The Good Life

Rainy and windy so no digging tonight. Got some piccies off my camera though.

Here’s Rob working that topsoil. Moira the bee lady is in the distance to the right. I think this was the day that he said to her Do you reckon the bee keeper will give us some honey? Well she did, so well done Rob.

  Here’s the allotment in full swing. Well almost in full swing, this is post slug ravagement. Tatties are in the foreground and you can just see the onions, and a row of tomatoes beyond the second line of bottles.

The peas are hiding under the little shroud in the distance. It’s a thin fleece for keeping birds off.

Next dig is planned for Sunday. We’re out Friday and Saturday night so it could be painful. Hopefully the pea frame will have withstood the wind, rain and weight of the pea plants.

We’ve both got loads of stuff growing at home which needs planting out, so we best get clearing some ground!

I have made a breakthrough in our slug control problem: Nematode worms. I was going to go for the traditional beer trap method, using only the finest cans of Special Brew as my choice of liquid doom, but out of the blue a mate at work told me about Nematode worms and their slug killing capabilities.

Its a fairly simple process. You buy a bag of dried Nematode eggs from the garden centre, put them in your watering can and water your plot. The worms hatch, seek out slugs and burrow inside them before spending a few days eating their insides out, resulting in slug death. I love nature.

Im still going to put some beer traps out and I’ve also started collecting egg shells, another good deterrant. But I’m more excited about the prospect of a microscopic army of killers on the loose, under mine and Rob’s control.

Went down the allotment today and spent an hour putting up a pretty pathetic climbing frame of netting and canes for our peas. The peas have come up quickly so I thinned them out into two rows and built the frame for them. No sign of our sweetcorn yet.

The new crop of radish and lettuce are just starting to sprout, did a bit of weeding and was pleasantly surprised to find that Moira had left us a jar of honey which tastes really nice. I checked that the Nematode army wouldn’t get in her bees brains and eat them (no, perfectly safe) before cycling off to see a man about a Bonsai.

Would you believe it, he makes £150,000 during December selling his trees to wholesalers. I think I’ve found a new vocation. All in all a good day.

Update (10/06):

My workmate didn’t manage to get any nematodes for me. I’ll have to buy some online.

Well, after a year or so of half-hearted attempts, I finally got myself an allotment.

My friend Rob is also a keen gardener so he came in on the deal, and with the power of 4 hands and legs we aim to become skilled horticulturists, thereby removing our dependance on the fruit and veg section of the supermarket.

I’ve created a blog to record our struggles with mother nature, the killer bees on the plot next door and of course our insatiable appetite for going out on a weekend which has been an obstacle to weekend working. Hopefully we can look back on this record and use it to make our further years more productive.

We are several weeks into working on it now, so I will summarise our efforts thus far with a bit of a ramble, then just update as and when we go down to the ‘farm’.

Here’s how it all began… Day 1.

I covered two thirds of the plot in carpet to help keep weed growth down and started digging. That’s two hours work you see there. The ground was like concrete. Honest.

At this point I was thinking it might be easier to grow carpets. They are low maintenance and a much sought after crop in the housing market.

During my intense digging workout ( I’m a computer programmer – manual labour means nothing more  than the effort required to read the instructions for my latest gadget these days) I met my neighbours.

There’s Judy and her mum in the plot above ours (behind where I’ve taken the photo) and also to the left. We’ve subsequently named her mum Jealous Woman due to the fact we can’t remember her name and she just watches us at work and throws in the odd comment like ‘Your soil is loads easier to dig than ours’, ‘You haven’t got half as many weeds as us’. No love, mine and Rob’s combined age is less than yours so we dig just a little bit faster than you. And where do you think we’ve been chucking our weeds.

To the right there’s Moira, or ‘bee lady’ as we have affectionately dubbed her. Though the affection may not last much longer if she can’t control her little tearaways. To cut a long story short, we have been attacked, chased and stung by her bees on a regular basis for the last month or so.

Apparently this is due to an aggressive queen in one of her hives which is making the workers go for anything that looks like me or Rob. Moira is on the waiting list for a new queen which should calm them all down and in the meantime we are playing a softly softly approach and trying not to antagonise them. Have you ever tried to dig hard soil ‘gently’? Nope me neither, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

A couple of doors down, there’s fag bloke. So named because all he seems to do is sit and smoke roll-ups and look over his plot, which seems to be doing amazingly well under his gaze.

The soil is quite heavy clay so has been hard to dig over and work. It is also full of bindweed, which is a real bugger because you have to manually pull every little bit of root out of the ground else it grows back. Afer digging you are left with lots of big hard lumps of soil which are difficult to break down, but luckily the previous owner left us a present…

The pile of earth at the far end of the picture is all lovely top soil. The previous owner stripped the turf off the plot and piled it up there, where it has rotted and crumbled into a fine consistency. This has been quite a saving grace, allowing us to dig the plot over then add a few inches of top soil, giving us good beds to work on.

Anyway, fast forward and here’s the plot after 2 months work…

 The bottles are protecting what’s left of the brassicas after I stupidly planted 2 inch high seedlings out without any protection from birds. I have a ‘reserve’ force currently growing at my flat.

The green line you see are our radishes. They are a fast crop to grow, in fact they were a little over 3 weeks old, yet already able to provide a tasty snack while working. In front of the radishes are onions, lettuce and potatoes.

Beyond the bottles we plan to plant peas, sweetcorn, tomatoes, courgettes and squash, which are growing at the home nursery.

So now, onward to 2 weeks ago …

Radishes galore! Our first crop came of age.

After a week or so of good weather we turned up to the allotment to find the radishes had made amazing progress and most were fully grown and begging to be taken home and put in a salad. The lettuces were up and I thinned them out into two rows of 15. The onions were starting to make progress and the potatoes (we only put one row of 4 in ) were well on their way. What a good start, pat on the back and smiles all around. I didn’t even mind getting stung that day. The smiles didn’t last too long though, and three days later we came back to disaster. Slugs.

So far we hadn’t been bothered by slugs too much. The odd nibble here and there, nothing too bad. But in the interval between our previous, happy visit, it had chucked it down constantly which I guess must have brought them out in hungry droves. I arrived at the allotment and when I got to our plot, it looked like a wasteland. Where have all the lettuces gone and why do all the radishes look ragged, I thought. My first suspect was Jealous Woman, but on closer inspection tell tale silver trails solved the mystery. Every lettuce except one gone, and nibbles taken out of most of the remaining radishes by slugs. What a bummer.

Not to be disheartened, I harvested the remaining radishes and re-seeded both lettuce and radish beds before going home. The following day we carpet bombed the plot with slug pellets as an interim measure until we can research some organic methods of slug disposal. We also planted some peas and sweet corn at the far end.

And now to the present …