Allotment Diary (March – Week 2)
Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £805 of fruit veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £396 this year, mostly one time investments
What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £143 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. We had 39 meals with ingredients from the allotment.
How many people are we feeding?
Our surplus continues to increase so we added another family to our deliveries, we are now feeding ourselves and six (Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Kate) other families.
Here’s a photo of one of the five harvests we did this week. We picked calabrese, romanesco cauliflower, broccolini, purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts, sprout tops, romanesco leaves, calabrese leaves, red cabbage leaves, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, spinach, perpetual spinach, mizuna, giant red mustard, chard, kalettes, spring onions, celery, rocket, claytonia, lots of bean tops and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried pears/apples.
What we’ve bought this week
Slug pellets, we don’t use many, but there are times and places!
Videos published
I published two videos:
Foul Weather Allotment Harvest – it’s not always sunshine and smiles!
Update on the allotment and home rain water capture and storage project
What I’ve sowed
What I’ve planted
Unfortunatey it’s not been much of a planting week!
I’ve potted on
I’ve started to take cutting’s off the over-wintered tomatoes. Some of these are unlikely to make great plants for summer (too leggy) but they are a good source of healthy side shoots.
I’ve also potted on all of the peppers that I sowed and germinated in the propagator a couple of weeks ago.
First harvests of the year
Nothing new this week.
Last harvests of the year
We don’t have any squash left in store, just a bit in the freezer
What’s left in store
Potatoes – 1.5 medium sized bags
Carrots – 2 1/3 big boxes
Onions – 1 large boxe
Shallots – 3/4 large box
Beets – 3 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag
Dried Pears – 1 big cool bag
Water reserves
Allotment reserves (Steve) : 2500 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 450 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 400 litres
Home reserves : 600 litres
We are not quite full to the brim as I watered all of the under-cover space on the allotment on Saturday, to make space to capture the next storms bounty.
What have we processed for preserving
Nothing
Highlights
We’ve had even more rain! This is a big deal as everything was getting quite dry under-cover due to the exceptionally hot February. The anticipated rain allowed me to fully hydrate the cold-frames, low and high tunnel and the water supply is nearly full again!
The food highlight continues to be the abundance of calabrese, broccolini, PSB and romanesco cauliflowers and their associated leaves!
Problems
We’ve had continuous storms and sunny spells, which makes it hard to manage the temperature under cover. Harvesting has also been a bit of a challenge, next week looks even worse!
I continue to be impressed by the photos of your harvests. This must be the equivalent of a full-time job but obviously you enjoy it. I plan to come back and look at the videos–interesting topics.
Thanks Sue, it a long way from a full time job. On average I aim for about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. In winter it’s much lower than that, maybe 1 hour a day, but in summer it’s a little more. Almost all of that is pure pleasure. Sometimes, like a rainy day harvest, it feels like work until I finish and look at everything I’ve picked and it’s all pleasure again. : All the best – Steve
Your greens are lovely as usual! I’ll have to try eating the PSB leaves. They are new to me and I wouldn’t have thought of it if you hadn’y mentioned it.