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July Week Five Saturday 28th 2007 This weeks excursion to the allotment once again proved to be a very productive one, on our arrival it became very clear that we had seen the last of the Sweet Pea flowers despite our meticulous deadheading and depodding. Yet these pretty blooms of recent weeks have only been surpassed by the glorious foliage and flowers of the Gladioli now inhabiting the front of the plot which hopefully will give us much pleasure for weeks to come. Beneath these some substantial Nasturtium, Poppy and Laveteria plants are beginning to take hold of the soil and we look forward to these bringing us some later summer colour once their spectacular over lookers have finished flowering.  'Summer Colour' Now some more pleasant weather is showing itself we can get back into the familiar routine of watering, weeding and harvesting which is the main back of work on the allotment at this time of year. Thanks to some substantial weeding over the past few weeks the plot is looking quite respectable and did not need a lot of attention in this respect during this visit and thanks to the significant rainfall we have been receiving of late the ground was also happily moist. As such we were able to participate in some more routine jobs which needed our attention in particular some damage control with relation to the strawberries and the copious amount of runners they have produced this year. To ensure the continuation of our nice healthy plants for another year, the majority of these runners were cut off and discarded. However, some which had already produced substantial miniature plants were trained into pots of soil and secured into them in order to allow rooting and the increase of our plant stock to replace our main plants after their three year cycle comes to an end. These shall remain in their pots or depending on growth be planted to get established before the harsh weather kicks in. 'Baby Strawbs' The largest and most exciting job this week was to harvest the shallots whom its leaves have gone from green, to yellow, to brown meaning that they have done all the growth they were going to do. To harvest the shallots we lifted the gently using a garden fork and then shook the excess mud off of them and placed them in a cardboard box in the sun so that the soil could dry off. Once the soil was dry we brushed all these off and replaced them into their cardboard boxes for storage until needed. The reason you must make sure the bulbs are dry and dirt free is because if this isn't done then the shallot can become rotten before you get round to using them. 'Shallot Harvest and the bed they were in' The majority of these shallots shall be turned into pickling onions for over winter use with our fish and chips. However the size of some of the bulbs this year was something else with them swelling to the size of a large onion. However these shall still be used as roasting onions with our future roast dinners. All in all we had around eight kilos of shallots from £3 worth of sets. 
'Whats that coming over the hill.... is it a monster?' Also on the onion front we couldn’t resist pulling the first of our red onions also. This was lifted in the same way but we could wait to fully open this and taste it so we cut the tops off and stripped the outside leaves off to reveal the most gorgeous red onion. The scent was something else. The rest of the crop should be ready for harvest with one month. 'What a Beauty' Other crops doing well this week on the plot were the peppers and chillies were the first large fruit had begun to set and was growing nicely in the warm environment that the monolith provides. The monolith adds around five to ten extra degrees of heat meaning that the tomatoes (whom all have blight) and the chillies thrive. These will continue to produce fruits right through t other first frosts. 'Hot hot hot Chilli Finally we checked upon our leeks which haven’t been checked for quite a while and we were thrilled to see that the small leeks we had transplanted into their final area had begun growing and were starting to fill the dibbed holes which they had been planted into. If you can remember these were started off in 1 large container and then transplanted directly into the soil and what we believe has increased the size and quickness of future growth. They are now at the width of a finger and will be a nice tasty size for harvesting right through the winter and into early spring. We are only thinking now that we should have grown some more of these as our soil loves leeks. 'Lushess Leeks' |
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