Allotment Diary (February – week 3)

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £448 of fruit veg this year

We’ve spent a total of £289 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £83 worth of veg this week, incredibly this is less than last week, but that’s just the way the harvests have fallen and this total excludes anything from the store. We had 31 meals with ingredients from the allotment and fed three other families.

Here’s a photo of one of the three harvests we did this week. We picked new potatoes, broccoli, sprouts, lots of types of kale, spinach, mizuna, giant red mustard, chard, kalettes, spinach, beetroot tops, spring onions, cabbage, celery, rocket, leeks, lots of bean tops and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, red/golden beetroot and dried pears/apples.

What we’ve bought this week
Three bags of verve multipurpose compost

Videos published
I published two videos, a challenge response video: The Five Reasons I Make Youtube Videos:

A quick update on my ‘crazy’ brassica growing experiments!

What I’ve sowed

Broad Beans Stereo
French bean Amethyst
Red Bolthardy
Calcot Tardia Lérida
Lettuce Tesy
Lettuce Cantarix
Parsley Curly 2

What I’ve planted

• I’ve planted out two trays of salad onions into the salad beds (interplanted).
• I’ve replanted the big salad bed in the polytunnel with a wide selection of lettuces for spring, these will last until it’s time for the tomatoes/peppers/cucumbers. This will be enough for rainy day harvests :-), ie when I don’t want to harvest from the outdoor beds!
• I’ve also planted lots of lettuces into gaps that have opened up, mostly due to over wintered lettuces getting stem rot.
• The last batch of calabrese, cauliflower, romanescos and broccolini also got planted outside under fleece, these will be my third succession, with the previous two in the polytunnel
• Finally I’ve planted out the last few peas that I had sitting around with nowhere to go.

I’ve potted on

Calabrese, red cabbage and Hungry Gap kale

First harvests of the year
Nothing new

Last harvests of the year
None

What’s left in store
Potatoes – 3 months supply
Carrots – 3 months supply
Onions – 3 months supply
Shallots – 2 months supply
Squash – 1 months supply
Beets – 4 months supply
Dried Apples – 5 months supply
Dried Pears – 2 months supply

What have we processed for preserving
Crown prince squash

Projects
We finally put the gutter up on the garage and fitted the first water butt at home. That gives me 16 sq metres of rain water capture capacity, which should be enough for the potatoes and blueberries for most of the year.

Highlights
The third batch of potatoes (Swift) broke through this week, they’ve joined the previous batches of potatoes (Swift/Charlotte) in the polytunnel. I have one batch left at home. No more potatoes need planting now until it’s warm enough for them to grow on outside.

We’ve had a lot of sunshine

Problems
Still tapering off steroids, very slowly.