Allotment Diary–Tuesday 30 August 2016
Finished off the spring hot bed, that’s next to the greenhouse. This means that all of my early spring preparation work will be all in the same place. By early spring the hot bed will have cooled and will be ready to use as a cold frame for hardening off, as a seed bed or to start some early crops of for example carrots. I won’t be filling it with manure until December, and it should be planted in January and be cropping in February. If all goes to plan this should keep me in salads until the poly tunnels take over in April.
I’ve taken my first crop out of one of the new cold frames, the young/tender leaves from peas. These pea’s wont be allowed to mature, I’m just adding the leaves to salads, they taste a bit like fresh peas and have many of the same nutrients. It’s quite amazing to see how quickly they’ve grown, by far the fastest crop so far.
I filled the first of my cold frames last week, today I filled half of the second one, I will fill the second half next week and then the first half of the hot bed the week after and the final half mid September, at which point all planting for this year will stop although I will be snipping crops off at ground level to grow again as needed. Into the ground today went half a row of rhubarb chard.
A full row of trusty radish, which is already growing beautifully in the poly tunnel and the other cold frame
A couple of rows of the equally trusty spicy oriental lettuce mix, I already have a couple of rows in the first cold frame that’s growing really well – I thinned it out a few days ago.
I finished off the few seeds of this red leafed spinach, but I only had enough for half a row. I love fresh spinach in my salad in the colder months, when it’s crisp and cold, in the summer it’s not that good.
Over the last few day’s I’ve emptied most of a compost bin, about £140 worth, the bit that was left I’ve used to top up another bin so that it’s full to the brim. This bin needs turning one more time and then it will be left for four months until it’s used as the growing medium for the winter hot bed.
