September 10th, 2009 by Rich

Today was my first time on morning chicken duties and it was all pretty good. Alarm went of at 6.25, got up had a wee stuck some clothes on and down the allotment in the car I went. I arrived about 6.30 and could hear the girls stirring inside so I quickly weighed out their food and filled up the waterers ready for them to be let loose on. The waterer did cause some fun as I deposited its contents over the floor and my foot! Apparently I hadn’t screwed the base on properly so when I flipped it right way up it fell off ~ clearly the thing to do is give it a good check before you flip it over.

Upon opening up the door they started to come out and headed straight for food and water. Sadly no eggs but fortunately no signs of eggs being eaten either so not entirely bad. I watched them for a little bit (there is something oddly satisfying about just standing and watching them) I then left to get back home to do the usual morning bath, dress and coffee routine before heading out to work.

I did pop by at lunchtime to check in on them (and take some more bedding down as I forgot it in the morning) and they were all happy and had popped out 3 eggs during the morning.

So I have now done a morning feed and release and the evening round up and lock away. The evening is definitely harder work but I suspect it wont be long before they learn to get in the coop when the sun is setting. At the moment you have to round them up and pick them up one by one with Benny Hill music going around in your head!

When I get a chance I shall do a post to show you the chicken club ~ we worked hard to get it up and running so some showing off is deserved!

September 1st, 2009 by Rich

Well festival weekend is over but I did happen across this photo on the beeb that goes to show the scale and possibly explains why we had  guard dogs stationed on the site over the weekend!

August 28th, 2009 by Rich

It’s festivale time! What does this mean? Well, being questioned everytime I go to the allotment by security guards and dodging guasrd dogs on the bike! Other than that plenty of young ladies wandering around and a few beers. If the weather is ok then bbq time it is. I may even find the time to give you a real update on the lottie and chicken club!

July 28th, 2009 by Rich

Since I last posted we have been harvesting courgettes like there is no tomorrow, it is proving quite tricky to eat them all! Hmm I wonder six plants – two adults, too many? nah We have been doing the usual things with them, plenty of fried up with garlic and served with pasta, courgette frittatas, courgette on pizza (yes it does work!). We have also been looking for some new ways to use them, one recipe we have found is creamy courgette lasagne which is brilliant. When I have it to hand I will try to post it on here.

In other news, my shoulder continues to give me grief so I went to the doctors to get it checked out, this ended up being a complete waste of time. After waiting 25 minutes past my appointment time (in addition to the 10 minutes that I waited for due to arriving in plenty of time) I finally went in to see the doctor and it was a rubbish experience. I personally expect a doctor to be able to listen to what I say, to be able to read information off of a computer screen and understand I am talking about an accident 5 weeks ago NOT last year!!!! I was then asked what I wanted her to do, WTF you’re the doctor with the years of training! Needless to say I ended up leaving with no real idea how it was healing and with no treatment. If I need to go back I shall make sure I don’t get that doctor again.

In other news, I will be taking a test ride on a new bike this week, a Ridgeback Flight 05, this ticks all the boxes for me so I hope it rides well. Sadly my employers don’t participate in the cycle to work scheme so I will have to pay full price. I really don’t understand why they don’t do it, the amount of effort required is minimal, in fact as a government scheme I think it should be mandatory for companies to take part if employees want to get a bike on the scheme.

When I rule the world it will be different!

July 15th, 2009 by Rich

Hmmm it’s been a while hasn’t it! What has been going on since I last posted …. from the lottie side of things we have been happily harvesting cucumbers, courgettes, runner beans, potatoes, peas, garlic, broad beans even a few raspberries and strawberries. The feeding is good but we are starting to hit the usual “argh not courgettes for dinner again” point, this means I will have to dig out he courgette recipe book to find new and interesting things to do with them!

Our harvests to date have been good and we are mainly happy but we have come to the realisation that some crops just aren’t for us and top of that list are peas. Every year we spend time and money trying to grow peas, fresh peas off the plant are a simple pleasure in life that we enjoy. Sadly every year we end up pea moth problems, as a conservative estimate I would say we end up composting something like 75% of the peas we grow as they are riddled with the little maggoty buggers. So that is it, we give up on peas and will use the space normally allocated for something else, after all we seem to struggle for space every year!

On a non allotment note, I had a great night out drinking high quality smokey beer from zero degrees wishing a work colleague a farewell, I then cycled home and right outside the door fell off. The next day I went to casualty as I decided shoulders shouldn’t look like mine did. Ended up that I had a severe sprained shoulder, the x-ray made me laugh, this was not the reaction the doctor was expecting! That was several weeks ago, it is healing and getting stronger but still gives me some grief. I really don’t understand what happened … after all as a teenager we were all protected but the god of drunk cyclists and never came to harm, shockingly our god has deserted us!!!

Erm what else ….. we spent some enjoyable time down in Cornwall visiting the oldies who treated us to a lovely meal at The Three Mackerel in Falmouth. The food was brilliant, the service friendly and the young waitresses in tight leggings with pert behinds and no vpl ~ does it get any better?

In breaking news I can also reveal that Chicken Club has been given the go ahead from the council, now we need to do a bunch of stuff to make it happen but more on that another time.

June 5th, 2009 by Rich

This week has been an important week, we harvested and ate our first two cucumbers of the year! They are a variety called Cucino and are described as lunchbox cucumbers due to them being only two to three inches long. The good thing is that they are not full of seeds and water so you get a real shot of flavour from them.  I would recomend this variety as hopefully it will also mean we don’t end up with a cucumber glut like normal (that will happen with the other variety – marketmore we have growing!)My only gripe about the cucino is that the seeds were normal price (£1.50 -£2) but the packet stated average contents 5 seeds, we got 3 thats a 40% discrepency! Fortunately what we did get all germinated so not as bad as it could be.

May 20th, 2009 by Rich

Is that you don’t talk about chicken club!

No I haven’t gone mad, well may be a little …..Our allotment neighbour Jon had an idea and has convinced me and a few others that it is a winning idea, to collectively keep some chickens. The basis premise being that seven plots join forces to rent a plot and keep chickens for eggs, sharing the costs and sharing the work. Currently we are five, we’ve worked out ball park figures to start up. We need to find some more willing members but I’m sure that won’t be a problem, the main sticking point at the moment is that we need to convince the council that this is a good idea. Hopefully we can get things worked out within the next month or two so we can get some ex-battery hens in and back to good condition before the poor weather kicks in.

May 19th, 2009 by Rich

If you remember way back I said we had planted four left over first earlies in a big pot, well last weekend we harvested the pot giving us our first new potatoes of the year. After emptying out and rooting about we came away with 2.4kg of spuds, not bad for the left overs that didn’t make it into the ground! I did consider taking a photo but then I figured you all know what a potato looks like

I feel I should also point out that I haven’t posted in a while,  ok more than a while! Sorry about that, been busy with many things on and off the allotment. I will aim to bring you up to speed with our progress over the next few days

April 2nd, 2009 by Rich

I seem to have been a little slack again and not posted for a while so this will serve as two weeks worth of stuff, I can’t completely remember when stuff was done so I’ll try to do a list of things done.

Onion sets planted – approx 100 Centurion and 50 Stuttgart Giant
First Earlies (Dunluce ) planted out approx 24 in the ground a few left overs in pots to force them early
Finished Digging the pond, lined with sand and pond liner, filled up using watering cans!
Planted a bunch of seeds – memory not too good so will post again with what we have.
Purchased some pond plants
Finished off pond by paving around it and covering exposed liner with pebbles collected off of freecycle
Sowed two short rows of early carrots
Prepared and then planted asparagus bed with 10 plants
Sowed a bed of broad beans
Planted some pansies and a load of summer bulbs
A few other bits I can’t remember!

Other stuff that has happened; the new greenhouse is rubbish and blows panels out every time there is a bit of wind. This is making it unusable, fortunately the council are trying to sort this out with B&Q. We were given a hop plant by Jon and Linda to thank us for lending of rotovator and giving them wind break netting for their fence line ~ now just need to decide where we are going to plant it. Can’t wait to get some hops off of it – beer time! Between leaving the plot last Saturday and coming back Sunday lunchtime we gained frog spawn! Thanks to some frisky frogs we now have two good size balls of frog spawn floating in the pond, really pleased with that as the pond had only been finished a week and goes to show that we got the right plants in to make it a good wildlife habitat.

March 16th, 2009 by Rich

You may have noticed nothing got posted about last weekend, this wasn’t me being slack, just as weekends go it was pretty rubbish, it started off OK on Saturday, we pottered around cleaning up greenhouses, sowing seeds, nothing too taxing, a nice relaxing day. Sunday on the other hand sucked, we had very windy conditions and when I went down to the plot was confronted by our old greenhouse worse for wear a panel had blown out casing one of the frame struts to come out. Result: broken glass and carnage. Then the new greenhouse came into sight, and around five of its panels had blown out, this meant that the seed containers we had sown the day before were also blown around the shop. Just to make life a little interesting a heavy hail storm kicked up ~ great … there I am trying to put panels back in in freezing cold hail and strong wind. After many a curse I had the old greenhouse patched up and glazing replaced with spare bits I had behind the shed, the new one had the panels back in and were secured with a LOT of gaff.

That is all I will say about that weekend as it is still a little fresh in my mind and I don’t want to rant too much! Now let’s move on to this weekend …..

Another productive couple of days, during the week I ordered and received a roll of wind break/greenhouse shading netting, this stuff is basically scaffold netting but only a metre wide, it is claimed this will reduce wind strength by 50% and is effective for a distance of 12 times its height (so theoretically enough to cover the width of the plot.) This was the first job for Saturday, we fixed this to the fence on the windward side of the plot for the entire length. We fixed it in two ways, firstly we stapled to the fence posts and then cable tied it to the top and bottom of the fence and added a few more in to make it nice and secure. As we didn’t have quite enough cable ties for the job I had to nip up to Do it all, fortunately whilst inside I bumped into Stumpy who offered me a whole bunch of cable ties for free, all I spent in the shop was a few quid on some flower bulbs that I got side tracked looking at! We noticed the difference in wind coming across the plot immediately, hopefully this will mean the greenhouses get a little less bashed. The other main job of the day was planting out some hazel along the back of the plot, the reasons for doing this are to provide wind break along the back, provide us with pea and bean sticks, give us a little privacy when we want to sit down and chill out and also to give the birds somewhere to hide/nest. The hazel was another free find of mine, I came across an advert on freecycle from a lady offering hazel, oak, yew and holly trees as she had a large number that had self seeded (all be it with some squirrel help!) All we had to do was go over and dig up what we needed, so around 30 minutes of work gave us around 15 hazel and 5 holly plants. The other quick job we got done was to plant some shallots, we hadn’t planned on growing any but our allotment neighbours Jon and Linda had around 9 bulbs left over having planted theirs so offered them to us. These were quickly planted out and will look forward to harvesting those later in the year.

This brings us on to Sunday,  I wanted to plant the remainder of the little trees along the wildlife area on the plot (around where the pond will be) so had to dig up some grass, fork over and then plant in the holly and hazel. This should give us a nice thick hedge, really good for the birds. Once that was done I did some levelling off and tidying up of the pond, this is pretty much ready for us to line with sand before putting the pond liner in, perhaps a job for next weekend if we get time. Whilst I was doing this Lou planted out a whole range of summer flowering bulb and perennials in a section we want to have as a flower border. Lou also finished off sieving two wheelbarrows of pond excavations, this was really really stony, from three barrow loads I would say we at most got one of soil. That gives you an idea just how stony that end of the plot is! The stones will be reused to make the pond area soil lower quality ready for the wild flower seeds to be sown next month. The final job for me was to drill a few holes in the water butt, attach the hoses up to the greenhouse guttering and then pour five watering cans of water into it to give it the weight to stay steady in wind.

I’m sure there are other things I have missed, if I think of any I will post again!