Allotment Diary (April – Week 3) 

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £1975 of fruit and veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £458 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £245 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is a bit higher than last week, it can’t continue though because a lot of the winter veg is ending this week and the spring veg is not all ready to take it’s place.  We had 37 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

 

 

We picked: calabrese, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, 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, spring onions, celery, salad rocket, sorrel, leeks, pea shoots, lots of bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.

How many people are we feeding?

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine and Sally) about 20 people and the water still isn’t on and we have very hot weather, so we have to reduce harvest levels next week and so sadly this will be the last delivery to Sally, I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers.

What we’ve bought this week
Nothing

Videos published
I published three short videos:

Living a Sustainable Allotment Life

Planting multi-sown onions/shallots and uncovering the spring lettuce

April Allotment Tour – Miraculous Abundance

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

I’ve planted the two main allium beds:  Main crop onions (Sturon, Red barron, Lila, Alisa Craig) and Shallots (Zebrune).  I’ve interplanted the onion bed with lettuce (Mood Red).

I’ve pulled one of the chard beds and replaced it with Golden Beetroot and one of the lettuce beds and replaced it with Bolthardy Beetroot.

I’ve planted a row of Alderman Peas

Finally I pulled a bed of winter radish, that has been an amazing source of smoothie leaves all winter/spring and replaced it with Amazon spinach, for baby leaves.

I’ve potted on

1. The outdoor – blight resistant – tomatoes
2. The indoor tomatoes
3. The indoor peppers

First harvests of the year

Nothing

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears
2. Winter squash

Last harvests of the year

We’ve now run out of last years Broccolini, but this years plants are very close.  The Lambs lettuce is now finished too.

What’s left in store

Potatoes – 1/2 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 1 big box
Onions – 1/3 large box
Shallots – 1/3 large box
Beets – 2 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

Allotment reserves (Steve) : 1900 litres, down by 700 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 250 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 300 litres
Home reserves : 650 litres

It’s been very dry for a couple of over three weeks and it’s now also very warm,  we are burning through water at an alarming rate.  Fortunately we have a little rain forecast next week and we might get the water switched on.

What have we processed for preserving

Three jars of tomato passata mix, made from tomatoes gifted to us my people we gift food too.

Highlights

I’ve cleared all of the over-wintered kalettes from the back garden, these beds are now resting for a few weeks while I clear any weeds that emerge and let any cabbage aphid die.

We are still harvesting a huge amount.  We have an incredible amount of blossom on the fruit trees and the broad beans have more flowers than I’ve ever seen before.  We have fairly well developed peas on our early plants and lots of flowers on our successions.

Everyone is raving about the quality of the new potatoes, definitely worth the effort!

Thanks to longer days we are now able to harvest in the evenings, which is cooler and we can also enjoy a day out.

I’ve planted the first batch of main crop potatoes, hidden away behind the blueberries in the fruit garden at home.

Frosts should have finished now!

Lowlights

Most of last years brassicas have finished now and need pulling out.  I think I have two weeks of supply left in the polytunnel.  I’m confident now that we will have continuity of supply, but I’m pleased we grow a surplus usually because I think we will have just enough for us and a few friends.

Some of the winter brassicas now have cabbage aphid AND white fly, so we will have to pull them up quickly, to try and avoid them spreading to this year’s plants.

The allotment water has not been switched on but we’ve heard that it might go on this weekend!  We are used to it being switched on in early April, so the lack of information on this makes it very difficult to plan.

Lack of rain and tap water makes planting out all of the new seedlings something of a lottery.