Allotment Diary (March – week 5)

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £1323 of fruit veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £446 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £173 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store.  This is actually lower than last week, but that’s because we have been, and still are, on holiday for a few days.  We had 37 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

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

How many people are we feeding?

We are stable for now at seven families (Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 20 people and we will probably stay at this level for a few weeks now, sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers (Lesley, Caroline and Anne).

What we’ve bought this week
Compost for planting potatoes in tubs

Videos published
I published three videos:

Planting Early Kale for Spring

How To Harvest A HUGE Amount of Organic Fruit and Veg in Spring

It’s Time To Start Planting Again!

What I’ve sowed

What I’ve planted

It’s been a slow week for planting!

1. Two beds of lettuce made up of Cantrix, Tesy and Navara, in a mesh tunnel and under fleece for a few weeks

I’ve potted on
Nothing

First harvests of the year
Nothing new unfortunately, but then again we have so much already

What are we running out of?

Dried pears, but I might find a few more bags if I have a rummage

Last harvests of the year
Nothing

What’s left in store
Potatoes – 1 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 2 big boxes
Onions – 1 large box
Shallots – 3/4 large box
Beets – 3 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag
Dried Pears – maybe none!

Water reserves
Allotment reserves (Steve) : 2200 litres, down by 300 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 300 litres,  down by 150 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 400 litres
Home reserves : 750 litres

We are starting to eat into our reserves as we have had no rain for a couple of weeks and lots of sun, everything is very dry now.  Ironically trhe under cover beds – that I’ve been watering – are better hydrated than the uncovered soil.

What have we processed for preserving
Nothing

Highlights

The weather has been great, so everything is growing very well and it’s been ideal for planting and harvesting!

More of our early plants now have tomatoes, however these plants are not really for fruits, we are just using them as a source of side shoots that we pinch out, drop in water and plant a week or two later.

Abundance, despite the terrible weather I’ve harvested more this week than I did in May last year and that’s 5 times as much as the previous year.

As everything is in good shape we’ve gone away for a few days holiday and had two day trips.

Lowlights
I had to clear a bed of lettuce that had a mild infestation of greenfly, it would only get worse and I have plenty.  In fact it helped me out because this is the painful time of year when I need to clear productive winter beds for new seedlings for summer.

It’s too cold and windy to take the cold-frame lids off, so we still need to water.  That said, it’s not rained for two weeks anyway, so we would have had to water regardless.