You turn your back for two minutes...

Been a bit quiet on the blog recently. And no it wasn't due to holidays. It was actually due to illness. The last Bank Holiday weekend, when I could have done a lot of work on the plot, I instead spent shivering in bed. Got some sort of a Flu thing that kind of knocked be sideways. So of course I didn't manage to get down the plot.

Needless to say the courgettes ended up a giant size marrows and  a whole load of them to boot. So the only decent thing I could do was to take them into work on Friday to give to my colleagues. Those they didn't take went to the canteen kitchen. I expect courgette and marrow to feature quite heavily in next weeks meals.

The last lot they turned into cakes...

 Meanwhile on the plot, after giving the plants in the greenhouse a much needed drink, there is still things which need doing. The last of the beans need to be picked.

Mind you, we still might get some more out of them if those flowers are anything to go by.

A few weeks back we put our few strawberry plants into long planters. Two main plants at each end, then we ran some of the sucker shoots through the middle. Hopefully those 4 plants should turn into 12.

The leafbeet has started to bolt to seed. But there are still plenty of small sweet leaves in there.

We grabbed a few bits and pieces from the plot. And picked our apple tree clean. Yeah, all three of them.

But those grapes just keep looking better and better.

"Plonk de Plot 30" anybody?

Big Bertha

So the tail end of hurricane Bertha blew through Britain over the past couple of days. Looks like yesterday (or maybe today) the wind and rains pushed my toms over.

Time to get the string out.

Diggin' for gold

The potatoes that were planted in the ground need to be harvested.

I've noticed a marked difference between the potatoes in the ground and those that were planted in the bags. Firstly the ground potatoes are bigger. Secondly, there aren't as many. Thirdly... it's a lot harder work to harvest them. Digging as opposed to simply up-ending the bags.

So which do I prefer? Well I think the bagged spuds did better overall. Perhaps if I had added a greater amount of soil on top it might have helped the size of the spuds. But the only drawback with the bagged spuds was that the leaves suffered from slugs very early on. I'm sure that didn't help much, and probably contributed a good deal to the overall performance.

What will I do next year? Bags again I think. The heavy clay soil of the London allotments means it's actually quite tough to dig. The rains at the start of the year seemed to have turned the deeper parts of the allotment into concrete, despite serious digging.

On another part of the plot though, I think I have a problem with my broad beans. They seem to have developed a blight of some sort.

The beans themselves are fine. But the leaves look terrible. Anyway, simple way to deal with that. Harvest the beans, and chop them down.