Allotment Diary–Tuesday 12 July 2016

I’ve been focusing on the Britain In Bloom competition for the last couple of days and spent another hour this morning mowing the paths, it looked pretty good!

I finally got some serious time to dedicate to my own plot today and that meant starting to turn my attention towards autumn crops.  I have my main autumn crops in the ground already, broccoli, sprouts, kale, late beans etc, but I need a new crop of leaves and so I cleared another strawberry bed into pots and planted that up, I also cleared out a row of spinach that was past it’s best and a cut-and-come-again row of red kale that was looking a bit straggly.   All this tidying up meant plenty of straw and greens for the hot compost bin, which I mixed up with horse manure and the result was a nice boost to it’s temperature again.

Then it was on to the planting: first up, a couple of rows of carrots, in one of the netted beds

A couple of rows of spinach, to replace the one’s I took out, this will be the last of these summer spinach I think, In another couple of months I will be planting the winter crop.

Then a row of Kohl Rabi, which is my third successional planting, although I’ve yet to see any food from it and it’s not looking that great – maybe not the most prolific of crops?

Then another couple of rows of rocket, I have four successional plantings on the go already, but it does tend to bolt, I like it though it crops really well and responds well to continuous picking

Then the last of the red oakleaf lettuce, I’ve a few rows of this on the go as well, I thinned those out today and they are all looking ok

The last of the cos lettuce, again I have a few of these on the go and I thinned them out today as well

I’ve also put in a few rows of curly Kale, under nets, this is a dwarf variety and it’s been superb so far as a cut-and-come-again crop, this is most of what we’ve been eating every day so far

Finally a couple of rows of radish, my favourite of all of the crops, I eat it leaves and all and it’s so productive

I also planted up about 20 leaks that I happened to find in one of the cold frames, still in their pots, I’d forgotten about them but they looked great.  I popped them in a bed under nets as lots of people on the allotment have been complaining of onion fly being rampant.

This is one of the two beds that I planted today, the flecks on the soil are from the strawberry straw that I composted.

of course I also cropped a huge amount, some of which is shown below

We used up some of the spare kale with kale crips which were surprisingly good