Allotment Diary (April – Week 2)

It’s been another great growing week on my allotment. It’s been sunny and cold, but most of that cold has been from the north wind and my low tunnels and cold-frames protect the veggies nicely from winds from the North and West. I’ve had to stop off at the plot morning and night to open and close up, but to be honest I like it that way. Debbie and I have been taking our evening walk around the plot, which is a treat during the fine weather of spring and summer.

It’s not been good weather for planting though and as a result I’ve a lot of stuff queued up waiting for frost free nights, which should arrive next week. I have however managed to plant a few courgettes and continue to clear beds and interplant existing beds as opportunities arise.

Debbie and I have also finished the front garden. We put down card and a few tons on compost a couple of weeks ago and then wood chip for the paths last week. This week I top dressed the beds with composted peat and seaweed and a few other amendments, so it’s ready for planting now.

Other then that it’s been long walks, short cycle rides, a bit of writing and lots of reading on the patio.

A lot of my attention has been directed away from gardening this week though because my first granddaughter finally made it home from hospital after a 7 week stay. She has two holes in her heart that will need repairing in a couple of months, but right now she’s doing great. I’ve spent two days looking after her, a couple of hours each day. I’m in my element!

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, so I automatically get ‘sowing to harvest’ and ‘planting to harvest’ data. New firsts are at the top.

Here’s what I sowed this week:

Here’s what we planted this week.

We are now at full harvest volume, feeding everyone on our target list for this year. We have a way to go before we are growing everything they eat each week, but for dozen or so things that are available in the hungry gap, we are happy.

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.

YouTube videos for the week can be found here: