Allotment Diary (August – Week 4)

How much time have I spent on the allotments?

There’s actually a fair bit of work to do on the allotments, but the weather has been good for cycling and hiking, so that’s taken precedence and I will have a couple of days on the allotment next week.  This week it’s just been harvesting and watering really and that’s just taken 7.5 hours.

Allotment Finances

I’ve now added the value of our preserves into our running total harvest value, so that gives us a total for 2019 of £5,880+£287 = £6167.   We’ve spent a total of £973 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. I only take one picture per harvest, so this is nowhere near everything we picked, but it’s a nice summary.

 

We harvested a total of £222 worth of fruit and veg this week, excluding everything from the store. We had 30 meals with ingredients from the allotment.  We’ve finally processed some of the onions and shallots and moved them into the store, so I’ve added those to the total, lots more to go.

We picked: Peppers, sprouts, main crop runner beans, main crop French beans, main crop onions, calcots, a few of the main crop potatoes,cucamelons, main crop tomatoes, main crop shallots, over-wintered shallots, Sweetcorn, Crown Prince squash, Aztec broccoli, gherkins, french beans, tayberries, red currants, chard, baking potatoes, trumbocino, cucumber, raspberries, red tomatoes, early runner beans, red and golden beetroot, mange tout broad beans, celery, courgettes, New Zealand spinach, golden purselane, strawberries, yellow tomatoes, carrots, calabrese, cauliflower, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves,  lots of types of kale, spring onions, mixed herbs and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: dried apples. Bold items are new this week.

People we are feeding

We are feeding 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)!  We are of course not providing these nine families with all of the veg they eat, just what we happen to have as a surplus in any particular week. Only Debbie and I manage to be fully self-sufficient in veg and seasonal fruit.

What we’ve bought this week

1. A lot of seeds for next year, all of the staples 🙂

Video’s this week

August weekly allotment harvest

Dehydrating season gets started with apples and pears

August Kitchen Garden Tour

Rambling on about getting older and still gardening

What I’ve sown

I’ve finally caught up with the seed sowing, it looks like everything has germinated apart from one tray of old spinach seeds.

What I’ve planted

Just a few radish and three late courgettes

What I’ve potted on

All of the brassicas for the ploytunnel

First harvests of the year

Nothing

 

What we’ve run out of in store

The store is rapidly filling up now with garlic, shallots, onions and potatoes, but it’s not full yet so I’m not going to start tracking it until then.

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
6. Onions – June week 2 (we have fresh onions now of course)
7. Beetroot – June week 3 (we have fresh beets now of course)
8. Carrots – June week 4 (we have fresh carrots now of course)

What’s left in store

The store is rapidly filling up now with garlic, onions and potatoes, but it’s not full yet so I’m not going to start tracking it until then.

Water Reserves and Rainfall

I didn’t intend tracking water reserves until the taps go off, however it’s been a remarkable month.  We’ve been totally self-sufficient in water for over a month now due to huge amounts of rain.  However the tap water has still been incredibly useful for harvesting.

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

What have we processed for preserving

Debbie has been hard at work preserving, taking advantage of the bad weather to work her way through the surplus that we’ve accumulated, I’ve started dehydrating and I’ve also started my first ever batch of apple cider vinegar, which we drink every day.

Highlights

1. No watering needed
2. Lots of time hiking and cycling
3. Started dehydrating apples
4. First ever batch of apple cider vinegar, using up the waste from dehydrating

Lowlights

1. The chard – like the beets – is suffering from fungal spot, so I’ve cut it all back to the base, in the hope that it will regrow in better condition
2. We continue to loose about a plant a week to cabbage root fly
3. About 1/4 of the peppers have caterpillar damage, which is a first for us