A Sunny Day in May

As the title suggests today was a very sunny May day. A little too hot for my liking but I am sure that the plants will be loving all the sun now they have had a good water. 

Lets start with the amassing work Bill has managed to do on the new plot. I was really shocked when I got down to the plot to see it so cleared. His new job lets him have a little more time in the evenings and he has been putting it to very good use. Most of the plot has had its brambles and grass removed. 

 Very impressed.

Overall the allotment is looking really good, I am so proud of how well its going. It still impresses me how much it has changed in the time we have had it. In just over a year we have turned a scruffy patch of grass into a productive veg plot. 

The salad bed is filling up with lots yummy things. We have headed lettuce, leeks, loose leaf lettuce, beetroot, shallots, and spinach. And as you can see they are all coming along nicely. 

The brassica bed is also looking wonderful. We have sprouts that went in today with cabbages, cauliflower, broccalli and some kohl rabi.

The big ones in the middle are cabbage and they look wonderful. And below is the freshly planted sprouts. 

And this is one of the kohl rabi, they look so strange and kool, I cant wait to see what they taste like. 

Can you guess what this is?:

Now lets talk fruit, we have rhubarb and strawberries already in, and today we added blackcurrants and gooseberries. 

We had space left that will next year be filed with more fruit plants but this year we filled it with onions. Don't want space going to waste, plus crops in the ground will always be better than bare earth.

 We planted out the broccoletto, so as they are a rather fast crop we will get to try them soon. Another something new to try, which is one of the big things I love about having an allotment. 

The above is the view from under the bean poles, one of my favourite places atm. We planted some marigolds under them today. Back in the potting shed we also planted some more yellow beans because the ones we planted out are looking quite unwell, see the ones closest to us. 

We also planted some more salad leaves and beetroot, potted on the okra and cucamelons, and back at mine I planted out some borage.

What do you think?

Another over due update

I so need to get better at writing updates. We have been super busy. 

Last time I updated the plot looked like this:

and now it looks like this:

So as you can see we have got a lot done. We now have plants in the ground growing. But more important than that, is before the plants went in we rotavated all the beds. We always said that before we got seriously planting that we wanted the ground fully prepared and so hiring a some heavy machinery made it so much faster, and this means that this year we will be getting a good haul of crops. 

Here is some pics of our rotivating day. 

 Billy rotivating

One of the beds before 

And the same bed after, see how much better it is :D 

And here is the whole plot once we finished. 

And then came the hilarity of getting a rather large rotivator into a fiesta and then out again at the other end. 

Bill was rather chuffed with this.

We also, as mentioned before, planted lots of seeds in the potting shed. Some of the seedlings have been planed out onto the plot and more is waiting for slightly warmer weather. But if we are talking about plants check some of these out:

 Broccoli? I think

 A radish, all ready to go to the kitchen.

Check out the root system on these beans. 

But there is more! We now have another plot! 

As you can see Billy is very excited. 

We plan to treat this plot much like we did the first, in that this first year we are going to focus on preparing the ground and not really planting much. That said we have set our selves some planting targets. We want to plant some potatoes in September for a harvest of xmas new potatoes. We also want to plant some broad beans in early November. 

Both of these give us a target of when we want the first beds dig, but also the crops should help break up the soil ready for next year when we will be planting on that plot in earnest. 

The other thing I have been doing is planing, lots of planning. I now have a set of spread sheets, one for each bed. We have been using them to know when to sow stuff. I am also converting it into a month by month calendar to keep us on track. 

But that is enough of an update, I will try my best to not leave it so long next time. 

Here is a few more pictures of what we have done in no particular order: