Allotment Diary (December – Week 3)
The slow growing season continues. I’ve had very few reasons to go to the allotment, or even into the garden. The good weather has seen me out on the hills instead and I’ve had two excellent walks with friends.
But the allotment is on the way home from the hills, so I’ve stopped off both times to do a quick harvest, especially the salad harvest!
I’ve now split our salad harvest in two, I do ours on a Thursday and everyone else’s on Sunday because it’s hard on my back and I find that if I split it I have no issues when I wake up on Monday!
I’ve decided to return the lovely sprout growing kit I bought a couple of weeks ago for two reasons. Most important I had a little stomach grumble every day after eating a serving and that stayed with me for a couple of hours. This happened with every batch. The extra health benefits wasn’t worth daily discomfort!
Also one of the mesh covers for the mason jars detached from it’s support ring, which didn’t bode well for the life of the product. I’m at a point in my life where – if possible – I like to buy things that are going to outlive me, so products that fail after two weeks most definitely don’t make the cut! We are however continuing to sow pea shoots.
On the gardening front everything is growing well. The new lettuces I planted a couple of weeks ago are well established now and putting on good growth, so they should be ready in March. My next batch are looking lovely and these will probably be ready in late March, early April. I have plenty of lettuces in the ground now of course, but they are occupying my best beds. These new ones will go into my worst beds (which will be fine in spring) leaving my best beds free for higher value crops that will appreciate them more.
I’ve also made myself a lovely batch of Granola which should last me for another month, Debbie’s made marmalade, so that’s breakfast sorted.
We also did the Christmas harvest for friends and family, we will sneak in an extra harvest for ourselves on Thursday.
Finally, my youngest daughter and her partner have just got a little dog for Christmas and so despite being in a level 4 lockdown, at least they have someone to fuss over on Christmas Day.
It’s very rare for me not to sow or plant anything, but that’s how it should be in December, a rest month!
Here’s this weeks sowing log.
As already mentioned I’m well on with the planting now, this is what I’ve planted this week.
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. We’ve now passed last year’s total harvest value and we still have a huge amount of food in the ground to harvest this year, so I’m expecting to harvest about £2,500 more than last year. This is party as a result of spending £200 extending the growing area in the back garden, a very nice payback!
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 week can be found here:
Looking forward to the book Steve. It is exactly what I need – how to become more organised as I am a little hit and miss with sowing and planting out. I do have some things that I can grow all year round – carrots, lettuce, fennel – but need more and next year is the year to do it! Thank you.
Sounds like you have an exciting year planned Joy : All the best – Steve