Tuesday, 31 July 2018

31st July


I bought another strip of weed suppressing membrane for the leek section. With only 29 leeks and a lot of bare soil, I don’t want to be weeding until winter or be overrun with weeds like some of the other plots. It is my plan that next year, I will use this membrane over nearly all the plot. I say nearly all as some veg that are grown in rows like the Italian and Oriental salad or carrots would be tricky with membrane unless you use it as thin strips between rows but then it ruins the effectiveness. I would then rotate the membrane with the crops because the onion section will have holes 6 inches apart but the leek section will have holes 9 inches apart, then the courgettes would be 2-3 feet apart. Ideally this would also be combined with some wooden barriers, about the width of scaffolding boards, up on their sides so that the membrane can be right up to the edge of the section so that weeds in the cultivated section can be really blanketed out and weeds from the grass paths won’t encroach in. Of course, if possible, once I have sides up like that, I would like to obtain more soil of a lighter nature and make fully fledged raised beds, but that is an awful lot of soil!



Today at the allotment I took 2 bamboo sticks from home to give the 2 older cucumber plants something higher to be tied into. Apparently there is greater benefit in having the plants grow as high as possible as opposed to letting them sprawl on the ground like other squashes. I used one of the now spare poles to give support to the third, younger cucumber plant. After tying those in I went to harvest the onions. They looked poor and pathetic and some were starting to implode and shrivel so although the books say August for harvesting, I didn’t want to lose the precious little amount of onions I had. I dug up 77 healthy bulbs, and around 6-8 small, mushy ones that were rotting in the ground. I am reminded by this journal that back on the 9th April I planted out 161 sets and was rather optimistic of a great harvest of about 140-150 large bulbs. That date sticks in my mind because it was our anniversary meal out (one day after the actual anniversary) and while waiting for our lovely Italian food to arrive, I was telling my dear wife of now 13 years how much we would save on onions, considering the fact that onion prices were set to rocket this year due to last year's poor harvest. Pride certainly does come before a fall.

On examining my pumpkins and squashes, I stumbled on a huge pumpkin – well, for this time of year it was huge – about the size of a slightly deflated child’s football, while others are about a tennis ball in size. The crown prince squash nearest the fence has sent 2 runners out through the fence and they are making their way across the path towards the next plot. I gently bent them round and fed them back through the fence.

After this I set about weeding the showcase first section, the one that used to have such a good, fine tilth, no weeds, and nice straight rows of salad leaves. Well, the salads are still in straight lines, but many have bolted (mainly the leaves that we don’t like though, so no great loss). It is covered in thistles which were a pain to pull out, and I couldn’t help but shake them and in doing so send little fluffy seeds everywhere, including into my hair. I did a little more yanking up of bindweed around the chard and the cucumbers and under the stems of 1 or possibly even 2 pumpkins growing from the home made compost I placed in for the sweet peas. On that note, there is now a blue sweet pea flower.

I was pretty much spent and so called it a day. I didn’t even get round to repairing the holes in the fence before I risk planting out the leeks. On standing back and viewing the whole plot, it looks rather pathetic. A now bare onion section, what will be a sparse leek section, 2 sections of sprouts and a few calabrese that contain more and healthier and higher weeds than veg, and a still vacant section for broccoli. Yes, the squashes are doing great but what else will be so productive? I am comforted by the fact that this is a learning exercise and I have never cultivated so great a patch of land with such a variety of crops as this before. The theory was great but I didn’t count on such a sharp slice of reality cutting into my optimism.

 

The papers include news of a bee crisis. There is a mite that is infecting the honey bee population and decimating their numbers. Some source valued the bee community as being worth £165 million due to the fact they pollinate commercial vegetables, let alone the private ones that yours truly tries to grow. It makes me more inclined to consider the possibility of having a beehive, not just for free honey (which will be far more expensive by Christmas due to this) but also to do my part to help the lovely little insects.
 
Next post: 1st Aug

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