Allotment Diary (April – Week 4) 

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £2205 of fruit and veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £482 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £170 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is quite a reduction from last week as we head into the hungry gap.  We had 37 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

We picked: calabrese, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, red cabbage leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, 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) about 20 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens!

What we’ve bought this week
Compost for potato tubs and a few seeds

Videos published
I published one short video: The worst thing about growing veg over winter

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

We’ve had very wet and stormy weather this week, so I’ve deferred a lot of the planting, but I did pop in a bed of kales, in place of pea shoots and planted  carrots and potatoes.

I’ve potted on

Nothing

First harvests of the year

1. Swift new potatoes
2. Asparagus

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears
2. Winter squash

Last harvests of the year

1. Pea shoots
2. winter radish

What’s left in store

Potatoes – 1/2 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 1/2 big box – the quality is quite low now though so we will soon switch to fresh
Onions – 1/3 large box
Shallots – 1/3 large box
Beets – 1.5 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

Allotment reserves (Steve) : 2300 litres, down by 300 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 400 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 300 litres
Home reserves : 650 litres

The tap water has now been switched on and we’ve had a spell of average rainfall, so the beds are all reasonably well hydrated again!

What have we processed for preserving

Nothing

Highlights

The allotment water is on!

The weather at the start of the week was excellent, so I took the opportunity to rest for a bit and got a lot of tidying up done in the garden at home, the garage and the allotments.

I’ve harvested asparagus for the first time!

I’ve taken the covers off most of the beds, so that they can take advantage of the rain this week, that has laid down about an inch of water, the equivalent of a cubic metre on my newly un-covered growing areas, and about 6 cubic metres across the three allotments!

I’ve cleared all of the over-wintered brassica’s now, except those in the polytunnel which are still quite good quality.  They will supplement the spring planted beds for another week.

 

We are still harvesting a huge amount.

Everyone is raving about the quality of the new potatoes, definitely worth the effort, we’ve now got Swift available as well as Charlotte!

Frosts should have finished now!

Lowlights

The delay in having the water switched on meant not being able to keep many of the beds hydrated, hence spinach and chard went to seed early, wasting probably £50 of harvests.  I think I’ve saved everything else by bringing a lot of water from home.

The broad beans got quite a battering in the high winds, but they should recover ok

Lots of jobs are piling up this week and next, making it a busy time.  I’ve spent the last three weeks on antibiotics and have been weak and tired a lot of the time, so it’s not been the best timing!  I’ve been getting plenty of help though.