Allotment Diary (March – Week 4)
The weariness of last week faded away through this week, partly because the sun came out, but also because the rate of sowing and planting is much reduced now. Our lockdown starts to lift on Monday and I know I’m only a few days away from finishing the garden, having effectively finished the allotment last week. I will soon be down to an hour a day on the allotment and much more time out and about or reading in the sunshine.
My first job this week was planting the last of the main-crop onions on my plot, I’ve now about 480 in the ground, which is a year’s supply for Debbie and I. I’ve also got a thousand spring onions in of course and the shallots and our reserve onions are yet to be planted.
I’ve managed to good long walks in the dunes as well and they’ve been really lovely. I even managed a cycle ride.
The rest of the gardening week has been spent working on the back garden. I moved and repaired our second water butt. They are now connected together and out of the way at the back of the garden. We use this water for the blueberries and the potatoes, which both like acid rain.
I’ve also given the drive a thorough tidy up and brushed all of the loose gravel up. This is important because I start to walk around in bare feet in spring and the loose chips are hard on my pampered winter skin.
The allotment is now in full production and every bed that’s not producing is growing fast. Looking back at my diary for last year I was stunned to see the difference between now and mid-April when growth really goes crazy. Definitely something to look forward too!
Harvests are amazing at this time of year, we have all the standard stuff of course, but some old favourites are now arriving. In particular the first radish, the purple sprouting broccoli and the kale rapini. I’ve been extremely pleased with all of my July planted kales this year, they are in much better condition than the earlier plants.
Although we are well behind last years harvest levels, having 200m2 less land. We are still picking a respectable £150+ of veg a week.
I’ve a new way of tracking my first harvest dates now. With a few exceptions I’m only tracking first harvests from sowings in 2021, but it’s still useful. The beauty of this new system is that it’s fully integrated with my sowing records now, so I automatically get ‘sowing to harvest’ and ‘planting to harvest’ data. Here’s our first harvests for this week.
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:
Much of my garden time this winter has been in watering, especially now as the weather warms. We’ve had less than five inches of rain. Fortunately our rain harvesting yields about 800 gallons when we get an inch of rain. My weight lifting is hauling water the short distance to the beds. The 300 gallon tanks have hoses attached which makes watering easier. There is something very cheery about pulling a bright red radish or an orange carrot after so much green.
I am impressed by the number of onions you have planted! I stopped growing them myself here because we don’t use that many of them. The spring onions are handy have though, so I have a perennial bunching type growing and lots of chives which we use often.
Well we get through at least 6 uncooked spring onions a day and one medium sized – normally red – onion too. For specific recipes we will do shallots too : all the best – Steve
That’s amazing! On the allotments we can only catch 100 gallons per inch and maybe even less at home!