I had an early morning blast in the office, setting up financial control systems for Red Kite and then headed off to the allotment.  I found that the large cloche was not that stable in the wind, so spent a fair amount of time trying to anchor it more effectively.  I then built supports for the melons and tomatoes, by the time I’d done this, I got the call to collect Lynn and we went back together to plant the melons and tomatoes and complete some harvesting to give me some vegetables to take into London.

Jobs today focused on follow-on crops.  So it was off to the allotment to prepare a bed for the sprouts and plant them out and get the new pea support built and the second batch of peas planted.  This end of the bed is now looking rather different as the first early spuds get replaced.

Replacing the spuds with brassicas and peas

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After a brief catch up in office, I got the lawns raked and mowed, although it is clear that they will need a further treatment.  This meant that I had a nice clear back lawn for spud drying after the next batch of potato harvesting.  I harvested all of the weaker looking Charlottes, which are still averaging just over 2lbs per plant.

Spud drying

Lynn has a colleague of Italian extraction, who asked if we had courgette flowers, as we do, I harvested a few and a couple of courgettes on the way to pick Lynn up for the Friday roll-up.  These were received with great excitement, which is nice.

When the sun broke through in mid-afternoon, I got down to the allotment.  I harvested the full row of Lady Christl’s and a few more courgettes and beetroot.  I weeded the sweet corn beds, which are coming on very well and then planted out the purple sprouting broccoli and after a couple of false starts got a netting framework over the plants.

The harvest led to the strange sight of a man on his front lawn, washing potatoes and drying them out on sheets of newspaper.  We had about 25lbs from the 16 plants that I harvested – not a bad haul given that the plants looked a bit sickly.

We have been away for the last few days, first at my Nan’s funeral and then on a golfing trip with Laura (my sister) and Neil (where we also worked on their vegetable patches).  We travelled home this morning and as the weather cleared up in the afternoon, I trundled down to the allotment for a bit of harvesting and checking.

Things are now growing really well as the photo below shows.

Growth following the rain

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Yesterday I had a half day course on allotment maintenance at Burchett’s Green (http://www.bca.ac.uk/).  It was inspiring and informative and well worth £27.  I am now planning to get some late peas in for autumn harvest and bought some Brussels sprouts from the course leader to see if we can get some for Christmas dinner.

One of the encouraging things is that with our accumulated experience thus far, we are generally doing the right things, so the course was more about additional ideas than learning from scratch.

We got up fairly early today and headed off to the allotment (with a planned set of tasks – as advised at yesterday’s course.  We prepared an area for the autumn peas, planted out the marigolds for the flower gateway and weeded the sweet corn beds.  We also harvested some of the Lady Christl potatoes to make a potato salad this evening along with some beetroot leaves for a green salad.

Once back at home I planted a batch of pea seeds in root training pots to allow easy transfer into the new bed in a few weeks.