A dry and busy weekend

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I have heard at last from the other party involved in the manure delivery and I now know that yes the manure was mine! Well not mine as that would be wrong on so many levels, but was delivered for me. Now I have to pay for it. £25 for a good trailer load isn’t bad. Unfortunately, despite my spending a lot of time on the plot I haven’t seen her.

This week is going nicely and is surprisingly warm and sunny. It’s a bit late for a barbecue summer (although we did give it a go on Saturday afternoon) but it does mean that there is a lot that can be done in the garden and the allotment in the evening and at the weekend.

I cut the grass and the edges at home, and mrs MK did a bit of weeding. All these bits ended up in the compost heap (eventually).

This week on the plot I will admit to being a bit lazy in the evenings, work at the moment is taking it’s toll on me and so all I have really wanted to do is just come home and switch off. Understandable but not very pleasing. And next week I have a little trip down to Exeter (a place I do like), so I won’t have much time next week for anything.

I’ve also got to admit that when it goes into Autumn I start to lose the impetus with the allotment, I generally feel that it’s better to let it do it’s own thing and shut down for winter, just keep off it and leave it to it’s own devices.

As I was mistakenly preparing for the Autumn to arrive and be followed rapidly by the first frosts the weather has annoyingly taken a turn for the better, so this year I have decided to concentrate on some things that could be done while still staying off the allotment if I can. This weekend I’ve turned over the compost heaps so that come the spring I can just apply straight to where it wants to go. I nipped to my local carpet showroom and picked up some off-cuts to cover the heaps with as well. I also managed to nip into the field after the farmer had combined and baled, and collected up some of the left over bits of straw. I got 2 good buckets full, so they are on the compost as well. So now they look like this …

I’ve tidied up in and around the shed. There was some serious rubbish that had accumulated from wind blowing things there, and things I’d put to one side to get rid of later but hadn’t bothered to, so now the area looks a lot better, a bit more organised and tidy. The spare sheets of glass for my greenhouse are put somewhere safe and it’s a lot cleaner now. The shed is so good that all it needs is a comfy chair and a fridge, or at least a kettle.

I also did a bit of hawthorn pruning to keep it away from the shed. I think I could do with an incinerator to burn the few odd bits of wood that I need to get rid of but take ages to compost down. But I have survived this long without one I can’t be bothered to get one to use it once a year or so..

I’ve prepared a large water butt that I acquired when I moved to the plot. It has lots of holes in so I can plant this up with strawberry plants or I might try something radical and see if I can grow flowers in it for next year.

I’ve weeded the fruit area and the strawberry bin and tidied up the windfall apples and the ones that had been attacked by wasps. Because I don’t want to give the wasps the excuse to attack my nice apples I’ve put all the windfalls in a bucket to the side of the strawberries. I got this idea when we were in Scotland where a shop had some watered down jam to attract wasps to one side and away from everyone else. Hopefully the wasps will go for these and leave the rest (well you can hope!).

While weeding the strawberries I found 2 strawberries that were pickable that are growing off runners! I’ve never seen this before, but is a nice benefit. I also put about 30 runners into pots so with a little luck I’ll have the strawberry plants for my strawberry bin.

The raspberries are cropping very nicely and I am getting a good crop every night. For the last few weeks we’ve been eating our fill of raspberries and also frozen a large tub full (probably just over a pound in weight).

I fixed my extension hosepipe to the inside of the door of the shed, this means that it iss out of the way for Winter and ready for use next year.

A lot more of the sweetcorn plants came up and it’s looking very sparse now, but I can’t complain as it’s provided me with well over 80 ears of corn so far. And there are still more on there that may get ripe in the coming weeks.

The plot had a good weed and a hoe just to tidy it up and it now looks a little like this …

In the greenhouse I have removed the cucumber plants but left the tomatoes as they seem in fine fettle and still have a lot of toms on them.

At home most of the tomatoes are about done, so I have had them out and moved the cuttings to the allotment heap along with the old grow bag material. All that’s there now is the chillies and the last 3 tomato plants.

The onions have dried nicely and so they have gone in the sack for general use.

As I write it it doesn’t sound like a lot but it was.

I went out on the Sunday and bought some fleece to cover the late potatoes to protect them from any light frost we might have. I won’t bother putting that on yet, we are hopefully a month or so away from frost.

Sunday afternoon I made jam. A recipe we call ‘Hedgerow Harvest’ that uses equal quantities of apple, blackberry and elderberry. You need to cook the elderberries with a little water to break the fruit down and then strain it to get the seeds out, then add the rest of the fruit and sugar equal to the total quantity of fruit and boil to a setting point. You don’t need lemons as the pectic content is high.

There’s a lot that I want to do on the plot, like growing flowers around the greenhouse and making some better cloches for my cabbages, I may even have a go at growing mushrooms, but that’s really for next year or over winter. I’ll settle down to some planning and plotting …

Have a nice week all, I’m off to Exeter for a cream tea…

• 13 Sep, 2009
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