Allotment Diary (July – Week 2)

I’ve done almost no gardening this week as we’ve been concentrating on family. Anna, Thom and Mimi are visiting us from London. We’ve been out on the beach every day walking and playing with Mimi (the dog), I’ve been hiking with Thom and we’ve spent loads of time in the garden chilling out and foraging fresh fruit and peas.

The blueberries have finally arrived, literally over-night dozens of berries changed from hard and green to blue and soft, it always amazes me. We’ve an abundance of raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, cherries and blueberries now. The kids timed their visit well! Steph and Graham arrived yesterday, so we switched to full on party mode.

Willow also returned home from her first major operation, the holes in her heart were repaired and she emerged feisty as ever. She’s so much stronger now and even happier than she was before, although she’s a bit quieter because of the trauma to her voice box.

Harvest wise we have lots of red peppers now, the second early potatoes are ready and as planned they are perfect for baking.

The yield is about 3.5lbs per tuber, which would be acceptable for a main-crop harvest!

I spent a few hours on the plot to water and harvest. I was particularly pleased with the last of the garlic, which I’d interplanted into the strawberries.

Since we have more people staying and are doing more entertaining this week, we only harvested for our own consumption. It made a nice change to do such a small harvest, very relaxing!

I did plant a couple of salad beds too, as our February sown lettuce will be rising to seed soon. Right now though the salads are great!

I also harvested the first few tomatoes, but they don’t count as a first harvest as we don’t yet have enough to stop buying them in the shops.

I’ve a new way of tracking my first harvest dates now. 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 and one lucky extra person as we have a bit of a surplus.

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. We will never harvest as much again as we have less land now, our objective has changed now.

Here’s a list of the preserves for last year. We don’t have any preserves this year yet, although Debbie is certainly making a lot of stewed rhubarb and dried parsley for immediate use!

YouTube videos for the week can be found here: