Grow to Eat #1

This is my first Grow to Eat Link-up post. I decided to make this a Monday one because we often go to the allotment at the weekend and a Monday evening might be a good chance to sort through the weekend gardening.

Things are getting serious down at the allotment. About 10 days ago I popped over there on my own and I managed to plant most of my seedlings. There are still a few to go in, but the majority of them are in the ground. It was ideal, really. I went and planted everything and only watered them in a little bit because I didn't have time, but that night it started to rain and it rained pretty much all day the following day - not a hard rain but a gentle drizzle, ideal to water the seedlings in nicely without damaging them.

The structural stuff is also coming along - the shed is slowly taking shape. After blowing over a few times over the winter D quickly finished the front panel because that is the side that faces the wind the most and because it was partially open it acted like a sail and simply pushed the whole structure over.

D also managed to get a water-butt set up to collect rain water off the shed roof, so we won't have to bring water with us in containers this summer. This was really high on the list, because the site has no running water and we could just never transport enough to water the plants adequately. Since rain isn't exactly a rarity around here the water that get get off the shed roof should sort this problem and in fact, the rain we've had these past two weeks has been enough to almost fill the water butt up to the top!

For the past few months I've also been contemplating how to extend our existing beds without creating a massive headache for myself. When I started planning for this year I realised that in order to really plant everything that I want to I will have to have more beds than we currently have. D was not enthused - he is of the opinion that we should try to come to terms with what we have instead of adding more and I can kind of see where he is coming from. Then there is are the borders for the beds. I quite like the way the wooden borders give the beds a clear definition and without that it would be much more difficult to keep the beds tidy. Because this is an allotment I didn't really fancy buying more wood to frame the beds, though, so all this meant that I was pretty much stuck with my planning.

Then, just as I thought I'd just make do with what I had, one of the allotment old-timers came up with the obvious solution. 'Well, you are just going to combine a few of the beds, aren't you?' It solves all the problems. More planting room? Check. Clearly defined outline? Check. Wooden surround? Check, because I can now just take out two of the wooden planks between the two beds and re-position them between the beds to create a rectangular space. It is kind of obvious, isn't it? Hadn't ever crossed my mind. Not once.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon we went over there again to cut the grass and see how the plants were getting on. We've had a lot of rain recently, so we'd not been for almost two weeks and boy, things really go wild quickly this time of year. Especially weeds, they always seem to grow much more quickly than anything else.

When we arrived it all looked a bit unkempt. D got the mower out and started, while the boys settled in for a bit of mud play in their favourite patch. I was going to plant in there this week but I'm slowly coming round to the idea that I may have to leave this patch bare (even more need to combine and enlarge beds!) - they really enjoy digging in there and really, the allotment is supposed to be fun for all of us...

Successful as a sand box and as a water-play area but not quite so successful as a vegetable bed - note the almost invisible tiny seedlings to the left, now trampled into the mud by small feet. I think I'll give up on this bed...

Now, look at this patch:

Hard to believe it, but under that clump of weeds is parsnip. I accidentally pulled a few up before I remembered and I'm only managed to weed half of it before we started to get attacked by our neighbour's honey bees and had to leave. Does anyone know why this happened? They are normally really peaceful and have never bothered us before, but this time they actually pursued both D and myself around the whole patch. So strange.

Anyway, when we left the patch looked like this - not much progress, but it was quite tricky to extract the parsnip seedlings from the weeds!

And what is going on elsewhere? 

The potatoes are doing well and I have to make sure to fill the tubs up with soil in the next few days.

I've planted these in tubs this year because 

a) they took an awful lot of room in the plot last year and 

b) we hardly got to eat any of them because they were so riddled with potato worms. I am hoping that growing them in plastic bags / tubs will deter them a bit...

I have also planted up some of my poor neglected tomato seedlings in the greenhouse at home, but they looked too sorry for themselves for a decent photo, and the salad bowl on the patio table is looking amazing! It's actually a mix of some salad bowl seed mix, rocket seeds, and some replanted plants from one of those supermarket 'living salad' packets. They looked pretty sorry for themselves because I had forgotten to water them, so I thought I'd give them a chance and replanted them around the edge of the pot. I didn't think they'd all make it but well, apparently they are tougher than they look!

So there you go, the season is well under way!! 

This is the first post in my new 'Grow to Eat' series. Since I am posting a lot about allotmenting and vegetable / fruit growing (and cut-flower growing too, so it's a flexible term, lol) I thought I'd start a link-up. I don't anticipate any large response initially, but since I'm posting anyway I might as well make it a thing and invite others to share if they are growing to eat as well. If you do I'd love it if you could link up so  I can find your posts - it's always more fun if you can share, and I'd love to see (and possibly learn from) what others are doing! 

(A better button will come, but I'm not that great at making them so don't get too excited! ;) )

   

    An InLinkz Link-up
   

Thinking about a Link-Up...

As you might have noticed, I'm posting a lot about the allotment. Apart from crafting, gardening is one of my oldest and most cherished loves, and even as a child, when I used to grow beans on my window sill, I loved growing food. I didn't even particularly like beans (or any vegetable) then, but I loved the idea of growing something that you could then eat.

Fast forward many years to now and our little allotment adventure. I love the process of planning for the gardening year, of searching for seeds, then planting and nurturing them, and eventually transplanting them into the plot only to watch them grow and mature there. Yesterday we ate our first lot of Pak Choi, so the veg growing year is officially under way.

While I often post about gardening anyway, I think I'd like to have the allotment to have a more formal place in my blogging world and I am wondering if eventually others might like to share their own adventures in growing things to eat, so I'm starting a link-up. This may be slow, initially, so there might not be much to see beyond my own allotment ramblings, but hopefully eventually this might gather speed and put all us veg and fruit growers and gardening nuts in touch with each other!!

So there you go, these are the guidelines for the my brand-new GROW TO EAT Link-Up. The brief is broad - post about your gardening, but while I certainly won't discourage anyone from sharing shots of their ornamental garden, this is more about the 'working garden'. Do you grow veg? Fruit? Flowers to cut? Then please share your adventures! :)  

I'll be sorting out the linky tool in the next post, which will also be the first official post of the link-up.

Allotmenting - End of March

It's time for another allotment update. It's the end of March, and the season is slowly creaking into gear. I few days ago I spent a bit of time on the plot - not long, because it's still cold and it was a windy and rainy kind of day - and spread a bit more compost (all from our chickens and home composting this year!!) and planted a few more seeds.

 I also had a look for any signs of life. 

At first glance it still looks very gloomy and wintery, but if you look closer you can find all the tell-tale signs that nature is waking up...

Allotmenting - a flurry of seed packets...

Look what arrived - the first lot of the many vegetable and cut-flower seeds I ordered for the allotment! 

It actually looks quite pretty, doesn't it? The individual packets are all cut-flower seeds and the big box contains vegetable seeds. This is what was in it:

Not bad, isn't it? I costed it up. It was quite a bit cheaper to go for a pack than to buy the seeds individually, and I think I'll try to grow all of them this year. 

This lot came from Sow Seeds. I've ordered quite a few vegetable and flower seeds from Vegetable Seeds and some additional seed potatos, onions and garlic from Suttons. Can't wait to get planting! 

Allotmenting...

... or rather, thinking about allotmenting.

It's come to the point in winter, just past Christmas and with the boys back at school, where my thoughts turn to the upcoming allotment season. I've been perusing seed catalogues and websites and deciding on what to plant this coming spring.

There are a few things that worked well, that I want to extend:

1) cut flowers

I so loved the luxury of having cut flowers in the house all summer long. It was easy and fun and the bunches of flowers made me smile every time I passed them. Definitely worth it. 

Last summer I grew Cosmos and Dahlias and some Sunflowers. They were great, but this year I'm planning to extend my range a bit. I'm thinking of adding some Cornflowers and Sweetpeas for sure, but possibly also some Larkspur, Calendula, Anethum, Antirrhinum, and Verbena. 

2) Vegetables

There were some definite successes and fails. Our beans were spectacular. In fact, we had so many beans we still have bags and  bags of frozen ones to get through. So runner beans and bush beans are a definite!

On the other hand, our sweetcorn and our carrots (despite what you see in the basket - they were inedible) were nothing short of pitiful. I don't think we ate a single cob of corn or carrot, lol. That said, I'm probably going to try again. After a few years of persistent failure to grow sweetcorn I seem to have developed a slightly unhealthy and misplaced fixation on successfully growing corn. I'm determined that this year we'll eat corn on the cob, grown in our own allotment!

I also want to increase our berry produce. Last summer we made some delicious blackcurrant jam and our strawberries were amazing! This year we'll devote even more space to strawberries, and I'm planning on planting a few more raspberry plants and possibly also another blackcurrant bush.

Other than that I'm planning on planting potatoes again (also not a raging success last summer), as well as pumpkins and courgettes, some cucumbers, brassicas, peas and mangetout, parsnip and onions, definitely onions. We were so unlucky with those because when we planted them we didn't have netting yet and they were all eaten before they even had a chance to establish. 

So there you go, my plans are made! :) 

I'm kind of enjoying this period - when you can't actually plant yet (all I'm planning on doing this winter is weed and dig in muck), but have to prepare for the growing season.

In case you are based in the UK and interested in such matters, I'm getting most of my cut flower seeds Sow Seeds - not the cheapest, alas, but they have a pretty extensive selection of cut flower varieties and give information about how long flowers last when cut, etc. All very useful. :) 

Most of my vegetable seeds and some additional cut flowers seeds will be purchased from Vegetable Seeds, which is great, especially if you have an allotment and purchase lots of vegetable seeds. The prices are reasonable and at the moment they have a 50% sale on, so all their seed packets are under £1! I really wish they had a better flower selection so I could order everything from them, but their vegetable selection is superb. I'm adding the link to their website:

Vegetable Seeds

VegetableSeeds.net offers fantastic value for the highest quality vegetable seeds in the UK. Over 400 varieties with next day shipping and free P&P on all UK orders over £15.00.

Allotmenting in September

Today I was working from home, mainly because I'm off to Leeds for the evening later on, and since we have no kids at home today and the weather is beautiful, D and I took ourselves off to the allotment for our lunch break. 

While D was cutting the grass I went around and harvested. This space continues to amaze me. This is only our first proper year of allotment gardening, and we are still learning, but this space truly keeps on giving. Even without any fertilizing, and with a constant battle against encroaching weeds, we've harvested so much here this summer.

This was my vegetable basket today:

So many courgettes, and cucumbers, and beans (the beans have been amazing - we've had buckets of them). There are even a few patty pan pumpkins in there. We've not been so lucky with the carrots - despite the netting there is some damage from carrot fly, and they are also somewhat woody and dry. I will have to read up on how to improve conditions for them.

Once I'd done the vegetable harvesting I went around my Dahlias and cosmos to cut flowers for the house. I love flowers in the house and my aim this year was to grow enough cut flowers that I wouldn't have to buy any for the summer months. The cosmos was slow to start with (lots and lots of greenery and no flowers), although it is starting to pick up speed now, but the Dahlias have been truly amazing. The more I cut for the house, the more seem to appear. When we got there today it was a riot of colour:

I cut most of them because as I said - the more I cut the more the plants produce - and we always find room in the house for a jug of flowers. This was the trough at the end of our short visit:

When we got home I immediately arranged them into various jugs:

Pretty, no? 

Simple Things Sunday

I was thinking that I might show some pictures of the last few days of our holiday this week, but then we went to the allotment yesterday and so much has happened there these past two weeks while we were away, plus you've already seen a few holiday pics, so allotmenting is the theme I'm going with this week.

It always amazes me, the way nature immediately takes a patch of land back, as soon as you stop tending it. We were only gone a fortnight, yet when we got there yesterday the whole plot was overgrown with some - admittedly very pretty - yellow flowers.

Pretty, no?

As for what was happening within the flower beds... well, let's just say that I didn't realise that courgettes could grow from basically non-existent to full-on take-over-the-world massive marrows within the space of 14 days.

Just look at those babies!

Overall there was a mix of over-grown wilderness and cultivation that was quite charming in its own way - not that I think the allotment committee would agree with me there. They have some pretty clear ideas of what an allotment is supposed to look like. But look at those pretty Dalias and sunflowers!

Well, D took to cutting the grass between the beds, and I went into full-on weeding mode. By the time we left it looked pretty tidy again.

In addition to the aforementioned marrows I also carried away a huge basket of vegetables and flowers.

I'll have to process all those beans and freeze them. The flowers however, are ready to grace our tables. I love that throughout summer we can always have a fresh bunch of flowers from the garden and the allotment on the table. So pretty.

Shared with Simple Things Sunday