Allotment Diary (March – Week 3)

I’ve been tried this week and a bit lacking in motivation. I always get this way in March as I grow weary of sowing and planting, too much preparation and not enough pottering around and harvesting in the sunshine. I’d normally have mitigated this weariness with a holiday in February and another in March, these would be put a spring back in my step, but it’s not to be, so I’m weary.

Fortunately we’ve had a couple of days of sunshine and now the allotment is effectively finished I’ve been working on the back garden. Hoping for lots of sunny days in my future I put up the sun-canopy and it’s support wires and got the loungers out and I even enjoyed one afternoon of reading.

I’ve worked my way through the garden: clearing beds, mulching them, cutting the lawn, laying out the potato tubs and planting peas and beetroot.

I also fertilised all of the trees and raspberries (concentrated cow manure, seaweed meal and BFB) and mulched them and all of the paths with a few inches of wood chip. I will be working on the back garden now until the end of March when I take a rest from the garden until I start planting potatoes!

Debbie has started on her spring project, transforming the front garden into a ornamental edible garden. We’ve removed a very old hawthorn tree, which we will replace with a Concorde Pear and we are in the process of weakening the grass, before covering it with a thich compost mulch. The large stones you can see near the wall will be moved (by the kids) to contain the 6″ of compost and wood chip (paths) that will cover the grass.

The only real progress on the allotment has been a little weeding, the first nematode treatment to control the slug population and the first planting of main-crop onions and lots more interplanting into every gap I can find!

I’ve done a bit of sowing too.

Other than that I’m pleased to see my main-crop brassica seedlings coming through, I’ve potted on the celery and another batch of potatoes.

Harvest wise things are looking good. Less than last year of course, as we have a lot less land, but a wider selection of veg for the reduced number we are growing for, which is exactly to plan. In particular I worked hard to get more leeks and root veggies this year!

I’m particularly pleased with the salad and the spinach harvest.

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: