Weather report

We've crammedi n a cheeky little weather forecast panel on the site to help predict when we have to go do watering duties at new yorkshire. We're all away over the weekend, so fingers crossed for a downpour.

We'll probably change it for a better one in the near future. this one seems to read our wonderful posts and creates annoying ads based on them.

Contrary to an earlier post about planting grapes next spring, we decided to throw in some grapes now so that they can catch the last of the summer and hopefully be off to a good start (then wine thereafter!).

That said, we got a green grape vine and a black grape vine off ebay for about a tenner each. Ebay is GREAT for buying seeds and saplings, and even trees, especially late in the season! They arrived a few days later wrapped up like an xmas tree, which was a suprise to all in our office. But they're kind of getting used to our green fingers by now.



Adam managed to get them planted up the back wall last night, so we hope it won't be long before they take over the entire fence and start dangling us some grapes of joy!

Watch this topic :)

Ooh la la

Yesterday we picked up a couple of onions from the patch that we had inherited. The rest of them are nearing their fateful destiny to be plucked and thrown into stews, salads and chillis.

Once we've cleared this patch out, we plan to transplant some of the seedlings, from the seedling bed - it's getting rather overgrown as we were a bit over zealous on seed sprinkling. So hopefully in a few months time we'll have a fine crop of celery, broccoli and leeks where the onions once sat happily.

In other allotment related news, everything is going well and sprouting into life. Including a huge influx of weeds that we have great difficulty distinguishing from seedlings.

Marigolds!

Marigolds are meant to be great for the garden for two reasons:

1. They attract bees and other useful insects
2. They apparantly help repel some unwated insects due to the scents they give off

Plus, they look really pretty and liven up the plot. We planted 12 or so, and hope that we'll notice a few less annoying pests and a few more bees to help pollinate stuff, and hoverflies and wasps to help kill unwanted pests. Fingers crossed that these organic beacons of hope do us good!

Here's a brief article on biological pest control - something that inspired the planting of non-edible plants in the allotment. We expect to do more reading and get some more pretty things planted in soon!

Look what turned-up!

Much to our delight, the turnip seeds we planted the other day have begun to sprout up in a neat little line at the front of our plot.

We'll probably leave them here for a few weeks, then start spreading them out, and giving to our allotment neighbours, once they get a bit tougher. Probably going to put them in place of the onion patch, most of which are almost ready for harvest.

No sign yet from any of the other seedlings though: the race is on!

By the way, check out a few of the health benefits of turnips here, including that turnip juice has twice the amount of vitamin C as orange juice...WOW! maybe doesn't go quite as well with a croissant though.

On the grapevine...

What could be better than brewing your own booze? How about growing your own grapes and hops then brewing your own booze. Home grown and home brewed!

We've got a big metal mesh fence at the back of the plot, which faces south and gets sploshed in hours of summer sunshine. It would be ideal for some vine-like plants to climb up. Vine like plants such as grapes and hops.

Sadly, after much investigation, it seems we missed the time to plant them (early spring). So looks like we'll have to wait until next year to get them going. This means that it probably won't be 'our round' until xmas time 2011 - but it should be a very merry xmas at that!

Here's 2 articles that seemed useful: growing hops and growing grape vines

Slugs: Copper load o this!

Within a few days of sorting out our plot, we noticed something had been chewing away at our plants. Prime suspect: slugs and snails!

The easy option would be to reach for a bottle of slug pellets and pepper the plots with poisonous little nuggets for the buggers to feast on. However, we're trying to do this gardening thing as organically as possible, so that was out the question.




The first plan was to draft in some frogs for the communal pond, which are in transit as we speak (keep posted for more on that). Until then, we did some research and one method that sounded like it probably wouldn't work was creating a barrier of copper tape around the bed, which apparantly slugs/snails won't be too happy crossing due to their slimey bits reacting with the copper. We thought we'd give it a go.



That said, we laid down a barrier of tape around one of the beds to test, after which we plucked out any slugs and snails we could find - probably not a good plan to trap them in with our beloved veg.

Let's hope this works - if not, we've got plenty more organic pest control plans for the plot.

Seedy business

The first task today was to round up all the stray/wild baby carrot plants and beetroots throughout the plot and herd them into neat rows in the front bed. Hopefully here they'll reward our caring efforts with thick chunky veg in a few month's time. Also gives us space to work and a fresh start on the over-grown beds.

After this, we rigged up 3 or 4 pea plants to the wigwam, along with a few garlic seedlings being strewn throughout the plot to ward off bugs and stuff apparently (in other words to clear out my fridge 'cause my housemate is getting annoyed).

A kind neighbour donated us a bunch of cabbage plants/beetroots, which we slapped in to trenches behind the onion patch.

We dug neat line after neat line and sewn in seeds of various plants including celery, turnips, parsnips, radishes, leeks, cauliflower and broccoli. These have varying harvest times, ranging from 3 months up to a year (broccoli). I was never such a broccoli fan, so can wait that long quite happily.

Anyway, we're starting to get a huge variety now. Kind of like a vegetarian Noah's Ark if you like!

An apple a day...

Many moons ago, we planted an apple pip in a small container at work. Fast forward two years, and that apple pip has become a huge, 2m tall tree. Apply. She has far out grew the office and has no room to get any bigger- one might say it hit the proverbial glass ceiling!

Anyway, ceilings aside, we realised the best thing for it, what with our new bit 'o' land, was to move it to the great outdoors. We're sure it's going to flourish from a bendy stick-like thing with leafs into a real tree, and hopefully even fruit in the next few years.

That shabby looking scarcrow was camping out under the weeds when we moved in - it seemed cruel to smash it up and bin it. Plus, it probably scares off the local kids from trying to retrieve thier footballs after seeing a bunch of men hanging out with this straw-haired transvestite.

The Yorkshire (Japanese) Tomato Ring

A big part of the New Yorkshire allotment is to try out new/non-conventional growing methods, and see how they fare against the more orthodox efforts and techniques of the other plots. A key part of this is to conserve room, or rather maximise the use of space, what with the New Yorkshire pitch being 2 plots each approx. 1.5meters x 6meters.

Anyway! Some time ago, we discovered discussions on a 'Japanese Tomato Ring' (nothing to do with the horror film/wells/vhs tapes). What is this 'tomato ring' you ask? In summary, it's a wire-made cylindrical tower of compost and leaves (etc), about 1m diameter, with 3 or 4 tomato plants on its outer circumference. Apparently, the tomatoes send their roots up into the tower of nutrients, allowing them to yeild massive amounts of tomatoes - check out this article for more insight.

We planted a few tomato plants of the same size near it to gauge progress in terms of plant size and crop yeild - keep posted!