Harvesting!

Huge landmark today, we've managed to harvest the first crop to make a full meal from the plot today!

The lettuce Lee is holding was one of the first batch we sowed, into the greenhouse border in March, and we've both been eyeing it for a while, but decided to wait until we had other edible crops to go with it before we harvested it!

Well, finally the first marketmore cucumber plant has produced its first edible cucumber, which along with the first ripe cherry tomato (from the plastic walk in greenhouse in the yard at home), some spring onions and radish from the plot formed the basis of our first plot produced salad!

As you can see from the piccies of the salad in the boot of my MINI, the radishes are rather large, we've been cropping them for about 5 weeks or so already, and the cucumber is 8" long and about 1 1/2" wide, and very very tasty indeed!

The radish were Juliette, very nice too, and the first single ripe cherry tom was cut in half and we both had some, very juicy, very fresh, very tasty and sweet! We've another approaching ripeness too, cant wait until they are fruiting constantly!

So, huge landmark for us both, and tasty food sampled that we've grown ourselves, huge confidence boost, cant wait until we are cropping regularly!

Hope everyone else thats growing has some early successes too!

Another attempt to get up to date!

As you can see, things are a growing on our Pumpkin Patch! Plot1 is growing nicely, with onions and garlic growing well, the Jerusalem Fartichokes are now at 3' tall, tatties are doing well, brassicas are growing nicely, sweetcorn is about 6" tall, courgettes are at 6 leaf stage, peas and beans are up and growing well, broad beans are flowering and the first pods have set, strawbs are ripening nicely (and getting munched by the slugs before they are fully ready!), goosegogs are swelling up and rasps have set fruit too!

On Plot2 (the Beanery) we've tatties, peas, beans, corn and pumpkins doing well, I'll post a few piccies in the next post to bring us up to date for any that would like to see, along with a few of our first crops!

As you can see here, the overwintering onions and garlic are growing on really well, with the cold snap we have had a few start to go to seed, but we've removed the flowers and will use these as our first batch (as they wont store well)! The spring sown onion sets and garlic are also doing well (they are the crops nearest the fartichokes in front of the pond at the back of this bed), as are the banana shallots and onions from seed! You can also see the first batch of parsnips in this piccy, behind the garlic and beyond the path that divides the beds horizontally! BTW, the discolouration on the beds is a generous application of Potash Mr D applied from the remains of weeds burnt in his new incinerator!

Inbetween the blocks of overwintering onions is our first few batches of carrots, which are doing ok, but they do seem to be suffering a little from the attention of the local wabbits! Something keeps nibbling the green foliage clean off, no evidence of slugs, so we can only assume its wabbits! Mr D would like to do something about it, but hunting on the plot isnt allowed, unfortunately!

In the plot1 greenhouse we've our first cucumber approaching edible size, with another 4 fruit forming too, we've lots of Naga Jolokia Chillies, some at 15cm long and ripe to pick (having some in a curry tonight!), and Big Jim chillies now at 11.5cm long, big enough to put us on the leaderboard of the Chileman Big Jim competition!

In the small plastic greenhouse at home we've much bigger toms than the unheated one on the plot, with our first fruit approaching ripeness! In fact, in pots at home the strawbs are growing well, the 4 heritage tatties we've got growing in containers all seem to be thriving, the cut n come again salad leaf we've been eating for about 3 weeks, and the herbs are doing great, I've been using them for about 3 weeks too, especially the chives and parsley!



This last piccy shows the minipop sweetcorn and pumpkins / squash (ghostrider and butternut) in the bed next to the greenhouse, with the brassicas just visible in the bed beyond (the one covered with netting).

In the bed behind the greenhouse you can see 2 rows of pickling onions and along the pea supports the peas that are growing through nicely!

The only areas we've struggled with are the asparagus bed, which has a total of 3 stalks that have shown, along with a mass of thistles and bindweed, methinks we are going to have to completely dig it out and start again with it, along with the herb bed next to it that also seems very full of thistle and bindweed (although there are 2 lovely foxgloves growing in there that we transplanted into it in the winter)! Other areas of the plot have lots of thistle, bindweed, mares tail and couch growing, along with plenty of annual weeds, but we are just about managing to stay on top of them by pulling up / digging / hoeing as we go along! Methinks we are going to be dealing with the perennial weeds for at least another year or so yet, not what we'd have liked after double digging the whole plot, but at least they are under control (sort of!)

All in all not bad so far for our first years growing! Neither of us can wait to taste the first meal totally produced from on the plot!

Getting up to date again!

Well! What a busy month April was! Unseasonably warm, glorious sunshine and very little rain, unusual for Manchester to say the least! We managed to get some piccies during the last week of April, but even now they are far behind where our crops are now, I'll get some more taken and posted very soon!

We spent most of the month weeding, watering and during the last week of April (when I was on holiday and Mr D was recovering from a hospital stay) planting out a large amount of the plants we'd germinated indoors and that have been growing on the bedroom windowsills for the past 4 to 12 weeks! As you can see in this general view of the plot our overwintering garlic (bottom right of the piccy) is growing really well, as are most of our overwintering onion sets (tho a few had started to go to seed, probably due to the dry conditions!) Also visible here is the brassica netting and its supports (canes with bottles / cans / plastic cups on top), one of the Jerusalem Fartichoke beds (infront of the pond and wooden compost bins behind the garlic) and the pea / bean supports!

This piccy shows our newly planted up greenhouse, 8 tomato plants (of 8 dif varieties), 12 chilli plants (of 11 varieties), 6 pepper plants (3 varieties), 4 aubergines (2 varieties) and a cucumber! The largest of the chilli plants are Naga Jolokias at about 4' tall, and are even now producing ripe chillies at about 4" long! We've used a string suspension system to support the tomato plants, which seem to be doing really well! (Tho the toms we have in the cheap plastic greenhouse in the back yard are already heavy with trusses of small unripe fruit, methinks we will soon be munching on fresh toms! Mmm!)

This piccy shows the inverted pea supports, the idea being that the pods hang to the outside, to allow easy picking of crops, whereas more 'normal' pea supports the pods hang to the inside! Whether it works or not is another thing that we will only know after this first growing season!

Empty pop cans make good cane toppers - to prevent you poking an eye out on them! Its good to reuse and recycle!

Behind the cold frame you can see the raspberries on the fedge, greening up nicely, hopefully a good crop of raspberries for our first year! We've also lots of flowers on the plot1 strawberries, aswell as lots on the hundred or so strawbs we moved out of plot2 and put into 2 hanging baskets and 3 oil drums that we'd cut into planters! (I'll post a piccy of them soon!)

This piccy shows the cucumber ramp, an idea mentioned upon the GYO Grapevine (see the links for a link), the idea being the cucumbers grow up the frame, the fruit hangs inside and the shaded area is good for growing lettuce is, and as it's netted its safer for the lettuces from the pigeons!

You can also see the first of our broad beans in a row along the path inbetween the greenhouse and the pea supports, and in the bottom corner the brassica netting!

This week we have been planting out lots of sweetcorn, pumpkin and squashes, french beans, peas and much more besides!

Further updates to follow soon, along with some more up to date piccies of where we are now, 2 weeks further on in mid May!!

We got a gadzillion Tadpoles!!!!!!

Well, glorious weather today, so after a quick trip to one of the local Garden Centers for some Wolf Tools we'd promised ourselves, we were down the plot for 7 hours, leaving at just gone 7pm! As you can see from the piccies, Plot No1 is looking great, the onions and garlic are going great guns, as are the parsnips and carrots that we planted out the other day, and the radishes in the greenhouse! With any luck we'll soon be eating plot grown foodstuffs!



We took the time to hoe between the 270 onions and 94 garlic plants we've got growing, then made our way to plot 2, in order to continue preparing the beds down there!




Another piccie of Plot No1, from the roadway, it still looks strange to us both having actual soil thats ready for planting, rather than weeds or weed control fabric, but I'm sure we'll soon get used to it!



We started using the new Wolf push/pull Hoe and hand held rotovator, which were so easy to use that we managed to get almost all of the beds rotovated and hoed over, quality tools made it very easy and quick, we are both well impressed with them both!


As you can see, plot no2 is now taking shape, all the marked beds have now been hoed and rotovated, and we've started to dig the trenches for the tatties, hopefully we'll be planting them over the Easter weekend!


Dont know if you can see them, right at the water's edge, but we've got anout a gadzillion tadpoles in our pond, and still more yet to hatch from the remaining spawn! They are very active, the water just seems to be teeming with them! One of our plot neighbours works for the council, and she asked if she could take some for a girl on another plot who's just finished her wildlife pond, so of course we said! Looks like our tadpoles are going to be in 2 places locally now!

I also managed to check up on our hibernating Hedgehog, s/he is still there, and still alive, so it looks like we're going to have a good organic slug control team on hand, tho we've yet to see any slugs this year! (Quickly touching wood as she types!)

Anyhows, thats all for now, hopefully more piccies at the weekend, weather permitting! Thanks for reading!

Saturday 17th March - Update

Woke up to find a grey sky, which cleared by about 10am, just as we were heading to the plot!

Got out of the car to a warm day, with a bit of wind, and sunshine, perfect conditions!

Mr D set about continuing to dig the beds on plot no2, I finished cutting the edges on the other beds on plot no2, then Miss D and I started to uncover the other 2 middle beds that were still covered on plot no1!

As we removed the weed control fabric it was evident that we had missed some of the weed roots when these beds were double dug, so I set to digging the 15 or so dandelions, about a dozen couch and a bit of ground elder out of the 2 beds (one bed is 30' by 9', the other one is 9' by 18', both of which are split down the middle by an 18" path). The roots were very deep, so I ended up turning over both of the beds to about 12" depth, removing anything that was growing, down to a depth of about 2'6", which included a few spuds that were just breaking the surface (on the end Mr D had double dug, and missed them! lol!).

Half way through digging the first of these 2 beds it started raining, and after stopping to take shelter and have a brew it lessened to a fine windborn drizzle, so I decided to press on and finish turning over the 2 beds, as any weeds growing would have had to stay there until next week as it looks like I wont be able to get back to the plot for about 9 days, and Mr D is doing overtime most of the week, so he wont get back until next Sunday!

So, an hour later, with the wind picking up, the temperature dropping, and my fleece soaking through to my skin we finished, picked a bit more rhubarb for another crumble tonight, and came home to warm up! Now going to go and propogate a few more seeds, pot on the toms that are now 14" tall, and generally potter about for a bit before a nice tea, a hot bath and glass of something cold!

Hope everyone elses day was as productive as ours!

Squeeeeeee!!! Planting Time!!!!!!!

Weather was lovely today, light winds, broken cloud and warmish (especially when the sun shone), but as I woke up with a bad back the planned digging on plot No2 wasn't something that would have been wise to attempt, so after moving a few hardy seedlings from home into the greenhouse on plot No1 we decided to finish raking and levelling the bed we double dug last week, then to try a few early sowings of some carrots and parsnips. We planted 2 rows each of 4 varieties in 4' by 4' beds that we've left in our onion set bed (bottom right in this piccy, where we put the overwintering onions and garlic that can be seen growing away nicely!), with any luck we may get an early crop, but it is still very early, so its possible we may loose them! Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained and still lots of time to replant more seeds is they dont take or get caught by frost!

This piccy shows the recycled shelving unit that was to be disposed of from work, now full of leek, banan shallot, carrot and onion seedlings and safe from the binmen in our greenhouse! Makes a good unit for seedlings, nice and strong, black plastic so fairly warm, and plenty of room too, tho perhaps I should remove the halfords shelf edging strips! Lol! Much better than it going into landfill somewhere!


I did manage to get a couple of piccies of Plot No2, highlighting the aspect, the flower bed and the 4 beds we now have raked over, which I will post below!


Unfortunately as can be seen on this piccy it is partially overshadowed from the West by some fairly tall trees, but the south and east aspects are clear, so we should be ok for growing this summer!

Mind you, at least the trees do give some shelter from the prevailing westerly wind, so its a little less windy on plot No2 than it is on No1!





A quick piccy of the other side of the plot, including the flower bed with the 2 blackcurrants, and crocuses, daffodils, bluebells and lots of other flowers that I dont yet know, but I'm sure will learn all about as the growing year progresses!


At home we managed to get a couple of piccies of some of our seedlings, including this one which shows some of our 6" tall tomatoes (Lidl, Gartenperle and Beefsteak) and Audrey Too, a pumpkin we inadvertantly sprouted in November and who's been living in our bedroom ever since!

Well, thats all for today, thanks for reading, watch out for the next installment, when we are hoping to plant more seeds, cabbage, brussel sprouts and cauli to go into the cold frame, onion, leek, shallot, spring onion and pickling onions to go into plot 1 and hopefully some progress to be made in digging over plot 2!

Hurrah! Plot No1 Double digging is done!

Well, 6 months after we started work on Plot No1, we have finally finished the double digging! The plot was badly infested with Bindweed, nettle, dock, russian vine and mares tail, so we faced a fairly large job in removing it, but the veg growing areas and paths have now all been cleared of as much as we can, so we are now ready on Plot No1 for growing!

There's still a bit of work to do on the raised rhubarb / fruit bed at the bottom end of the plot, but thats something I think we are going to have to tackle as and when we can!

Yesterday was gorgeous down the plot, warm, sunny with a few showers, so Lee managed to get the last bit of double digging done, and I was in the greenhouse digging the beds over to remove any weeds that had grown over the winter and prepare for some sowing! Managed to plant a catch crop of 6 lettuce, 30 radish, 5 celery, 8 beetroot, 30 spring onion and 30 quick growing carrots, in the hopes we can harvest these before we need the room for our toms and chillis!

Today it is rather wet, so we wont be down the plot, but tomorrow looks nice, so Lee is going to go and make a start on digging the 10 beds that we've still to do on Plot No2.

Other than that we still need to sort out the compost / seating area near the pond (that was damaged in the gales) and sort out the compost bins we inherited on plot no2 that are rotten. Hopefully the pallets Lee salvaged from work will come in handy for this!

At home we've about 15 toms growing away nicely, along with about 12 chillis and a few other bits n bobs, plus the pumpkin that we planted in November is now flowering and producing fruit! Cant wait for the weather to improve enough that we can start to plant out!

Getting Up To Date!

There's a post in the GYO Grapevine forum that covers most of the work we did in getting our plot up to scratch, from asking advice before we got the plot, to pictures of before and after, so rather than duplicate the info here, I'll just pop up a link!

Newbie Seeking Advice / Opinions / Help - Possibility of a new allotment!

There's also another thread all about our Freecycled Greenhouse, from getting to erecting, which can also be found here

Possibility of a Free Greenhouse!

And lastly we've put in a 'fedge', (a food bearing hedge), along one side of our plot, consisting of supports with 2 varieties of Raspberry and some Brambles, there's also a Grapevine thread about it, which can be found here

Raspberry Care and Advice!

We cut back the autumn fruiting canes last week, so its looking a bit bare at the moment, but the rasps are sprouting, so it shouldnt be long until it's back to its former glory!

So, that should get us fairly well up to date with where we are now on the Pumpkin Patch!

Onto our newer News then!

(drumroll please!)

We've taken on a second plot! With our enthusiasm for buying seeds we've taken the plunge and taken on a half plot which is about 30m from our first one! No2 Plot is orientated East / West, and is in a much better condition than was our Pumpkin Patch, so it shouldnt be too difficult to get it into cultivation! Our plans include 3 beds of potatoes (Desiree, Charlotte, Pentland Javelin and Cara), a big pumpkin / squash bed, the 6' by 4' walk in plastic greenhouse is going down there, a 3 sisters bed (sweetcorn with borlotti beans and butternut squash), a small bed of strawberries (they are already there, just need to be carefully moved), a bed of turnips and swedes, a couple of brassica beds, some beans and pea beds and anything else that we really cant fit in plot No1!


This was how it looked when we first saw it, fairly clear and the soil is in not bad condition, having been manured last year, we've also had a chance to talk with the previous plotholders (they've another lovely plot next door but one), so know whats been grown in it recently, so crop rotation shouldnt be too much of a problem!



We've taken the time to mark out the beds, which can be seen in the second picture (the string marks them out) and which are 14'4" long and 5' wide, with paths of 18" between them, and there shopuld be about 11 of them. They are North / South orientated, so should make the most of the light! The current plan is to just remove the weeds and turn them over, as they are not badly weeded or infested, then to get our crops growing, ideally long term we want to put some edging in, but time and resources will have to be found to do this later! Once we do get them edged, then we will be covering the paths with weed control fabric and barking them up with chippings, but for the time being I have a feeling we are just going to mulch with cardboard!

More info and updates to follow as we get further along with it!

Other news, we've almost finished the double digging on plot No1, there's only about 3 meters of one 3 meter bed left to do (the bit next to the pond), and then all the veg areas of No1 plot have been double dug! Unfortunately the plot was badly infested with bindweed, so its been a long and laborious job removing as much of the weed roots as we can, but we are finally seeing the end draw near!

The autumn planted onion sets and garlic all seem to be doing very well, as are the spring sewn onion sets and garlic that we put in a week or so ago and the rhubarb is sprouting nicely! We put in some Jerusalem Artichokes from one of the grapes a few days ago, so will wait and see what comes from them, neither of us can wait to get things growing, but we are all too aware that a single frost can put paid to anything we plant early, so will bide our time for a while yet!

Inside the greenhouse (newly reglazed, as we lost 15 panes of glass in the gales - fortunately it wasnt as bad as some on the plot who lost greenhouses and sheds) we've found that some of the saved leek seeds that we stored in there must have escaped, cos we've about 50 leeks sprouting from one of the borders, I think we'll leave them be for a while and try transplanting them when we need the greenhouse space! We've shared the saved leek seeds with about 25 folk from the Grapevine, so it should be interesting to see how folks get on with them!

Inside the house we've been busy propogating seeds, and now have about 11 tomato plants and about 15 chillis potted up, along with some banana shallot seeds (courtesy of a fellow Grapevine member) and some cabbage and cauli, all of which are in the loft conversion, along with the chitting spuds!

Lee spotted some large plastic barrels at work, which were going into the bin, so he scrounged 4 of them to use as rainwater barrels, all we need to do now is rig them up to the greenhouse and we'll be collecting! I also noticed a plastic display unit at work that was going in the bin, so have recycled that for seedlings in the greenhouse!

We also managed to get 4 big 55l fun tubs from Makros recently, which are going to be used for our spud trials, using 4 heritage varieties of spud that we got from another Grapevine member!

Finally, we've a second 'proper' greenhouse coming, which is going to go into the back yard, this is another freebie, will need a little bit of glass, but cant complain for free! Its 6' by 4', and will mainly be used for seedlings, then some toms and melon in the summer, and possibly some xmas spuds in a tub!


Wildlife News!

We've a hedgehog hibernating on our plot! Lee found him when trying to get to grips with the brambles and bindweed at the top of the plot in November, so we halted work in that area to let him / her have a nice quiet sleep! I dont know if you can see him / her in the piccy, but its under the straw curled up nice n warm!

With the weather warming up we've now got over 30 frogs and toads in our pond, they are mating like mad, loads of frog / toad spawn and its nice to dig to the sounds of the frog chorus! Que video of Paul McCartney's hit of the Frog Chorus!

The first toad / frog piccy is to show one on its own, the second shows the spawn in the center, along with a very large number of the ickle amphibians!

The last piccy shows some more of the little cutties!

Must say we are both happy to have the wildlife on our plot, as both toads / frogs and hedgehogs help to control the slugs and snails, so an organic way of doing it is always best in our opinion!

We've also lots of bird on the plot, ranging from a couple of Robin's, whose territorial boundary seems to be located within the allotments, blackbirds (who all seem to be doing mating dances at the moment), blue and great tits (no, not mine!), magpies, wood pidgeons and others that I dont yet know!

There's also a fox who pays regular visits to the plot, you often see his tracks on any newly raked areas, but fortunately he / she isnt using the area as a toilet!

In the woods neighbouring the allotments are also squirrels and fieldmice, being on the edge of the countryside means we are always going to have a mice problem, but no-one on the site seems to think that they are that much of a problem, so we'll have to see how we get on with them!

So, thats all for now, more piccies to follow as we get them! Thanks for reading!

The story so far!

Welcome to our online Blog! We are Lee and Suzanne, a married couple from Partington in Manchester, and this is the Blog of our allotment, named The Dobby's Pumpkin Patch!

Lee has always fancied growing his own veg, and after we reached a point where we had finished sorting out our home (we bought our house as a repossession, so had to spend a lot of time fixing it up to get it to a reasonable standard) we took the decision to do something about it! Lee joined an online Gardening Forum, the Grapevine, (the online forum of the Grow Your Own magazine), with the user name of Dobby (we are both Harry Potter fans!), I joined soon after (as Mrs Dobby), and not long after that we found our first allotment! It is on the Moss View Plot in Partington, and I think we both knew that we had to name it after our alias's on the Grapevine, so we called it the Dobby's Pumpkin Patch!


When we took it over at the beginning of September it hadnt been worked for over 12 months, so was looking a tad overgrown (as you can see from the pictures), so we faced quite a job in removing the weeds and trying to get rid of their roots, especially as we wanted to stay as organic as possible and not use any chemicals!

Fortunately underneath all the weeds the soil was in good condition and there was some useable structure there too, making it a much easier task to get the plot cleared, which we did with a slash and burn tactic, and then spent a few months double digging the plot to remove as many weed roots as we could!