Photographs of things growing in June

After the cold May winds June has turned out to be rather damp.  While June has been wet it has not really been warm and the vegetables have not really been growing very quickly. 

I have harvested the comfrey and filled up both of the green bins.  I am watering comfrey on a lot of the vegetables so I am using up quite a bit.  

 The salsify and the scorzonera are growing quite well but I have not harvested any of them.  I took out a row of spinach and replaced it with a row of Swiss Chard.  The Swiss Chard has not germinated yet.  Beetroot and the Hamburg parsley are doing quite well.  

The carrots are pushing against the enviromesh they are growing so big.  I have begun to thin them out and use the small carrots in salads.  

The Swiss Chard and the parsnips  are coming along well although I would like to see them a little bigger. 

I have not used any of this spinach yet and it seems to be going to seed already.  I will make sure that I get some of this over the weekend.  

The strawberries have virtually finished now.  I have only had about 18kg off them.  Not bad I suppose.  I am going to leave the runners on the plants now to get some more plants for next year.  The stolons will have little plantlets on them and these are what I use to plant up the new strawberry bed.  

The potatoes are still taking over the world.  The heavy rain battered them about a little and now they are lying  a little flatter  The tops are right over the path and make it very difficult to get to the shed.  I can put up with this if there is a big crop of potatoes under all this foliage.  The old blokes keep on trying to convince me to take a few roots up to see how they are doing but I haven't yet partially to irritate them and partially because I want the biggest potatoes I can get.  

These are my oca and I am very proud of them.  I have five plants now and I will be treasuring them until I can build up a big stock of them.  The potatoes keep trying to cover them completely so I have to keep staking them back.  

The raspberries are beginning to fruit now and also throw up really long new canes.  These will be the fruiters next year and will have to be tied in so that the wind does not blow them over.  I haven't taken any of the raspberries home yet because I have eaten them all with my cup of tea. 

The big lettuce has not gone to seed yet and we are eating quite a few.  Still got a lot left though.  Looks like salad for tea today.  The lettuce succession is working well and I have replaced the garlic with broad beans and the new lettuce.  

The leeks are fine at the moment but I will have to cover them with enviromesh towards the end of July.  The onions are now being infected with white rot.  I doubt if I will  have a good crop of onions this year.  

This is the first main picking of the sweet peas.  They are looking and smelling good now.  

These are the Blue Danube that are going to be picked next.  

I didn't take a photograph of the blackberry although it is covered in fruit.  I noticed yesterday that they were turning black as well.   I know that I have an early one but blackberries in June?  

The Aintree runner beans have nearly got to the top of the canes now and there are some flowers on them as well.  I don't think that they will produce any beans for a couple of weeks though.  

Swedes and kohlrabi are forming swollen roots now.  I hope that they don't come too soon though.  When I crop them I will replace them with another brassicae.  If I keep all the brassicas together like this then there is less chance of club root infesting the soil.  Next year they will be rotated into the next bed.  

The calabrese is starting to head up now.  I will crop this when the heads get big enough and any that I cannot eat I will freeze.  They still taste relatively acceptable after freezing.

The purple sprouting brocolli are shading out the summer cauliflowers.  I will have to release the cauliflowers from their net because it is restricting their growth.  

The turnips are not very big yet but I expect them to be a reasonable size by next week.  The red Brussel sprouts are growing well but they need hoeing up so that they do not fall over.  

I have harvested some of the broad beans.  I got about 1kg off them at the first picking but there are an awful lot more on the plants.  

Brussel sprouts are coming along well.  I have hoed them up to help to stabilise them and prevent them from falling over.  They will produce roots along the stem where the soil has been earthed up against them.  This may also help to ward off cabbage root fly.  

One of the squashes has been eaten by slugs a little so I put a sunk a plastic cup and filled it with beer.  I t has not caught the culprit at the moment but I am hoping that it will in the near future.  The squashes have recovered from the cold winds of May but they are still not very big.  

 

I have five lines of peas each sown one week after the last and believe it or not they are all coming more or less at the same time.  I don't really mind because I will freeze the ones that we don't eat.  However, it would be good to grow them in some kind of succession.  

The dwarf French beans are doing well and are not too damaged by slugs and snails which cannot be said for the climbing French beans.

There are some climbing French beans there but they are very slug eaten which means that the courgettes and the sweet peas have taken over a little more than I wanted.  There are some courgettes on these plants already.  

So that is the state of the allotment towards the end of June.  Not bad at the moment.  

Partial successes

I have to admit that I am not a very good Florence fennel grower.  I have never been successful with it.  At the moment I have six plants growing - or should I say surviving? I would really like to know what I am doing wrong.  It shows you that, regardless of how long you have been growing vegetables, you still have things to learn.

I am really pleased with them but I would have liked to have more.

Together with the climbing French beans, which have been devastated by the slugs, I am not doing as well as I would like.

Still, without some partial successes it would not be gardening.

I still can't get the climbing French beans to start to grow well.  I think that it is the coolish June weather that is holding them back.  I might put cloches over the cucumbers to help them over this cold weather.  However, they are doing remarkably well and may not need them.

A big success has been the oca.  I now have five plants which I am very proud of.  I hope they taste good after all the effort I have put into them.  Five out of six is great but I am still looking to see if the sixth one is going to poke its head through.

The onions are growing well but I think I may have taken the barriers off too soon.  Some of them are showing definite onion fly damage.  I am watering with rainwater and diluted comfrey liquid so they are fairly big plants.  I hope that the bulbs swell towards the end of the month.

Peas are beginning to flower and fruit now.  There are not as many pea pods as I would like, which shows that it does not matter how big the plants grow if they do not produce the crop then it is only a partial success.
There are no failures on my allotment.  :-))

Am I getting a profit from my allotment?

Now, if I think that I am getting a profit out of my allotment, I really know that I'm being foolish because I do not take into account the amount of time I spend working on the garden.

However, it is good to see how much I would have had to pay if I bought the produce in a supermarket such as Tesco.  All of my harvest is organic so I look for the price for each of the organic vegetables and put that on my spread sheet.

I have had about 15.6kg of strawberries off the five rows.  At Tesco's prices for organic strawberries of £0.83 for 100grams, it means that I have made about £130.  Now when would you go out and buy £130 of strawberries?

This year, over all, I have spent a total of £260 on seeds etc. So the strawberries on their own have covered at least half of my allotment costs and there are still a lot of strawberries on the plants.

On a completely different tack, I have decided to go into the town allotment competition.  You get points for tidiness, crop rotation, succession and composting but the major points are gained from the vegetables themselves.  The only vegetable I am not growing is celery but it is such a faff to get this to grow properly and keep it slug free that I really cannot be bothered to grow it.  I am not going to grow it just for the competition.

I should score quite well for my peas, dwarf French beans, cabbage, cauliflower, broad beans, winter vegetables, runner beans, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, beetroot and parsnips.  I am not too sure how they are assessed because a lot of them will not be their full size until the autumn.

There is a category for soft fruit but my strawberries and blackcurrants have been harvested and either eaten or frozen.  This leaves my raspberries and blackberries.  I could score a little on them.

Another category is flowers.  Well the sweet peas should give me some more points.   So I thought that I would give it a go.  It is good to see how well you are doing in comparison with others.  I am not going to wait with bated breath till I hear the result; I am just going to continue harvesting as usual.

I grow for food, exercise and fresh air.  Nothing else matters much.  But it would still be good to win the competition.  Chance would be a good thing.

The allotment is doing quite well now.

The peas have started to fruit and make pods.  I was a bit worried that I had made their lives very easy and that they were not going to produce any peas at all.  I weeded them a few days ago and now they are looking very neat and tidy.  I have had to put even more string around them because they have significantly over topped the chicken wire.  If the peas flop about they do not seem to produce many pea pods so I like to keep them growing upwards.  The tallest row is now about four feet tall and still growing.

All the dwarf French beans have survived being put out into the allotment.  I watered them with comfrey liquid today just to keep them growing.  The turnip row I put in here is growing on much better than the ones on the brassicae bed.  I don't think that there is as much flea beetle on the pea bed.

Brassicas are growing big.  The broad beans are just coming now.  I will probably pick a few at the weekend.  The Aintree runner beans are nearly to the top of the support canes.  They would have been at the tops but I nipped out the growing tips of the lead stems to encourage side shoots from the bottom of the plants.

The sweet peas are flowering  and producing an incredible scent.  I have some good stems - some with five buds.  I watered these with comfrey liquid today just to keep them growing and producing.

The Webs Wonderful lettuce have hearted up now and I will have to eat them quickly before they go to seed.

The onions and leeks are not growing as fast as I would like them to.  I doubt if they will be very big for the town competition but, hey, you can't have everything.

The sweet corn has decided to grow now and is getting quite big.  So too are the ridge cucumbers. They really need some warmer weather to keep them growing.  I was thinking of putting the cloches over the cucumbers to give them a little more warmth and protection.  I'll do this at the weekend if I do it at all.

The potatoes got a bit battered down by the rain and are only now recovering.  Everyone wants me to dig one up to see what they are like but I don't think I will until they stop flowering.

The raspberries have begun to fruit but I don't know how many will find themselves home. I usually eat all of them at the allotment.  I think the crop this year will be bigger than I would be able to eat so a few might be made into jam.

It seems, from what people say, that my roots will get some points in the town allotment competition.  They are doing all right but nothing particularly special.

I will crop the comfrey and put it into the digester bins at the weekend.  I am seriously running out of comfrey liquid, although I have been making significant amounts of it over the last few months.  I am going to use nettles as well so that I can get maximum amount of nutrients into the mixture.

I got some shredded paper today so I put it onto the compost heap and covered it with a generous layer of grass mowings.  The mowings were hot and steaming.  I hope that they don't set the shredded paper alight.

General Summer Allotment Chores

The first thing I did today was to water the onions with comfrey liquid.  They are still growing fairly well and I think they will produce some big bulbs.  As I was on a roll I did the sweet corn and the pumpkins too.

I weeded around the lettuce carefully and then put my beer traps along the first line.  I have had some big slugs and snails in the lettuce but I did not see any when I was weeding.  Hopefully, they will go for the beer rather than my lettuce.

The beer traps consisted of a plastic cup dropped into a hole with some beer in it.  I covered the traps with broken slabs mainly to keep the rain out.

The rest of the onion bed was weeded and watered with comfrey liquid.

I had a cup of tea and a flapjack cake.  My favourite.

I was going to take the blackcurrants bushes out because they had big bud mite on them.  However, when I looked at them carefully they had all made some really good growth from the base of the branches.  I decided to just prune hard back to these ground level shoots.  As I pruned them back I took all the currants off the stems.  Most of them were ripe but I took off the unripe ones as well.  If you are only making jam with them the green ones will help the jam to set.

To pick black currants you need the patients of a saint.  It is incredibly pernickety.  Still I got another 2kg of currants off the pruned branches.   


Put some more beer traps under the climbing French bean supports.  The slugs and snails are still devastating the beans here.  The runner beans are fine and have flowers on them.  


I picked some American land cress and lettuce to take home.  I have had them for salad this evening.  


As part of the allotment competition you need to have compost heaps on the go.  Mine are just piles of stuff I have taken off the allotment - like the blackcurrant branches.  I thought that I might as well cover these up with some grass mowings and soil from the mega compost heap.  I got five barrow loads of grass mowings but only one barrow load of mega compost.  Looks a bit more like a compost heap now.  


I don't know why I am bothered about the allotment competition.   I just want to know whether my allotment is as good as others in the town.  I think that I will find that it is better than some and not as good as others and I will be none the wiser.  

How I treat the soil for each of the vegetable types.

There is a science to gardening, however the variety of different soil conditions and environments means that growing plants is more down to knowing and understanding your own small growing area than the generalities of ideal conditions.


Is gardening  more of an art than a science?  Certainly the better you know your local conditions the better you can grow plants.


So all things considered the preparation of the soil for different vegetables probably needs to be changed depending on the plants grown.  I cannot honestly say that I prepare the soil particularly differently for any of my vegetables.  I might get an even better crop if I did but the general strategy is to pack as much carbon into the soil as it will take - and its appetite for carbon seems to be insatiable.


So what different strategies do I use for each of the vegetable beds?


During the winter I marinade charcoal in comfrey liquid.  This infuses the charcoal with nutrient and I add this inoculated charcoal to the planting holes of most of  the vegetables - until it runs out.


I see the peas and beans to be net contributors to the soil fertility.  After cropping they will be dug into the soil to add nitrogen. When I was young I was told that you should cut off the tops of peas and beans and put them onto the compost heap leaving  the roots in the soil. The roots add nitrogen.  This is true but roots only contribute about 30% of the available nitrogen.  60% of the nitrogen is in the stems and leaves of leguminous plants (peas and beans).  So, I dig these into the soil too. This will be done at the end of the year for the roots to get the benefits next year.  


If manure or tree leaves are available I will dig these into the pea and bean bed in the autumn and winter.  I put charcoal and a pinch of mychorrhizal fungi in all of the planting holes.  Together with that, I will water the peas and beans with comfrey, sweet cicely, nettle and worm bin liquid mix during the year.  This year I have been able to put a 50 - 100mm top dressing of good home made, friable compost over the whole area. It is full of weed seeds but I can put up with this because it is also full of nutrients. Chicken manure is sometimes used as a base fertiliser along the rows before planting.  


The comfrey liquid is not scientifically mixed.  Whenever I can crop each of the ingredients, I add them to the digester bins to rot down.  What goes in the bins, stays in the bins.  Everything seems to end as a liquid.


I do not add any farmyard manure or leaves to the brassicae bed.  The bed is given a good dose of lime to prevent the brassicas getting club root (Plasmodiophora brassicae.)  The plants are watered in with comfrey liquid and given charcoal in their planting holes.  The summer brassicas are given comfrey liquid to bring them on during the summer.  The winter vegetables are given nothing because they seem to fair much better if left to fend for themselves.  If you feed Brussel sprouts too much, the buds will "blow" or open out before they can be harvested.
Cauliflowers and cabbages do like to have nitrogen in the soil and this is added in the form of chicken or pigeon manure during the winter or early spring.  


The onion bed gets as much organic matter as I can find.  That is farmyard or horse manure, leaves, grass mowings, weeds etc.  The onions seem to relish lots of organic matter in the soil.  This is another bed that I covered with a top dressing of home made compost.  Great stuff except that it has a lot of weed seeds in it.  When planting, I put charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi in the planting holes.  The onions are watered with comfrey during the year but the solution is very dilute. Onions do  not like too much nitrogen in the soil.  The do require a damp root run and just watering will do this more than adequately.  Really, for my rotation system, I should be liming the onions to keep the pH quite high -to about 6.5 to 7.5.  I will do this in 2012.


The potato bed had quite a lot of horse manure and leaves dug into it last autumn.  They were planted with charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.  They have had nothing else.  I have not even watered them.  If pigeon or chicken manure is available then that is used on the potatoes as well.  


The roots did not have anything dug into their soil except the old bean and pea haulms; grass mowings and weeds.  This will avoid the problem with forking that manure stimulates.  I put comfrey liquid in the sowing drills and a little mychorrhizal fungi.  That is all that they have had this year.  I have watered them  during the very dry weather.


And that is it more or less.  So if you do this for 30 years or so you will get an allotment as good as mine.  


I cropped the garlic yesterday and it has white rot in some of the bulbs.  I had to throw away about 6 of them.
The others are drying in the store shed.
I harvested one large lettuce, some American land cress and some spinach.


The weather is still particularly cold and this is preventing the vegetables from growing.  There is no point in worrying about this because nothing can be done.


There are more strawberries ready to be picked.    You can certainly eat too many strawberries.