In memory of our darling Jonny Young who died a week ago - 28/8/09
Went to the allotment today as the children are back at school and I haven't really had much allotment time over the holidays.
Plenty to do but the ground is so hard. I managed to dig a row and a half of potatoes up, but I gave up in the end. If we don't get some ground drenching rain soon, I will have to hire a jack hammer to break the ground up!
I then harvested another full basket of mixed tomatoes. I spotted the first signs of blight, but only on the odd leaf, so to be honest, it is so late now in the season, I am not going to worry. Next visit I will start stripping the leaves from the plants just leaving the fruits exposed to see if they will ripen off. Again, a mix of black cherry, roma, gardeners delight, great white, ferline, santa, cherokee purple, sungold, and a few others. I have been really pleased with the toms this year.
From there to the fruit cage. It was time to tackle the old fruiting raspberry canes and have a general cut back and tidy. Cutting down the old canes doesn't take long but I got stung and scratched to buggery. I still need to get in there and weed around the redcurrant bush as it has a lot of long grass growing around it. Plenty of new raspberry canes for next year, and the gooseberry bushes are thickening up. I did take a few goosegog cuttings and stuck the stems in the ground - well, I have nothing to loose.
I next started to dig up the pink fir apple and Anya spuds that I didn't dig up last year - tut tut. Masses of spuds as you can imagine. The Anya are rather small, but the PFA are great and so yummy as wedges and chips. I only made a start as I was also cutting back the currant bush hedge and apple trees that have grown into the area over the last year. I will dig the rest of the spuds next visit.
Finally I had a sort through the squashes. I gathered 8 sweet dumpling squash and a marrow. I cut back a lot of the foliage from the other marrow plant but didn't pick the fruits yet as we want those for the village show next week. I have one butternut squash, and no pumpkins which is very dissapointing as there were 2, but the slugs tucked in.
I generally just pottered and picked. As you can tell, I couldn't really get myself launched into any job completely, but spending the day on the allotment did help me loose myself a bit. Back on Monday to try and finish a couple of jobs.
2 comments:
I've been at the allotment during the day too since the kids have been back at school.
My son's got one pumpkin on his plant, but it's grown elongated rather than round. I don't think it will be any good for carving at halloween.
My kids carve any squash, they like the weird and the wacky, and we have even been known to carve a marrow.
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