Bloody weather

So, a couple of weeks back we had summer-like weather - 20+ temperatures, sunny, then... British weather hits. Last weekend the forecast said this:

Any fruit currently flowering and potatoes may be killed off completely by a hard frost - we didn't have any fleece to cover the apples or strawberries with but did make a cover for the potatoes with some fine net we had planned to use as a windbreak:



Most important question - did this work? On Thursday went up to uncover the spuds and essentially looks about 90% successful:


Leaves at the very edge got frosted but by and large things survived (or looked like they did - time will tell) - the situation with the apple is less good:


Badly frosted flowers but the buds look possibly OK, so we may yet get some fruit, but a long shot. Also the strawberries suffered in the same way but they flower for a long time, so we should still be OK there. We may also have lost our entire blackcurrant crop...

Lessons:

• Covering things is a good idea
• Should put in potatoes later next year 
• If growing apples, later flowering ones are good (we have an early one)

Will come back to this later in the summer to work out the final impact of a couple of cold days...

General update

It has been ages (perhaps a month) since we have had a decent amount of rain. As a result we are going to the allotment every few days to water. This is perhaps not a bad thing: It gives us an opportunity to check on things and do a spot of weeding. 

Currently we have a steady supply of spring cabbage:

This variety is "Offenham".  The garlic are looking splendid:

The same cannot be said of our peas. Something has been nibbling the shoots... I thought it was slugs so we put down some pellets but one of our allotmenteering neighbours reckons it is the pigeons!

From the autumn-sown onions, the Japanese ones are by far the best and are fattening up nicely:

The red onions "Red Baron" and white onions "Snowball" are not looking as strong:

Perhaps these would do better if planted in the spring? Notice the giant cracks appearing in the soil due to the dry weather!

Good for parts...

Like most folks we have a certain amount of junk in the garage - the phrase "good for parts" has been used on more than one occasion as a reason (excuse) for keeping stuff. On this occasion however this has ended well.

Though it is clearly spring here the weather has decided differently and frosts are forecast over the next week - helpful when we have just planted lettuce, so need to cover them in the raised bed. We had an old plastic greenhouse which used to house chilis a couple of years ago, which kind-of perished but I kept the frame. Also kept a roll of essentially "giant" selotape the removals guys left behind. From these were made an ersatz-greenhouse:

This has used the "legs" of the old greenhouse to make the thing wider, then covered with that tape:

Looking like it may actually protect from frost... finally tied it down:

So will hopefully not blow away... already working on Mark II version which I will get on with once the weather stays warm...

Fruit update

This is a nice time of year for fruiting plants - lots of flowers and feels like things are happening:

Apple: Golden Delicious planted just over a year ago - looking happy, have a few flowers so maybe will end up with a couple of fruit. Neighbours have apples in flower at the moment so good chance of pollination. The black currants which were twigs last year are growing very strongly and are completely covered in little flowers:

Since these flower all at once we get the fruit crop all in one go - on the plus side currants are very easy to preserve. The strawberries planted next to these are looking healthy:

Will need to net them soon to avoid the fat birds / no fruit for us combo. Finally back at the house the blueberries are in flower:

These will be in flower for the next few weeks and should keep us in fruit for much of the summer. Our raspberries:

Are an autumn variety so flower much later in the year (and get cut back to nothing in the winter). Finally we are finding potatoes we missed from last years harvest sprouting, as we dig for the coming season:

No idea what variety it is - however hoping that the growing-spuds-in-bags strategy will avoid this for 2017. Current state of cultivation of the south side:

Hopefully will get a bit more digging done over the holiday weekend then get the rotavator up there...

Raised Bed II

We have now filled the raised bed and now planted up with salad (lettuce, parsley, chives, salad onions) and sowed some mizuna:

In the end the bed was largely filled with the soil that was removed before (which had already been improved for lawn) with 3 bags of compost to lighten the texture a little. Will need to make an enviromesh cover for the mizuna as flea beetles love them (though we may also try some companion planting.) Hopefully with the salad growing over the summer we should stop needing to buy any from the supermarket - we shall see....

Slug off!

The Hispi cabbage seedlings that dad gave me a few weeks back are now ready for planting out at the allotment. We always do well with our cabbages (I guess they like clay soil) but slugs are a perennial problem. Cue: new line of defence:

Two slug and snail traps from Home Bargains! The idea is you fill the trap with beer or yeast mixed with water and bury the trap so that the slugs crawl in through the opening in the side (and hopefully don't crawl out again). We decided to go with the yeast and water mix as per the recipe on the slugoff website (I'm not joking!). We made cardboard collars for the cabbages and planted out the 6 biggest ones, keeping 5 in reserve:

Only 6 you might say? Well they all tend to mature at the same time, and there really is only so much cabbage a family of three can eat! As per usual we also netted the plants to provide shade, shelter and to keep the cabbage white butterflies at bay:

In other news we have sown some courgettes and squashes:

Most of the squash seeds are old so I thought we would try a bit of pot luck. Two seeds per pot were sown and if any germinate we will probably select 3 or 4 plants to grow on.

Raised Bed in Garden

When we put in the lawn last year we left about 4m x 2m at the end for a raised bed - with the improvement in the weather we have finally started to make some progress on putting this in now. Unfortunately we had left a some soil in a heap on this space which needed digging out, and I had very foolishly left some turf on top which also needed clearing:

This filled two and half builders bags once it was sufficiently dug out (about 50mm below the level of the paving.) Finishing on the end of day 1:

Next day sleepers arrived, 100x200x2400mm (4"x8"x8' in old money) - they came from a local timber merchant and were rather cumbersome to move around:

We also put in some weed proof membrane to stop anything we missed coming through:

And the first mock up assembly to judge position - ends made from half sleepers:

This was useful for deciding on the placement i.e. directly centred on 4m x 2m space or offset to one side or the other. Also useful for discovering that assembling this and getting it flat, level and correctly aligned was going to be fiddly. Anyhow some time passed and I realised I needed to drive in some piles, get these to the right level and then build the raised bed on top of these. Made 8 (one for each end of each side of the bed) 300mm piles from some spare timber:

Also surveyed the site and put down string and pegs to get the basic positioning of the piles correct:

This was also the first time I have ever used the Pythagorean identity while gardening to confirm that the survey lines were perpendicular:

Anyhow, then installed piles with the aid of my trusty 4lb hammer, confirming that the resulting lines were level then verified that everything was positioned correctly:

Having made sure that the wood sits flat, they were removed and the membrane replaced. To fix the sections of timber to one another I used 16 x 150mm screws:

Key point here: this wood is quite tough so 150mm self tapping screws require a lot of torque to get in, much much more than is achievable through a #3 pozidrive screw:

Succeeded in the end with the aid of a lot of cursing and occasionally mole grips. Should have used bolt-headed, hex-bolt or torx screw. Anyhow, once layer 1 was complete the second was somewhat easier:

Last part of this work was to put the soil back in and put some gravel around (850kg of 20mm Cotswold, delivered from AWBS) - final view:

Will probably top up the soil once it has settled some.