Allotment Diary (March – Week 3)
Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £960 of fruit veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £416 this year, mostly one time investments
What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £155 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 upped our friends and family deliveries, we are now feeding ourselves and six (Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Sally) other families.
Here’s a photo of one of the three 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, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, mizuna, giant red mustard, chard, kalettes, spring onions, celery, salad rocket, sorrel, claytonia, leeks, 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
Food safe buckets for harvesting, which were surprisingly expensive compared to non-food-grade buckets. We always harvest into water, to keep everything as fresh as possible and to get rid of soil, slugs and bugs!
Videos published
I published two videos:
March harvest highlights: calabrese, romanesco, radish, spinach, onions
Managing Arthritis With An Allotment Centric Life
What I’ve sowed
What I’ve planted
Unfortunatey it’s not been much of a planting week, the weather has been really bad, gales and rain for most of the week!
I’ve potted on
I’ve potted on another batch of tomatoes and moved them to the grow lights in an attempt to stop them getting too leggy!
First harvests of the year
Radish!! It’s always such a treat to have lots of radish again, I managed to get these 2 weeks earlier than I’ve ever done before 🙂
Last harvests of the year
Nothing
What’s left in store
Potatoes – 1 medium sized bags
Carrots – 2 1/4 big boxes
Onions – 1 large box
Shallots – 3/4 large box
Beets – 3 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag
Dried Pears – 3/4 of a big cool bag
Water reserves
Allotment reserves (Steve) : 2500 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 450 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 400 litres
Home reserves : 750 litres
We are full to the brim. I’ve taken advantage of all of these storms by keeping everything under cover well watered.
What have we processed for preserving
Nothing
Highlights
We have our first tomato fruits, last week we had our first flowers. We also have our first asparagus breaking through, so we might be harvesting that in a week or two!
Abundance, despite the terrible weather I’ve harvested more this week than I did in the whole of March last year and that’s at least ten times as much as the previous year.
Carefully watching this year I’ve seen plenty of opportunities to do even better next year (weather permitting)
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.
Lowlights
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 better 🙂
Your winter harvests are so impressive to me. The list of veggies you are harvesting is long and varied! And having enough to share is indeed wonderful too.
You may be retired but it appears you’ve retired to a new enterprise. My head is spinning with the reports of all the activity.
We just harvested today Dave, 125 litres of veg, enough to keep seven families going. I’ve always said that the key to growing a lot of food is to pick a lot of food. We pick two or three times a week and we pick everything that’s available. We are constantly amazed by the fact that there’s more to pick a few days later. Very occasionally we rest the beds, for example this year we rested the salad beds for a week in December and a week in January. Finally we don’t waste, we’ve discovered that much more of a typical plant is wasted than eaten and often the part that’s wasted tastes great. We’ve also done a lot of work on novel planting times and patterns.
Eventually we will scale back the number of people we feed and really go all out to grow an even wider range of veg for ourselves, but right now we get all the extra variety from our friends and family gifting us eggs, tomatoes, grapes etc out of season.
Thanks for the feedback : All the best – Steve
Well we have to do something in retirement Sue. The allotments have been designed to provide a very enjoyable 16 hours a week of activity for me and a bit less for Debbie. There’s no true work involved, but sometimes the activity isn’t what you might call peak enjoyment, but the end result always is. If you want to understand the back story and how the allotment fits into my life I recommend this video https://youtu.be/Fp9PRW55bp8
Thanks for the comment : All the best – Steve