Allotment Diary (June – Week 2)

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Allotment Finances

We’ve harvested a total of £3,843, smashing all previous records, since records began! Harvesting this much gives me immense freedom to spend money to save time and increase food quality and variety, without a hint of guilt, it also bought me a fancy new iPad Pro this week. Of the £3,843 about £2,200 is a direct saving off our food bill.   We’ve spent a total of £758 this year, mostly one time investments and a lot of compost!

What we’ve harvested and eaten

I’ve a new feature in the database that I created to track my harvests, that automatically gives me a weekly summary view of my harvests (I only take one picture per harvest, so this is nowhere near everything we picked, but it’s a nice summary.  Below each photo is the total number of boxes we harvested, often more than shown in the photo.

 

We harvested a total of £320 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is a lot more than last week, because we did the bulk harvest of the broad beans, which are now all processed and frozen.  We also harvested a lot of garlic and onions, but these aren’t processed yet so they are now included in this weeks tally.  We had 35 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

We picked: Runner beans, elephant garlic, bulk garlic harvest, beetroot, mange tout broad beans, bulk onion harvest, celery, baby leeks, courgettes, New Zealand spinach, golden purselane, strawberries, tomatoes, carrots, onion scapes,  calabrese, cauliflower, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, true spinach, spring onions, salad rocket, sorrel,  mixed herbs, rhubarb, broad beans, mangetout peas, shelling peas, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: potatoes, onions, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.  Bold items are new.

People we are feeding

I’m delighted that another of our daughters has returned to the local area, so we are now harvesting for her too, so that makes nine families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tessa, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 22 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens (which supply our eggs)!

What we’ve bought this week

1. Nothing

Video’s this week

None!

What I’ve sown

It’s been a big sowing week, in went all of the late summer salads and the winter brassicas!

1. Broccoli, Florret Claret Brassica
2. Cabbage Tundra (savoy) Brassica
3. Cabbage January King Brassica
4. Calabrese, Florret Marathon Brassica
5. Cauliflower, Florret Romanesco Brassica
6. Kale Redbor Brassica
7. Kale Winterbor Brassica
8. Kale Nero di Toscana Brassica
9. Turnip Greens Rapa Senza Testa Cooking Leaves
10. Annual herb Red leaved Basil Herb
11. Broad Bean Luz De Otono Legumes
12. Lettuce Moon Red Salad Leaves
13. Lettuce Grenoble Red Salad Leaves
14. Lettuce Tesy Salad Leaves
15. Lettuce Lobjoits Green Salad Leaves
16. Lettuce Cantarix Salad Leaves
17. Lettuce Grenoble Red Salad Leaves

What I’ve planted

No big plantings this week, but I continue to fill in gaps with spares.

1. Rubine red sprouts
2. Bedford sprouts
3. Calabrese
4. Reflex kale
5. Sweet corn
6. Baby Leeks
7. Celariac
8. Spring onions
9. Outdoor tomatoes
10. Outdoor cucumbers
11. Outdoor gherkins

What I’ve potted on

1. Outdoor cucumbers (to keep as spares)
2. Outdoor gherkins (to keep as spares)

First harvests of the year

Using the same technique my first harvest database now also gives me a nice summary view of the week’s first harvests.

Cut off at the bottom of the photo are baby leeks!

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears – March
2. Winter squash – March (we still have some in the freezer)
3. Carrots – May week 2
4. Garlic – May week 3 (we have still have pickled garlic and green garlic to harvest)
5. Shallots – May week 4 (strictly speaking we didn’t run out, they just sprouted and got bad greenfly)
6. Onions – June week 1 – we are processing the few that are left and freezing them
7. Beetroot – June week 1 – the few that are left have gone soft

Last harvests

1. Celery – May week 1
2. Last years kale – May week 1
3. Perpetual spinach – May week 3
4. Purple sprouting broccoli – May week 4
5. Chard – June week 1

What’s left in store

1. Potatoes – 1/4 medium sized bags
2. Dried Apples – 1/2 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

I’m not tracking water now that the taps are on:

1. Allotment reserves (Steve) :
2. Allotment reserves (Jennie):
3. Allotment reserves (Debbie):
4. Home reserves :

What have we processed for preserving

1. 70kg of broad beans for freezing
2. 10kg of onions for freezing
3. 6 jars of strawberry jam

Highlights

1. Although we’ve had tomatoes for months now, we finally got a harvest from the polytunnel plants, Tumbling Tom yellows, very sweet!
2. Our garlic harvest this year is superb, but we muddled up the types last year and planted way too many hard necks!
3. The runner beans won the race for first and best early beans, one container in the polytunnel is yielding very well!
4. We completed the harvest of the broad beans, about 70kg, which is by far our biggest harvest.  We don’t freeze much, but broad beans are so easy and freeze so well that we do them.  We also need to free up the ground for squash and leeks that go in next week.
5. We cleared the carrot bed that had gone to seed and actually managed a decent harvest, enough for a couple of weeks, we have plenty of other carrots ready too
6. The peppers have finally started growing

Lowlights

1. Most of the elephant garlic failed to split into cloves, yielding just large mono-bulbs.  This is the first time we’ve grown it so maybe we should have left it for another month, who knows.  Anyway we will save some and plant it for next year.
2. Greenfly continue to be a challenge, especially on the red lettuce
3. I suspect that the company who look after our lawn managed to get weed killer on some of our veg beds, as a result the chard is alive but not growing, so I need to plant that again