Allotment Diary (March – Week 1)

I’ve just watched a video of the allotments at this time last year and it’s quite enlightening to see the differences. By far the biggest difference is that this year we now have no kalettes left on the allotment, whereas last year we still had about 4 plants. Kalettes give a huge winter harvest so that’s a big difference and it’s arisen because we gave up Jennie’s plot, which had most of them last year. This year my plot will have plenty.

Set aside the kalettes though and we are in a much better position than we were last year and that fills me with confidence that we made the right decision when we gave up Jennie’s plot. I’m especially encouraged by the fact that I can see a lot of potential for improving still further this year.

I’ve now completed planting my plot with all the crops that will be harvested in spring and to be honest that’s 90% of the plot. Focus now switches to the back garden where all of the hardy summer veg will be planted over the next two months and then back to my plot in late May when it will all be re-planted for summer.

In addition to planting I’ve now trimmed all of the onions and they are looking much better for it.

I’ve also removed the top 4″ of my trees in buckets and applied the year’s fertiliser to them. I will top up with bark of wood chip.

I now just have broad beans and peas for shoots to plant and these are almost hardened off, so these will get planted out on Monday, under fleece.

I’ve also planted my early kales and interplanted with radish. Hopefully, if I get my timing right, these kales will be ready before my winter kales finish!

Finally I’ve decided to under-plant my purple sprouting broccoli with field beans. A lot of my beans were damaged in the ‘big freeze’ so these extras will be useful. I’m also trialing this under-plant to use under kalettes, sprouts and PSB next yer.

Harvests this this week have been excellent, we broke another harvesting record. We have a better range of food than we did last year too.

Just a little sowing this week, I’m finished now for the month, plenty to get started with in March though, here’s what I sowed this week:

Here’s what we planted this week although I also filled all the gaps in the salad beds with spare calabrese, cauliflowers and new lettuces.

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: