Our First Harvest!

Look!

This evening we picked our first harvest; thirteen beautiful big strawberries. (And just two months after getting the baby plants in the post!) I know it’s a cliché, but they really are the best strawberries I’ve ever tasted! We laid straw underneath the plants at last to keep the fruit off the soil, so hopefully there will be plenty more soon!

My lovely mum bought me a box of petunia plants which I planted around the asparagus the other day, and while there are still a few asparagus beetles around, the numbers do seem to be reduced. Hopefully as the plants get bigger they’ll do even better at keeping the beasts away. The flowers make a nice splash of colour anyway, and some of our marigolds and nasturtiums around the place have started flowering at last too.

The lavender has started flowering as well, although it’s swamped by weeds, like most other things. We’ve had a lot of rain recently and it’s really not helping in the battle against the green carpet that comes from nowhere and spreads over everything!

The beans are pretty swamped too, but they’re making a good effort and have started climbing up their canes. The pesky slugs are still doing them some damage, but the battle continues...

And the borage is about to burst into flower, which will help attract more bees and predatory insects. You can see one above between the bean rows; there are quite a few dotted around.

I had thought our first harvest would be new potatoes or lettuce leaves; our patchwork of lettuces is growing nicely (though it could do with a good weeding like everything else!) and the potatoes are flowering with enthusiasm. It’ll only be a couple of weeks before we start picking these too!

Progress!

As promised, we got pretty busy at the weekend! While mum and I did various bits of weeding and planting, Eddie and Dad cleared more than a third of the 'jungle' half of the plot! It still needs a quick fork-through for roots (which I have made a good start on already) but that's two more squares nearly ready for planting (and thank goodness; if we don't get it done this month it'll be pretty much too late).

The strawberries are busy producing fruit, and we pinned some of the runners into the soil each side to create new rows, and put some net up over the plants to protect the developing fruit from birds.
The potatoes have started to flower, which means we'll be able to dig for our first baby new potatoes soon!
And the onions seem to be doing really well despite the weeds. A few of my red onion seeds have finally sprouted now too, though I doubt they're going to have time to develop fully before the end of the season. Next year I think I'll stick to onion sets and not bother with seeds!
The pond is doing really well, despite last week's rock-fall which I cleared up at the weekend. The plants are really flourishing, and if you look closely below you can see two little red water-lily leaves starting to show...
And the tadpoles are turning into frogs! Lots of teeny-weeny frogs!
We're going away in a couple of weeks and it really is getting to summer now, so I'm determined to plant lots more before we go. The two squares clear now will be for brassicas and tomatoes, but that still leaves sweetcorn, more brassicas and two squares for curcubits to clear. But the progress we've made has been really encouraging, and I can't wait to do more!

A Quick Update

I've got no pretty pictures today but I just thought I'd tell you how things are going.

I'm losing the battle against asparagus beetles I'm afraid; I pick them off whenever I visit but they seem to do so much damage so quickly. It's not as if they're destroying this year's crop, but they defoliate the ferns so they'll weaken the plants for the future. Petunias are supposed to keep the beetles away and I had planned on a border of them, but for some reason none of my seeds grew. If I can scrape enough pennies together I'll buy a load of plants from the market... On the plus side, the asparagus seems to be putting up lots of new shoots, which is good.

Slug and snail damage has been greatly reduced but still not enough; there must be millions of the things living in the overgrown next allotment (and of course the overgrown part of mine) and they've completely destroyed the sunflowers I planted at the border. Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I'm now considering a wall of bristly doormats to keep them out!

The weeds keep on coming, and it's not just my lack of enthusiasm which is stopping me from digging the next part of the plot; there's always too much to do to look after the planted patches all the time!

The strawberries have started fruiting! How exciting! The fruits are still white at the moment so I need to protect them from birds soon before they ripen, and put some straw underneath to keep them off the soil, which can spread grey mould. Where does one buy straw, that's what I want to know!

Someone has kindly knocked most of the pile of rocks by the pond into the water, killing a huge frog that must have been visiting. It can't have been the wind; I spent ages building that pile and making sure it was secure. Next time I visit I'll have to fish all the rocks back out and build it again...

The potatoes are doing well, as are the onions, and I think among the forest of weeds yesterday I spotted some parsnips and red onions finally coming up too! The seedlings in my garden are starting to really suffer from being in tiny pots, and the cats keep digging up my leeks, so I really need to get things planted out or it'll be too late to bother (though I keep telling myself not to worry if not everything happens this year; next year we'll be able to get a much earlier start and we won't have such a battle on our hands!).

This weekend we're planning to spend a whole day there, do a decent amount of weeding and dig that next strip at last. Wish us luck!

War on pests!

After seeing the damage done to my poor bean plants last week by the slugs and snails, I rushed out and found organic slug pellets in Homebase. They're "certified for organic use", more rainproof than traditional slug pellets, and they break down into harmless iron and phosphate in the soil. I tried them on my patio first; usually I daren't leave my seedlings outside after dark, and if I do they're covered in snails when I remember them. With a scattering of the pellets all around them, I've left them out three or four nights now and none have been touched. HA! Take that, nasty little molluscs!
So I spread them all around my crops on the allotment, particularly around the beans and the grassy edges of the plot where I'm sure they must all hide, a few days ago. When I went back today there were hardly any left in most areas, but as we were weeding we kept finding dead slugs and snails hiding under leaves so it looks like they're doing the trick! I scattered more before I left - they're not getting away with it any more!
Slugs and snails are not the only pests I've been dealing with. I arrived at the plot the other day to find the asparagus ferns covered in asparagus beetles. They're funny, exotic looking things - I thought I had a good general knowledge of British insects but I guess you only ever see these on asparagus beds, and mine is the first asparagus bed I've seen! What with the wind and my camera wanting to focus on the ground beyond the tiny stems instead of the stems themselves, I completely failed to take a decent picture, but here is one I found on Wikimedia:

All those I could find met their end today in a cup of soapy water, but not before laying dozens of eggs. You can pick them off but it's a really fiddly, painstaking task so I might leave them to the ladybirds and lacewings - and there are hundreds of ladybirds around, mating everywhere!


SO, apart from the pests, my crops are doing fine. You can see the onions getting bigger, the potatoes are leafier and more vigorous than ever, and the strawberries are flowering happily. The weeds are also incredibly prolific - we dug the strawberries out today from under a forest of them and the onions will have to be done again as soon as we have time. It's been so weedy I've completely missed out on a spring crop of baby carrots, and the red onions must have been completely swamped - they should be up by now but there's no sign. I'm hoping it won't be so bad in future years; the soil must be full of seeds from last summer's weeds, it's been growing wild so long, but of course next year that won't be the case.

The strawberries are going to start to fruit soon and I'll need to cover them with net to keep the birds off and mulch them with straw so the berries don't touch the ground, which will need some thought. I don't really have the cash at the moment to build beautiful frames out of beautiful wood like everybody else does! Also how do I work it? With three rows of plants, I don't want to cover all of them at once and have to remove the whole lot to harvest, but if I enclose each one separately I'll need to leave room for runners so I've got more plants next year, so how big do I need to make them? It's complicated, this business!

The pond is still doing really well, although the water level has dropped dramatically again since the sun's come out. Look - you can see right to the bottom! Although it doesn't look like our very expensive water lily is doing much down there...


Unlike a couple of weeks back, it's bursting with life; the tadpoles are getting huge, we've got at least two different kinds of water beetle in there and our first pond skater has arrived! And our Iris flowered:

The lettuce/spinach patch that I had started in my last blog is planted now, with (are you ready?) little gem lettuce, iceberg lettuce, lollo rossa, rocket, watercress (apparently it will work if I water it enough!), land cress, swiss chard, two types of beetroot, two types of basil, coriander, spring onions, spinach, New Zealand spinach (does better in hot weather), perpetual spinach (does better in cold weather, and should keep going all winter), corn salad (lamb's lettuce) and a patch of mixed lettuce leaves. I probably should have sown just a few of each and then more at fortnightly intervals or something, but I'm afraid I didn't have the patience (and I've been rubbish at keeping up with the things I should be sowing at home), so I expect a glut in a few weeks time and then I'll try to re-sow as I harvest. Actually, the trickiest thing will probably be to stop them bolting in the hot, dry summer we're expecting; I'll have to water them all loads.

That done, I've got almost no excuses left not to dig the next strip of the plot...

It rained!

It rained! In fact it's been raining for a week now, and of course I'm starting to wish the sun would come out again... And while digging has been a miserable task in the rain, it has done the whole plot a world of good.

I took the opportunity a few days ago to water in my 'Nemaslug' - a 30 million strong army of slug-eating eelworms. It was more difficult than I anticipated; said worms come in suspended animation in a fine clay powder which you're supposed to mix with water - sounds easy enough but it was really hard to get the stuff to mix, and little lumps kept blocking the rose of my watering can. I spent half an hour sitting on my bench with my arm in a bucket of the stuff trying to squidge out all the lumps, and ended up with it all over me and a large amount spilt around the bench, on the bench, on my shoes etc... Next problem was distributing it evenly; one watering can with the correct dilution of nematodes is enough for about an eighth of my plot, but it was raining so hard at this point I think my guesswork may have been a bit off, and on the very overgrown patches I'm not even sure how much of the solution even managed to reach the soil (though if I'm lucky the rain will have washed them down off the plants fairly quickly). All in all I'm not really sure how good a job I did, and I'll think twice before spending that £20 again unless the results are incredibly good!

Unfortunately signs already point to no; the wet weather has turned the whole site into a slug and snail paradise, and though I'm delighted that all my little beans are popping their heads up at last, the slimey little beasts are delighting in them too and several are already a sorry, leafless sight:

I didn't want to, but I'm going to have to buy some slug pellets; the nematodes only deal with slugs anyway so while they will (hopefully) protect things like my potatoes underground, something else needs to be done about the snails. I've seen some kind of organic slug pellets on the web, so I'll try them as soon as I can; I'm not having all my hard work eaten before I get the chance to!

The potatoes all seem to be doing really well, and have stuck their leaves above the soil again already after I earthed them up last week. They're such vigorous, healthy-looking plants it's a pleasure just having them there next to certain less-successful or slower crops. I just hope the harvest is as good!

Elsewhere the beans are shooting up, as I said, the onions are starting to swell (and starting to get swamped by weeds again already!), the strawberries are flowering (I've decided I think I'll leave them to fruit - I've spent my money; I'm blooming well going to have at least a small harvest this year!) and the herb seedlings I planted out over the last couple of weeks are settling in nicely (well mostly; the snails have completely polished off one of my nasturtiums). The borage in particular is growing amazingly fast; I swear this one has quadrupled in size in the past week!

The rain has done the pond a lot of good too; the water is full to overflowing and has gone from foggy green to so clear I can almost see to the bottom, and yes, there is still life in there! Millions of daphnia and other tiny wriggly things, loads of water-snails, whole families of water boatmen and far more tadpoles than I thought we put in there in the first place! Mysterious, but I'm not complaining; I was feeling rather disheartened about the whole pond thing last week but now it's just lovely!
The plants are thriving too and our iris is even thinking about blooming. If you look closely you can see the purple bud:

We are nearly ready to plant our next eight-foot square as well, which will contain lettuces and other salad leaves, swiss chard, spinach, beetroots (as much for the leaves as for the roots), spring onions and some herbs; basil and coriander. The idea is to create a patchwork of small areas of different crops - all that leafy foliage in different colours will look fantastic when it's growing - so when we finished digging the patch today we began marking out the different beds with stones (until the weather drove us away again). When we've finished this patch will contain sixteen squares of sixteen different crops, dotted with coriander to try to keep aphids away and lined with marigolds. Pretty!