Allotment Diary (January – Week 5)

It’s been another cold and wet week, with only a few hours on the allotment to harvest. It’s not bothered me though because I’ve been busy decorating the bedrooms and that’s allowed me to make a dedicated – cool and dark – space for all of my seed packets.

It’s also allowed me to create a wonderful new space for grow lights. I’ve also put up a new shelf in the workshop for all of my module trays, which makes me much more organised. I relocated the lights onto the bottom of the shelf and that helps with the sowing and pricking out and I’ve done plenty of that this week!

The allotment site itself is still very soggy, the path is very muddy and lots of plots are still flooded and frozen, but mine is fine now.

I’ve also been excitedly watching the final few of my January sowings breaking surface, that’s as exciting as gardening gets right now!

I’ve managed a couple of beach walks, but everything is very blue without any sunshine and of course nothing is growing, so we still don’t really have a decent salad harvest! But we still have just enough to eat.

I’ve also been writing my book. New chapters this week include growing guides on alliums and legumes

Now that my seedlings have all germinated, everywhere warm and light – in the house – is full of module trays. Most of the polytunnel is full of seedlings hardening off. So not much can be sown now until mid-February. Here’s what I sowed this week:

Here’s what we planted this week

Here’s our harvests for the year so far, with the most recent at the top.  We hit our target for last year and harvested over £12,000.

Here’s a list of the preserves for last 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: