Allotment - Beginning of May
By balcony
16 comments
Our allotment at the beginning of May is beginning to look like a place where vegetables can be grown instead of an overgrown weed playground that it looked like at the end of March beginning of April!
The old apple tree has been in bloom for the last week or so & we have erected our shed under its branches. Wonder if we will be “inspired” by falling apples?!
The Onions I planted in the middle of March are coming on very nicely – at least they are visible in this blog! In my last blog you needed to have really good eyesight to find them! I planted another row before April ended.
The lettuces have come on really well. I’ll be able to pick one or two before the end of the month!
Once I had cleaned the strawberry bed of the weeds & loosened up the soil as well as giving them a few good soaking during the last week of April, they have made no end of flowers. I hope we see plenty of fruit for all my efforts!
Like the strawberry bed, the Raspberry bed has made an astounding amount of progress since I cleared all the weeds out & managed to loosen up the soil. It was so hard it was like concrete! I also gave them a few good soakings to encourage them to “wake up”. In less than 24 hours they doubled their growth after finishing the loosening of the soil. They certainly appreciated my hard work!
In the meantime Gerry has gone over some parts of the allotment with his old rotovator a couple of times. He has planted at least 10 rows of potatoes in two different places. He has also sown a row of Parsnips. He has also sown a couple of rows of Sunflowers of two different varieties.
I busied myself doing weeding & making paths between beds so that we can easily work on the different beds without treading all over the soil. I want to plant the cucumbers & tomatoes, I’m growing in pots on my balcony at the moment, in a couple of the beds I’ve prepared. Gerry had some very well rotted horse manure at the beginning of the allotment. He said we should scrape it off & use it somewhere so I did, (I got 3 barrow loads of manure/soil!), & dug it into a couple of beds.
I imagine the deeper “soil”, (Gerry says it’s full of rubble underneath), will be rich in nutrients that would have washed out of the manure over the winter. It would be a shame to let them go to waste! I don’t know what we can put there at the moment.
I wish we could get hold of a ton or two of compost so that we could mulch the beds. The soil is quite poor I think. It’s quite thin & stony although it has a fair amount of depth. It needs a lot of compost to give it some “body”.
This draft I saved for several days & now my wish for more compost has come partly true! Gerry had brought some compost to the allotment when I went down on Wednesday. He told me I could use it wherever I liked.
The shed has now been put up. It’s been up for one week as I write this. You will notice in the photos that the roof has a huge overhang – that is because the roof doesn’t belong to this shed – it came from a different one!
This is a view of the allotment as seen from inside the shed on Saturday 15 th May.
I wondered how it would turn out & I’m quite pleased at it!
At the end of the month I’ll add another “instalment”!
LOL!
17 May, 2010
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Comments
well done Balcony,i see you are enjoying it now i said you would.. and its looking great i hope you get lots of produce from it ..do you not have a local.."freecycle"..site on the net ? we do ,its a site on the net where people donate things they dont want, for others to have for free we are waiting for some topsoil but will be a few weeks till we get it..it may be worth a look for you, or type in your area name followed by freecycle..
17 May, 2010
It looks a treat Balcony and things are growing well, will that overhang on your shed make it easier to put a guttering on the shed, its surprising how much water I get off mine......
17 May, 2010
Thank you for your comments - they are very encouraging! :-)
Joanella, I looked Freecycle up months ago when Ian wrote about it in a couple of his blogs. I don't remember anything about it so I'll have to look them up again.
Licslass, thanks for your idea. At the moment we don't have any guttering - nor do we need it, it hasn't rained here in months! We've only had an occasional shower. Nevertheless we will do something about collecting rainwater.
17 May, 2010
It looks really good well done...
17 May, 2010
Hello Balcony ... good for you ... the allotment is looking well on the way to producing a summerful of veg for you! Rhubarb looks lush!
17 May, 2010
I admire all your hard work too, when OH and I took on an allotment the ground was baked hard, it was August, and we couldn't rotovate for fear of churning weed seeds back in ! You'll find the taste of 'home-grown'will be worth all the toil. Enjoyed this blog very much, no longer have the allotment as care for my Mums garden as well as my own, not enough hours in a day !
17 May, 2010
You have made incredible progress at the allotment; it is lovely, and everything growing well. I like the shed standing under the tree - looking forward to the next insdtalment. :-))
17 May, 2010
It's great ! Everything coming along nicely now. I love the shed with it's different roof lol. It looks perfect under the apple tree :o)
18 May, 2010
wonderful progress quite jealous of your efforts.
winter is here for me now and every thing is closing down.
have to buy vegies for the first time since befor xmas
18 May, 2010
Its amazingh how much your allotment has come on, looks as if you are heading for a bumper harvest! well done to you both!
18 May, 2010
Thank you everyone for your comments & I'm glad you enjoy looking round our allotment.
I earthed up Gerry's potatoes yesterday. He himself earthed them up for the first time last Tuesday (11th) just in time to avoid that night's frost! I'm afraid there are many angry/disappointed/frustrated allotmenteers down there as they hadn't covered their potatoes & the tops have been badly frosted. :-( Some even lost their runner beans. :-(
What did you all think of the view from INSIDE the shed of the allotment? Nobody's commented on that!
The onions & lettuces are actually much further along than you see here. I used photos from 10 days ago & in that time, in spite of the very, very cold week we had last week, they have made a lot of progress. I hardly recognize them now from when I took the pictures!
Fluff, the rhubarb have "lost" a lot of their leaves since I took that photo!!! LOL!
18 May, 2010
Yes it's a nice view. You can see right down the allotment, and how everything is coming along.
18 May, 2010
In front of the door you can see Daffodil leaves dying down as well as Tulips. The next row out is full of Gladioli, transferred from further down the allotment before we had decided on where we would put the shed. Then my Amaryllis bulbs (the first 2 dozen bulbs) beyond them you can make out the Raspberries that I cut down to the ground at the beginning of April.
Beyond them there are a couple of empty beds awaiting ... who knows what, we haven't decided just yet! Then, with some difficulty & plenty of imagination, you can see my lettuces! The strawberries & the onions can't be seen but the bushes beyond are Gooseberries & Red/White & Black currants.
I was thinking today it would be a good idea to take a couple of more photos from inside the shed in the coming weeks. But that will only be till the Raspberries stop any vision of anything behind them!
18 May, 2010
You'd see how it changes by doing that :o)
19 May, 2010
That's my reason for taking so many photos of plants & flowers!
19 May, 2010
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I am impressed with all your hard work well done you.
17 May, 2010