Allotment Diary (September 2020 – Week 3)
I’ve been away hiking this week. I walked the hills, the beach and the cliffs and it was wonderful.
It meant of course that there was very little time on the allotments. I managed to plant a few dozen turnips in containers at home and on my first day back I cleared one of the pepper beds and planted lettuce interplanted with spring onions.
I did dig up a few chili pepper plants and moved them into pots in the polytunnel and I might do that next week with a few of the sweet peppers too.
The seedlings I sowed before I went hiking have all germinated now, unfortunately two of the spinach varieties didn’t do so well, fortunately I sow spares and I also popped in another tray of Red Kitten just in case. If all goes to plan I’ve now finished sowing for September!
While on holiday I always like to do a bit of research and this week I figured out how to provide views onto my sowing/plantings database that are filtered for the actual week associated with this diary. This was always possible, but very time consuming and messy, now it only takes 5 seconds.
Here’s this weeks meagre sowing.
As already mentioned I’m well on with the planting now, this is what I’ve planted this week.
We also had an excellent harvest, spread over several days. It’s hard to photograph these harvests, but here’s an attempt at about half of it.
Here’s another quick photo from about 15 minutes into the harvest
One of my viewers commented recently that although I publish all of the varies that I grow, I don’t make it easy to find the seed supplier. Well I do my best to please. I now have a public view onto my database that lists every seed packet I’ve used in the last few years, as well as those I have in stock. You can find it here and embedded below.
It’s worth noting that these embedded views are very powerful, you can search, sort, filter and export from them.
Here’s our harvests for the year so far, with the most recent at the top.
Here’s a list of the preserves for the year.
I always like to keep a track of or first harvest dates and you can find a summary of those here:
Youtube videos for the month can be found here:
Interesting to hear about you digging up peppers. I’ve done that with hot ones and overwintered them, but I never thought of sweet ones. I actually plant some of the hot ones out for a second year. We had plans to getaway this week to Arizona but those plans will have to wait.
We are so lucky to have our gardens, great places to retreat from the worries of the world and with so much food stocked up all we really need is flour, sugar and a bit of butter (ours is frozen) and oil and we are sorted! Where do you keep your hot peppers over winter?
I have a light setup in our basement. and I keep the peppers there. I prune them back hard before bringing inside and I water just enough to keep them alive over the winter.
Yes, our gardens are that retreat. I’ve been especially thankful that the garden and freezer have meant very infrequent trips to the grocery store.