot, parsnip and spring onion seeds. We earthed up our potatoes (they have to be buried to stop them going green) and did a spot of tidying. All very productive!

After that we went for a lovely walk up the hill behind our house. We allowed Biscuit a well earned trip to the swings on our way home which she enjoyed. She usually bumps into a little chum and has a chat. She's a sociable creature.

We used some of the wild garlic to slow roast with some lamb shoulder. Our whole house smelt amazing! Then we used our rhubarb to make a crumble, a proper Sunday!! 

On Monday I had to work in the morning, some overtime, which is always handy. As I work part time, working on a Bank Holiday doesn't phase me, though I can understand why those who work full time treasure those days off. I'm happy to help out. It was busy and exciting. 

When I got home we had bacon sandwiches. We pottered around for a while then all went for another walk around a local nature reserve. The weather over the weekend had been such a contrast to Friday's, it seemed silly not to make the most of it! We saw Dragonflies, butterflies and some horses out on a hack.

When we returned home Mr Husband watched the football and the rest of us enjoyed tea and blueberry pancakes in the garden with Mum, Dad and my brother. 

I've had a really lovely long weekend, spent enjoying friends and family. I hope you've had a great time too. 

Love, love

Spud Watch!

Hello to you!

Do you remember the seed potatoes?  The long forgotten seed potatoes from days of yore?  Well my friends, something happened.  The weather was sodding terrible!  Frost, snow, frost, snow, sleet in April, ugh!  Not potato weather that's for sure.  Monty Don made us promise, PROMISE not to put our spuds into the ground until the weather had taken a turn for the better, so unwilling to ignore the great Sir Monty of Don that's exactly what we did.  Wait.  We waited until the seed potatoes had become so flippin sprouty I started to get worried that we'd be digging spuds up in the house.  Eventually I cracked and decided that they had to go in the ground, frost or no frost.  Thankfully the weather lately has taken a little bit of a turn for the better, but in an ideal world we'd be past the point of ground frost and I'm not sure we're quite there yet in Blighty, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

So here's how it worked:

Carefully load seed potatoes into the bottom of "the big buggy" and push them up to the allotment.  Refuse to let anyone else push the buggy in case the tubers get snapped off rendering them useless.

Volunteer to be on "Baby Watch" whilst Mr Husband and Biscuit locate tools and generally get prepared.  "Baby Watch" is also a good excuse to take lots of photographs.  Apparently this can get quite annoying.  Bah!  I blog, therefore I photograph.  Live with it.

Prepare the ground ready for the seed potatoes to go in.  Essentially dig lots of long troughs which are not easy to photograph.  Like this:

Allow small children to assist.  They love it.  And they're handy.... Speaking of hands, notice Wiggles' little pink fist getting in on the act in the bottom left hand corner there....

Instruct husband to dig.  Biscuit helpfully points out where.....

More of the pointing.  Remove seed potatoes from beneath the buggy ready to go in the ground....

Carefully place the seed potatoes, rose end up, into the freshly dug troughs.  Be careful with those tubers!

THOSE TUBERS:

Insist small child does ALL the hard work.  How else will they learn?  

Space them out according to the growing instructions, this will vary a little depending on the variety.  Ooooh look, there's my shadow!!!

Wiggles gets involved.  Although she was easy confused by a picture of a potato compared to an actual potato...we've all been there....

Cover up the seed potatoes with soil; gently!  And don't stomp them down.  

Give the (now empty) egg boxes to mucky muddy little Wiggles to play with.  She spent ages enjoying these.  I have no idea why we buy her brightly coloured bits of musical plastic when old cardboard will do....

Mark out the potatoes so you know what is where.  This means you'll quickly and easily be able to tell which spuds you'll get to harvest first.

Plus they look fairly impressive, like little garden-y sailing boats.....

And then wait!  Wait for those cheeky spuds to start sprouting.......

Edge of your seats, right? 

Allotment jobs for March...

A before photograph - not looking too hot, right?

What we call The Raspberry End - still in need of a little love!

We spent two lovely afternoons at our allotment this weekend giving things a good sorting.  March is usually a time for having a good tidy around, turning over the ground ready for new crops to go in, pruning, mending and making sure everything is looking good.

You can also sow some vegetables as early as March.  These include:

• Beetroot
• Broad Beans
• Early peas
• Brussels Sprouts
• Leeks
• Lettuce
• Radish
• Parsnips

This weekend we put our Broad Beans in, but so far I think that's pretty much it.  We've been concentrating on moving our fruit bushes about a bit so that we have specific (fairly low maintenance) beds which consist of just one thing.  We now have a very appealing looking gooseberry bed and a bed of blackcurrant bushes with a little added asparagus.

Let the digging commence!

It's good soil....

Some crops need to be rotated each year as they take a lot out of the soil.  Mostly we try to avoid planting anything that requires too much crop rotation, although the big exception to this is potatoes.  We have to have a little get together to discuss where we're going to house the potatoes each year as they have to be moved about a lot.  We have an allotment book so we can jot down what has gone where every year.  It's incredibly handy, as I can never remember once we've dug everything up

Lots of digging and marking out going on.  Some very neat paths, I thank you.

I got busy with the strimmer and cut back some of the grass on the pathways and around the edges of our plot so that's all looking pretty good. I did a little digging, but the men - grrr - did the majority.  Though on the Sunday afternoon Mr Husband Sir was very preoccupied by a football match that didn't go his way, so he spent a fair bit of his time checking his phone and rolling his eyes!

Pesky football...

Marking out ready for the Broad Beans...

Time for a break...

That Baby and Woolly ran around and entertained themselves with talk of creating mud hotels and mud restaurants.  This Baby had a little sleep in her buggy and then joined us on a picnic rug with a few of her toys.   It's lovely to see them getting involved, enjoying the fresh air and getting some colour in their cheeks.   It's not so easy to dig and entertain a small child, but we seemed to do ok.  Some friends popped up whilst we were all there for a bit and said hi, we shared a beer, a flask of tea and a left over bottle of wine.  I swear the other allotment holders think we're party animals!  I suppose we are in comparison, a lot of them are getting on a little!  They're lovely folk though, always happy to give us tips or leftover plants to put in.  We're very lucky.

This Baby plays in her muddy little marshmallow suit...

I was there too!

 All in all I'm pleased, we've made a lot of progress and things are starting to look ready for getting busy when it's time to plant out.

Potatoes in next!  I love our plot.

Looking pretty tidy!  Oooh my strimmer :)

Grow Your Own - Chit Watch....

Remember the seed potatoes?  Way back at the beginning of February?  Well!  If they've been out in the sunshine (ha!) they should now look something a little like this:

Yep, all ugly and sprouty looking.  Those black, slightly fuzzy tubers peaking out the sides mean that they're ready to go in the ground!  This also means that the easy part is over and I need to get my spade out.  Now, Mother Nature if you're reading this, do you think you could arrange for a spot of pleasant weather so I can actually make a dent in the ground?  We've got A LOT of digging to do you see.  That'd be terribly obliging of you, many thanks....

Stay tuned folks...



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Grow Your Own Potatoes - Phase One- Get Chitting!

Hello! Here begins the first in my little series of grow your own...we're going to start with potatoes. There is NOTHING like a home grown potato, they really are amazing. So much tastier than a sweaty plastic bag clad shop spud that only lasts for a week. One of the best things about them is that you don't need a lot of space to grow them, you can do it in a large pot, or ideally an old bin!

Long before you get to the planting stage you've got done decisions to make! First of all you need to think about when you would like to feast on your tatties. Potatoes fall into three groups:

• new potaotes (sometimes called earlies)

• second earlies

• main crops

Their names indicate when they will be ready to harvest and how long they need to be in the ground.

I tend to buy some new potatoes and then quite a lot of main crop potatoes as these last well and are quite versatile.  I get bored of new potatoes quickly as I find I can only do a limited amount of things with them,  perhaps I'm just not very imaginative!

Once you've decided which type of potatoes you fancy you need to get yourself to a garden centre (or in my case a local branch of Wilkinson's) and buy yourself some seed potatoes.

Seed potato is a slightly contradictory term, because what you're buying are actually tubers and not seeds. Seed potatoes are potato tubers that have been specially grown in areas that are not affected by garden pests, so they should produce you a lovely big crop of spuds when the time comes.  Generally speaking they look like small wizened new potatoes, they don't look terribly appetising and it would be hard to confuse them with a potato that you eat.

Once you've decided when you would like your spuds to crop, you then need to select a variety of potato.  If you have a favourite type when you do your shopping, by all means seek it out to grown your own.  I tend to choose a different type of potato every year, just for a change.  Some I have found work better than others, but that can be because of soil, or the type of summer we're having, rather than just a dodgy type.  This year I chose:

I bought three bags of the Roosters and just one bag of new.  You need to think about where you're going to grow your spuds and how much space you have, there is no point buying six bags of maincrop potatoes (which are around the longest) if you only have a single bin to grow them in.  Make sure that you keep your packaging as it will contain some important information about when to plant out the variety that you've chosen, how deep to plant them, and how far apart.

If you choose more than one variety of potato, make sure you keep them separate and label them so you know which are which.  Nobody wants a potato commune!

Once done that you need to get chitting!  That's right, you heard me, chitting!  Chit like you've never, erm, chat, before!

Chitting means encouraging growth.  To chit our spuds we take our seed potatoes out of their bags, put them in a suitable tray (egg boxes are excellent, but I didn't have enough) and into the sunshine to sprout.

Each seed potato has a rose end where the majority of the eyes are.  The other end of the potato is smoother with no eyes.  The, erm, blind end?  That's not a technical term.  Don't say it in a garden centre.  Like the time I say muddy stuff when I meant compost and got LOOKS.

Rose end at the top...

Pop your spuds into their box, or onto their tray with the rose end facing upwards.  You can see from the next picture why egg boxes are useful - less of a jumble.  But it doesn't matter in the long run.  They should look a little something like this:

Note funny little elf decoration I made a while ago guarding the spuds.....

Place them in a bright, cool and frost free spot and let them do their thing....we want them to grow slightly revolting looking dark sprouting tubers.  We chit to encourage growth, so we're giving our tatties a head start before we plant them.  You can see from my spuds above that some of them have already begun to sprout - huzzah!

Once they've sprouted quite considerable tubers, somewhere around mid March it'll be time to plant them out which is phase two.....phase three is SPUD HEAVEN!

You're on the edge of your seats right?

The story of our allotment

I wanted to write a post about our little allotment, I'm not sure if I've mentioned on here before.

We are very lucky to share a blessed little plot of land with our friends Impressive E, Impressive D and their wonderful little boy Woolly (who also happens to be That Baby's favourite friend) it's a short walk away from each of our houses. It's beautiful there, surrounded by trees and close to the river.  We have a little shed with garden themed curtains which houses our tools.

This year will be our fourth year of allotmenting.  We were complete novices when we started out and in many ways we still are.  We're very lucky that either side of our plot there are some seasoned pros who are happy to point us in the right direction and give us a few tips.

The first year we were given the allotment it was just a patch of scrub land.  I remember that year clearly.  That Baby was knee high to a grass hopper but desperate to help out as we spent an incredibly long hot May weekend digging and digging and digging.  It was back breaking.  Cue filthy feet, filthy baths and aching muscles all round.  But we turned that patch of nothing into a place where things grow. And it made us bloody proud! Stupidly we didn't take any photographs of our plot before only during and after it's renovation.

I love this picture!  It shows Mr Husband Sir and I digging like crazy and my Dad sitting in the middle and watching!  That little house to the left at the back was our only shelter at the time and and the only place where we could store tools, wheelbarrows and things.  It was a wonderful little wendy house that belonged to Woolly and he was very kind to let us keep it there.  It became the model for our future shed!  You might have noticed that we decided not to dig traditional style straight plots. We thought we'd go rogue and plumped for a sunshine themed arrangement for our beds.  The logic behind it was that we had two small people to try and keep on the paths and not the vegetables, so we should try and have a lot of paths for them to run around on.  And I have to say it worked.  To an extent.

The sunshine pattern progresses...

Mucky feet mean a good day's work.

Yes I used to dig in ballet shoes,  I actually wore these on our wedding day.  They were ruined, but what does it really matter? I have proper welly shoes now.

So after a LOT of hard work, this is what we achieved:

Neatly dug over and planted

You can still see the string marking the boundary line...

In that first year we grew pretty much anything we could.  We were late starting that year, by May many things should already have been in the ground so we planted what we thought would survive and were jolly happy with our efforts.

A year or so later we added the shed.  That was a great day, we made a bit of an outing of it, had a bbq lunch up there, drank some wine, it was wonderful fun.  We were pretty useless with the actual shed construction.  Impressive E and Impressive D had to do pretty much all of it (hence they are impressive and we are not) but they were very gracious.

Impressive D doing his stuff...

They added a jovial wee wee hole for boys, tsk!  That IS Mr Husband Sir's finger.  No really, it is.

The finished shed, though it now has curtains of course.

Last year we were offered an allotment extension and doubled our ground space. We didn't really manage to dig it over properly last year as I was pregnant and Impressive D was away a lot and unable to help.  But lordy this year, we have great plans!  Although Impressive E is pregnant this year (due in June - I am beyond excited) we plan to take that allotment to task and get it back on track.  We let things slide over winter and we needs to do some serious sorting.  When I manage to get up there with my camera I will take some photographs so you can see how wild it's become!

This is what it's all about, our first basket of home grown goodies,  That Baby was particularly impressed at the prospect of a near endless supply of vegetables!

So, that's it, the tale so far!  I'm going to start a small series of grow your own themed posts with a few things that we've learnt, though we are by no means experts.  They will begin shortly with the delights of the home-grown potato.  You don't even need a plot of land!

Love,