Plot 103

And so it begins......again!!

2010-02-01T06:15:00.000-08:00

Well the 2010 growing season is now upon us so I've been a busy little bee ordering seeds for this year. Unfortunately my camera is broken at the moment so this will be an extremely text heavy entry. We had a bit of bad news recently as with all the snowfall in ireland over the past month and subsequent thaw our lovely allotment was severely flooded. We had been told by someone who was up there a couple of weeks ago that the entire plot at one stage had literally turned into a lake under a couple of feet of water and there were even sheds bobbing around the area. I would imaging the avonmore river at the back of the plot must have burst its banks as the snow thawed, some parts of Roundwood were under a few feet of snow!! We haven't yet been up to survey the damage but we hope to get up there soon and check. I think I can take it our autumn sown garlic and shallots will have unfortunately washed away.

We took a trip over the weekend to Johnstown garden centre and stocked up on this years seed potatoes and I have just ordered a load of seeds from www.seedaholic.com who come highly recomended by many people on the gardenplans ireland forum. As our chillis were so successful last year I'm determined to try a few new varieties this year. I have been looking for a mild chilli without much heat but with tonnes of chilli flavour and was recommended Numex Suave, which is a type of habernero chilli. Apparently this chilli has all the flavour of the habernero but very little of the heat. I'm hoping to make a nice sweet chilli sauce from them. I found it imposssible to source seeds for this in ireland so I've just put an order in with The Chilli Pepper Company in the UK at www.chilliseeds.co.uk They have a huge selection of all things chilli be it chillis, seeds or chilli products. I also have some jalepeno seeds, serrano, and the two apache chilli plants that served us so well are currently overwintering on the window sill and are even beginning to show the start of some flower buds for this season!!!

This year we opted to do potatoes properly as last year we hadn't intended on doing potatoes and threw some generously donated seeds in which tasted fantastic, even if we did get blight.

So this years seed potatoes are as follows:

Earlies: 'Orla' and 'pentland javelin' both a firm waxy potato full of flavour and perfect for boiling and salads. I got two varieties here as I got a little over excited about being in a garden centre again and managed to slip them into the basket before Cillian saw and set my head straight!

Second earlies: 'Kestrel', These seem to be very popular as a good all rounder for mashing, boiling, chipping and I believe are particularly good for roasting as the flesh isn't too floury and doesn't take up too much of the fat.

Maincrops: 'Maris piper', again another very popular and highly recommended potato for flavour and storing ability. Our potatoes last year easily lasted us a few months in storage in spite of getting blight so a full crop should easily keep us until after christmas into the new season of 2011, how's that for forward planning.

As for the rest of the veg going in this year:

Cabbage: Greyhound for summer, apparently a very quick maturing cabbage that lives up to its name, can be sown early spring for summer or late summer for autumn, we'll be sowing these in the next week or two, and Ormskirk, a savoy cabbage for Autumn harvest.

Carrots: 'Solar yellow' and 'Nantes 2'

Parsnip: Tender and True, supposedly large roots up to 3 inches across and very tasty.

Beans: 'purple queen' which grows purple pods to add a bit of colour on the plot, and some other type of green bean I haven't decided upon yet, and we'll also throw in some more of the yellow wax pods we grew last year.

Peas: 'hurst greenshaft' as these are supposed to be very well suited to early sowing and are relatively tolerent of our cooler weather.

Turnip: 'snowball' These small white turnips just look so tasty and are supposed to be quite sweet and mild, I'm not a fan of very strong flavoured turnips or swedes.

Beetroot: 'Boltardy' apparently resistant to bolting and quite tasty.

Courgette: 'F1 Ambassador' which apparently has a nice long productive season.

Leeks: 'Autumn Mammoth 2 Hannibal' a summer leek which matures quite quickly, as far as leeks go, and we'll try 'Musselburgh' again for winter. These failed on us last year as we couldn't get them started early enough but we're going for it again this year but sowing in the next week or 2, a good 2-3 months earlier than last year.

Brussels sprouts: 'Bedford Darkmar 21' a new variety for us to try. We grew F1 Trafalgar last year with resounding success and exceptionally tasty sprouts for christmas so we thought we'll just try another variety this year and see if we can get the same success.

I'm sure there will be plenty more as the season progresses, the above list I must stress is definately not all of it. There will be quite a number of additions to it but its enough to get started with. Its early yet in the season and the allotment will have to share my time this year with my wedding planning for my impending big day out in July so please forgive me if I occasionally say that I 'planted out the new laboutin 5 inch high heels that go perfectly with my dress' instead of the 'lovely 6 inch leeks' which I hope to have ready for planting out in June/July!!!

Worldwide festivities, the adventures of travelling sharon....

2009-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Well I'm finally back from my travels, I've spent the last two weeks travelling to conferences and training courses for work. I spent a week in Ettlingen Germany, came home for the weekend and a spot of allotmenteering and the following week was off to Columbus Nebraska, USA so needless to say the jetlag and travel tiredeness hit home fast. But I'll include a few photos just to prove that I was actually there and not skiving off the allotment or updating the blog. Ettlingen is a very pretty medieval town in Germany on the edge of the black forest and the first thing that struck me upon leaving the airport was the amazing use of every available patch of space for growing crops. Even the green spaces in front of industrial estates and the edges along motorways were crammed with the withering remains of neat rows of summer crops. We had a lovely location for the conference in Ettlingen castle the front of which is unusually painted to look like a highly decorated building but is in fact pretty flat and not as decorative and moulded on the outside as it would appear. The town itself was full of very pretty typically german buildings and cobblestone streets and in full seasonal spirit pumpkins and squash adorned the strees in abundance.

It was nice to see such an Autumn harvest theme associated with Halloween in both Ettlingen and in Nebraska, originally a pagan festival of the Harvest and signifying the coming of the new year, a display that seems to be sadly lacking in Ireland considering they grow relatively well here in our climate. Ireland has become very commercial when it comes to this time of year and its sad to see the old traditions fade and be replaced by commercial western glitz and glam. It has inspired me to perhaps try growing a few unusual shaped squashes and have another go at the pumpkins next year. This was a festive display shown outside my hotel in Nebraska, showcasing the seasonal harvest of corn, squash and pumpkin.

Unfortunately our own spooky purple halloween pumpkins did not fair so well up on plot 103 this year I suspect due to going in too late. At the weekend we surveyed the end of the plot containing the pumpkins and courgettes to find powdery mildew has completely taken its toll on the plants which have now withered and died. We dug up the plants to level the ground for our plastic walk in greenhouse for next year only for Cillian to notice something lurking in the grass on the other side of the deer fence by the river. We walked around and found that one of our pumkin plants, bravely making a break for freedom,had escaped through the fence with a long 10 foot vine containing a single immature pumpkin. Unfortunately we had pulled up the plant before we realised the extended arm containing the fruit. At this stage it would be too late for the pumkin to ripen anywayso we've resolved ourselves to trying again next year a little earlier in the season.

Our Brussels sprouts look ready and very healthy, I'm hoping for a bit of a frost over the next week or two before we harvest as I believe that makes them sweeter. They are definately a little too early to have for Christmas but I will post up a query on the gardenplansireland forum and see if the good people there can tell me how long I can leave them on the plant before they blow. If I can't leave them too much longer we'll harvest them and freeze them for Christmas, I'm sure they'll taste just as good and we'll be eating our own veg for Christmas dinner. They've proven to be one of our resounding successes with no problems at all through the growing season.

Over the last 2 weeks Lidl has had the autumn planting fruit deals going so I had to take advantage and stock up on our raspberry canes and we also bought two cherry trees 'stella', a desert type of cherry for plot 103. At E5.99 a tree, and E2.99 per pack of soft fruit canes I just couldn't say no. I bought 2 packs of 3 raspberry canes and one pack of 3 redcurrant canes so hopefully our fruit will be in abundance next year as our existing raspberry canes and strawberries will be in the ground a year and should give a better crop in their second year.

Here they are gracing the edge of plot 103 which will hopefully provide us with a 'soft fruit walk' for next year along the length of the allotment.

We spent the last couple of weekends preparing beds for next year as this years stock of manure has arrived on the site, so we're filling our nutrient starved soil with it and covering with weed suppressing membrane to enrich the soil over winter. The garlic and shallots are in with the help of my parents who took a trip up the allotment and were surprised to find out just how brussels sprouts grow. They were rewarded for their offer of manual labour with a few freshly pulled carrots and a savoy cabbage which we are still cropping in abundance.

Our onions are unfortunately very small, but should still give us something. I've bent over the tops in the hope that this will bulk up the bulbs a little, and then we'll start drying them. Our leeks unfortunately were an abismal failure and never got bigger than an elongated toothpick. Again, I think due to getting them in too late in the season. We'll try again next year and be able to sow them much earlier in the hope that they will be ready to plant out by June or July. Our 60 metres of 5x1 inch timber arrived on the plot, courtesy of Martin the allotment owner, which we got at a good price to edge the beds for next year and add a little structure to plot 103. We harvested the last of our courgettes which had turned into a marrow and tasted gorgeous stuffed and baked. Far from being what I would have thought of as a quiet time during winter in allotmenteering, theres a lot of work to be done on plot 103 for next year. Roll on harvest 2010!!

It's garlic time!!

2009-09-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

First off I must apologize for not updating the blog in so long, but we have been down to plot 103 and have been harvesting carrots, cabbage, potatoes and french beans and peas for the last couple of weeks which have all been delicious when eaten fresh and frozen when there has been too much to enjoy at its peak. Things are beginning to slow down up in Annamoe allotments as its coming towards the end of the season and so begins the new one as we start preparing our beds for next year. There is still a good bit to come yet though and we are still waiting for our onions to 'fall over' which signals that they are ready for pulling up. They are small, due no doubt to the poor soil, but we did pull some red ones which were full of flavour in a ratatouille and we're looking forward to our white ones over the coming weeks. Our raspberries are putting on another show of fruit and these ones are huge compared to the berries we got earlier in the summer. As soon as the last fruits have been picked we'll cut the canes down to the ground and new ones should sprout next spring and provide us with a bigger harvest. We will probably invest in a few more canes over the coming months to supplement the 2 we have. Their flavour this time round is not quite as strong as last time however this could be due to the fact that the plant has already fruited this season and its probably a little tired now as the days get shorter. I'm also not sure if its a summer or autumn fruiting type as we've gotten fruit in both seasons! I'll have to do some research. Now if only I could find the tag that came with them!!

We pulled the last of our cauliflowers a couple of weeks ago which was once again very tasty, and although small were definately a success.

Our Cabbages are also continuing to provide us with fresh head every week and we've still a good few weeks supply left for the remainder of the season. The cabbage seems happy enough to stay in the ground until its needed and so far has not shown any signs of going to seed so we'll keep harvesting as needed. It does however have to fight with the weeds which we've given up on at this stage due to the end of the season.

Our sprouts are buttoning up nicely!! and the plants look as healthy as ever, even though they are squashed in the nets I am still wary of taking the nets off as there are still a few butterflies about and poor William the allotment guru's brassicas have become covered in cabbage white caterpillars which are feasting on his purple sprouting broccoli. So my nemesis, the butterfly, is still a little too active for my liking. Our sprouts look like they may be slightly early for Christmas but they freeze well and will still hopefully taste great on Christmas day sauteed with some garlic and chopped bacon with perhaps a few roast chestnuts thrown in for good measure.

The sweetcorn now has lovely healthy tassles and cobs are forming large and healthy on every plant. When the tassles go brown the cobs will be ready to start looking at the kernals to ripen. According to my a-z of allotment vegetables book, when the tassles go brown peel back a little of the covering and squeez a kernal gently. If the resulting liquid is clear, the cobs are not yet ripe, if the liquid starchy cloudy and thick they have gone too far. Somewhere in between is just about right, still a liquid but slightly cloudy. Sweetcorn takes up a lot of space for quite a long time so I'm yet to be convinced that it is the most efficient use of so much space for such a low yield of only 2 cobs per plant, but we'll wait for the taste test before we decide if its worth growing again next year.

Our pumpkins unfortunately have officially been a failure. They have now got powdery mildew, are looking very sorry for themeselves and still no pumpkins formed. At this stage its far too late in the season for pumpkins to form and ripen. One did attempt to form but doesn't seem to have gone much further than a cricket ball sized deformed swelling. I suspect they may have been planted a little too late in the season and are not too fond of the slightly colder weather up in the wicklow hills, but we may try again next year and now that we have the full season will be able to start months earlier.

Now that preparation for the new season is upon us we got stuck into digging last weekend. It's garlic time!! So I got to indulge in my weakness for garden centres without Cillian trying to drag me out by the hair, although I'm sure he considered it when Id chosen not one, but 5 varieties of garlic after I couldn't decide, considered a sixth and sneakily threw in some shallots on my way past the stand for autumn planting alliums! Now understand I absolutely love garlic, I put it in everything and can on occasion easily go through 2 bulbs a week. So I really do need 5 varieties of garlic!! yes....I do.....really.....! The varieties I've chosen to grow are Germidour, a mild garlic supposedly good for roasting, Thermidrome, a full flavoured large cloved garlic which is supposed to be very reliable, Cristo, considered the garlic of choice for chefs due to its excellent flavour and can store for up to 9 months!! so will keep you going almost until your next lot are ready for harvest, lautrec white, which is well I'm not sure, supposed to be good but at that stage I was caught up in a seed buying frenzy and completely lost sight of anything other than buying more garlic, and the previous week it had been sold out and this was new stock. So if it was good enough to go out of stock that quickly its good enough for me to absolutely need it to go into our garlic beds this year, and finally Iberian wight, possibly for the same reason as the lautrec wight. Although I believe the varieties ending in 'wight' are farmed on the isle of wight and are therefore acclimatised to the British and Irish climate so should grow well. I threw in some jermor shallots as at that stage I was just frantically grabbing anything that could be planted now and these popped off the shelf and strangely fell into my hand! don't know how they got there but they're going in.

We dug the bed for the garlic, removed the weeds and put in some manure and a good bit of compost. We'll rake in some fish blood and bone fertilizer to tide them over at planting time until the spring, when we'll mulch with some more compost to keep the nutrients flowing. As I'm going to Germany next week with work, and Nebraska, USA the week after with work, it will be the middle of October when we plant the garlic cloves and shallots. Garlic needs the frosts of winter cold weather to split into cloves and form bulbs. So it can be planted any time up to November as it must have just enough mild weather first to form roots to tide it over the winter. If it doesn't have a good spell of cold frost after that, the danger is that the clove won't split and you won't get nice big bulbs, but rather one large clove more like a spring onion. So we're full steam ahead, with hopefully proper ground preparation and a full seasons growing this time I'm hoping for a bumper harvest next year. Now all we need to worry about is rust, onion root fly, white rot and any other potential diseases or pests, but at least our ground will hopefully have the nutrients to give us lots of great veg next year. We also dug up the last of the potatoes, our blight ridden roosters, which are small but have not shown blight in the tubers so are very tasty. This bed was dug over and lots of manure put in and covered with weed suppressing membrane to prevent any weeds germinating until planting early next spring. We've ordered lots of timber also which will be delivered to the plot over the next week or two and will then begin digging and preparing the remaining beds as the veg in them finishes up, edging them with wood to try and halt the spread of weeds from our 'sort of paths' into the beds, filling them with lots of manure and compost ready for next season. While our beans and peas have finished, our carrots and plenty of other veg is still going so its full steam ahead!

feast or famine!!

2009-08-27T12:51:00.001-07:00

Well, it looks like we're gonna need a bigger freezer! We've found we're in the position where we have to start thinking about how to manage a glut of vegetables. All of our broccoli and cauliflower came to fruition at the same time more or less, far too much for us to eat fresh so I've broken out the freezer bags and got to blanching and freezing our veg for eating over the coming weeks. Next year we can resolve this problem by 1)Buying another freezer! and 2) sowing successionally from early in the season right through with a number of different varieties of veg, not just the one or two. Unfortunately due to getting the plot very late in the season, we couldn't do that this year, but next year we will begin sowing in early February and continue through the season so we should hopefully begin harvesting from May onwards right up until Winter.

Our sprouts are really trying to burst out of their cage of netting and you can see the beginnings of little sprouts forming at the intersection between the leaves and main stem. I have high hopes for out brussels sprouts this year, they seem to be growing healthy and tall, with no sign of any diseases or deficiency, so heres hoping for homegrown sprouts for christmas dinner. This picture was taken the weekend before last, and since then they have started to push the netting right up and look packed underneath.

Our onions are finally bulbing up a little. We sowed them around the 26th April and so far they haven't exactly thrived, probably due to the poor soil, and the leaves have grown relatively small in comparison with everyone elses, with slightly yellowing tips but other than that they have faired ok. Many other peoples onions up on the allotments have bolted and gone to seed and I'm wondering perhaps we did the right thing not manuring the onion beds that late in the season. Yes the growth hasn't been as lush as some other peoples onions, but they haven't bolted or gone to seed and seem to be bulbing up now. The veg growing books I have recommend a growing time of 22 weeks for onions growing from sets which would mean we are pretty much right on schedule to have our onions ready by the end of september. If too much manure is added too late in the season onions can bolt and go to seed as they grow too quickly in the rich manure. I believe the general rule is you manure in the Autumn and lime in the late Winter so this year we will manure the beds around October or November, allow the winter weather to break it down and settle the nutrients into the soil and then come January or early February, we will lime the beds we didn't do this year. Hopefully between this and growing as much of our veg as possible through weed suppressing membrane next year, and successional sowing, we should have even more success with our veg next year.

Our sweet corn is finally putting out male flowers, I'm hoping its not too late in the season to get cobs, (I suspect it may be!) but the seed pack did say harvest from end of September to October so theres still hope yet. The sweetcorn has shot up and looks tall, strong and healthy.

Now that our broccoli and cauliflower is pretty much done, the next thing we are looking forward to is our cabbages. We had one pointed cabbage and one savoy ready for picking and another 15 or so cabbages we hope will be ready over the coming weeks. Unfortunately I sense another glut coming on and I'm not quite sure cabbage takes to freezing as well as cauliflower and broccoli so any ideas on what to do with excess cabbage? Answers on a postcard please! (or in the comments section.)

Our pumkins are making a break for freedom!! I definately underestimated quite how much pumkins spread out. Our plants are putting out vines all over the place! here you can see one of them making a B line for the sweetcorn. The traditional native American Indian way of companion planting is to plant pumkins, sweetcorn and beans together and I can certainly see the pumpkins have an affinity or affection for the corn. This vine is about 6 feet long and is budding with new flowers. Traditionally the pumpkins are grown around the base of the sweetcorn which suppresses weed growth due to the enourmous pumpkin foliage. Beans are planted around the base of the sweetcorn and use the height of the corn to climb up and the flowers from the bean plants attract bees and insects to pollinate the flowers of the pumpkins. So the three veg, or holy trinity, all help each other out and there you have it! Companion planting at its finest.....in theory..!! We'll try this way of planting next year and see how it works. In the meantime with our pumpkins making a break for freedom we just do our best and hope for pumpkins at halloween. Below you can see one plant edging towards the sweetcorn, and another climbing through the deer fencing trying to escape towards the river!!

Cornucopia!!!!

2009-08-20T11:50:00.001-07:00

Not only the name of one of my favourite vegetarian/vegan cafes in Dublin city, but also the glorious scene we arrived to at plot 103 last weekend. Our broccoli, cauliflowers, more beans, peas and another courgette were ready for harvest!

Our chard bright lights was looking delightfully colourful and I really hope it tastes as good as it looks!

I'm not quite sure but I think we may have the first pumpkins showing a hint they they are going to turn up on plot 103 for halloween.

However celebrations weren't to begin just yet. We had a look at our potato bed and in the space of a week all the plants had deteriorated drastically with confirmed blight. Once it strikes unfortunately theres not much you can do but try and prevent the blight spreading to the tubers in the ground and rotting the potatoes. So we cut down the foliage to ground level, earthed the mounds up and I dug up 2 of the plants to see if there was any hope of salvaging some spuds. The roosters are small but thankfully no sign of blight in most so we'll leave them in the ground for another week and then just harvest what we can of them. Unfortunately with the foliage cut back there is no possibility of the spuds getting any bigger so the best we can hope for is baby roosters. It would seem that most peoples potatoes on the allotments succumbed to blight including William the allotment guru who generously gave us a rather large bag of his spuds, british queens. (Thanks William, they were very tasty!!)

Overall not a bad haul at all though up in plot 103. This is the beautiful table full of food we managed to harvest and provided us with plenty of veg for the week. The broccoli and cauliflower went into a very tasty broccoli and cauliflower gratin and tasted absolutely fantastic. For the first time we discovered just how cauliflower is supposed to taste and it was surprisingly different from the shops, not quite so bitter and much sweeter. The heads are small but his is probably due to the lack of manure in the soil this year and can be fixed for next season. I loved it before but now!!! I'm an addict!

Finally I had plenty of opportunities to continue my rehabilitation programme to eliminate my fear of butterflies. The plot was crawling in them!!! There are so many up there now we are very glad we put nets over our brassicas, but even so one or two still managed to get in as we found a couple of stray caterpillars in the broccoli (thankfully before I cooked them!!) theres nothing worse than enjoying the wonderful taste of home grown food only to look down on your plate and see half a caterpillar!! So heres a picture of one of the butterflies sunning itself on one of our marigolds around the pea and bean bed. I have to say, with so many butterfies flitting about I have definately begun to run slightly less, I didn't really have much choice, if I ran away from one of the fluttering monsters I ended up running into another 2 of them dancing in the air so in the end I just gave up running and closed my eyes momentarily instead. I think my rehab plan is working!!!

Making progress!!

2009-08-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

There were definate signs of progress at the weekend up on plot 103. Our sprouts are starting to grow tall with thick stems and will need the nets raised soon.

We had hoped to have these sprouts for christmas, but I'm wondering if we might not see them sooner.
Our cabbages are hearting up nicely and this one was ready to take home with the rest of the weekends bountiful harvest comprising of, yes more baby carrots and more beans which were all absolutely delicious.

Our corn is growing nice and tall and looks quite healthy. We would hope to see cobs around the end of september or so.

We were met with a bit of a surprise when we inspected our raspberry canes. It would appear our raspberries were not quite happy with their performance this year and have begun flowering again to give it another go. Hopefully this will mean we might have some autumn raspberries aswell as the small few we got in June.

Our brassica bed was hiding a little secret among the weeds and overcrowded cabbage and cauliflower. I gently pulled apart some of the leaves on our cauliflowers only to reveal these cricket ball sized heads looking tight and unblemished. I'll wait a bit to see if they get bigger before picking and keep and eye out in case the head splits before harvest. Hopefully we should be harvesting some over the next 2 weeks or so.

We had a rather scary visitor to plot 103 as we continued to wage our war on weeds. This guy was a good inch and a half long and got us thinking, hmmmmm I'm not sure this thing belongs here!!!! and that massive sting type barb looks absolutely terrifying....but I crept close enough for a picture anyway. I did some research to find out what it is and it turns out its a great horntailed wasp!!! Particularly large, and very mean looking, but apparently relatively harmless and quite common in Ireland where the female lays her eggs in wood using that enourmous stinger like barb, which is not in fact a sting at all.

Unfortunately it appears that our rooster potatoes may have blight. These were not sprayed and we found that some leaves had these brown blotches which seemed to go through to the underside of the leaf. I will post the photo up and ask the good people in the gardenplansireland forum if this is well and truly blight and if so, can our spuds be saved if we cut down the foliage early and hope that the tubers continue to develop for a while to an edible size.

A Summer Bounty!

2009-08-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

We were quite naughty last weekend and abandoned plot 103 to enjoy a weekend in Co. Cork surfing in Inchydoney! Thankfully the weather picked up on Saturday and we had a fantastic day learning to surf, a new hobby I think we will definately keep up. We're already looking at wetsuits! On Monday evening we went up to plot 103 to see what if anything was available to harvest as last week our beans were forming and in order to keep the plants producing, beans and peas must be picked regularly, otherwise the plants think they've done their job and produced seed and will die off. Our peas are forming well although not quite ready to pick yet. 2 pods were nearly ready and we couldn't resist picking them and eating the peas straight from the pod like sweets, they were absolutely gorgeous and I am in danger of never eating another cooked pea again.

To our delight we found our calabrese (broccoli) plants are forming nice tight heads which will hopefully be ready over the next couple of weeks for harvesting.

Our courgettes have finally started to produce female flowers and one small courgette was ready for picking. Courgettes are supposed to be sweeter, tastier and best picked when only as thick as your finger or a little bigger making this one perfect. Its hard to find courgettes in the shops at this size as they are usually left to get bigger on the plants which makes more watery and a bit less flavoursome. This one was perfect and full of flavour. I'm looking forward to more of these over the coming weeks.

We thinned the carrots, again, but this time we were rewarded with proper baby carrots from our rows of Autumn king, yellowstone and chantennay. We left the carrots thinned to a spacing of 1 inch or so between them so that we could thin them gradually to their final 3 inch spacing by picking and eating the thinnings as baby carrots, that way we don't waste any and get a bigger harvest. Hopefully by the time they are thinned to their final spacings they will be full sized. We should regularly be in baby carrots from now on.

Our beans have been a success!!! After all our troubles with them the beans are producing plenty with more later sowings yet to come. We picked a small bag full and these ones were absolutely gorgeous blanched along with the baby carrots and stir fried in some olive oil and garlic. Thankfully we managed to escape the dreaded carrot fly also in spite of the failure of our carrot fly barrier. Not a single root was tunneled or damaged and they grew straight and strong with a flavour that was unlike any shop bought carrot you will ever get. The flavour was almost overpowering and deliciously carroty!! This was todays summer bounty!

Our chilli plants on the balcony are also laden with chillies now ripe for the picking and I've been using them for the past two weeks. I've been cooking a huge amount of indian food, which I love! due to the abundance of chillies to use some up however we've had to take a break from it this week due to certain..em.......episodes of ....well flatulence really.....human beings are definately not meant to eat that many onions, chillies and spices...ahem..

Nevertheless they are a true success and so easy to grow I'm doing a chilli list for next year. Martin, the allotment owner is considering getting some polytunnels on the site which will come in very useful next year as I intend to grow a few different varieties including this years successful apache chillies. The apache chillies are extremely tasty, and you really get a nice chilli flavour from them but they are not particularly hot and I do like a good bit of heat in chillies. So next year I'll try and grow some other varieties such as thai birds eye type chillies and cayennes along with some others if the polytunnels come through. My tomatos have also begun putting out fruit in abundance and I'm hoping for a bumper crop at the end of the summer. Lets hope it keeps on coming...

Wiggly Wigglers!!

2009-07-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

We got some new pets!!.....well, actually about 1000 of them.... My Can 'o' Worms composter arrived today so we set about getting it set up and getting our new tiger worms settled into their new home. I haven't named them all yet but we're getting there. From now on, hopefully these guys will eat all of our kitchen waste, contributing to our green revolution, and turn all the veg peelings, egg shells and any other organic waste into lovely nutrient rich worm castings and compost for the plants. It will also provide us with 'worm tea' as any of the liquid that leaches out from the composting process provide a nutrient rich liquid plant feed which is apparently great for vegetables.

Lady Isabella Harveys nose, however, seemed a little out of joint now that she is no longer the only pet in the apartment. After running around like a lunatic looking for attention, she finally decided to sit in one of the tiers of the wormery and look at us as if to say ' look, I can compost too, If you want worms, I could be one!!'

The time had come to try our chateau 103 elderflower champagne!! It had been fermenting away in the bottles for the last 2 weeks, thankfully without any explosions, so we popped open a bottle last night and it was deliciously fizzy and and delightfully sweet. Definately a success which we will be doing again next year.

Our courgettes are in full bloom but only male flowers so far. Apparently this is quite common, the plant first produces a flush of male flowers and follows with the fruit baring female flowers. The flowers are apparently quite delicious stuffed and deep fried in batter, something I'll definately be trying over the next couple of weeks.

Or peas and beans are both setting their first pods so hopefully over the next couple of weeks we can begin harvesting them.

The carrots are starting to look like carrots and now when we thin them we are benifiting from some tastey morsels just big enough to eat sprinkled whole in a chicken salad and todays thinnings were absolutely gorgeous. Such a strong flavour for such a little pre-baby carrot, I can't wait till they get bigger.

One of our cabbages unfortunately looks like it has black rot. Black rot is a Brassica disease caused by a bacterial infection of the plant. Apparently it can be carried by the seed or picked up from the ground. There is no cure and no prevention. It starts with 'v' shaped yellowing in between the leaf veins, after a while the veins begin to blacken and growth in mature plants is stunted and seedlings can be killed. As the disease seemed to have just started I pulled off the affected leaves in the hope that the disease may not spread to the rest of the plant. All other cabbages, and brassicas look so far unaffected but I'll be keeping an eye out. Apparently the disease is quite prevalent in warm wet summers, which we've certainly had over the last month or so.

The not so humble spud!!

2009-07-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Things got very exciting up at plot 103 this weekend. I had my first firkle!! At the end of April, Val, our allotment neighbour gave us 2 seed potatoes to try. They were 'Aran' earlies and we had watched them flower 3 weeks ago with lovely purple and yellow blooms. On Saturday, while harvesting another small bowlfull of strawberries and raspberries (these went very well with some chocolate and coffee), Jemma and I got stuck in to firkling! We carefully removed a little of the soil around the potato mound and there it was.....our first spud staring back at us temptingly.....

Then of course it started to pour with rain which kept us from harvesting until Sunday. Unfortunately the rain made work difficult up on plot 103 so only weeding was done and I put some fish blood and bone around the broccolli and lined each plant with some slug stoppa pellets. Some of the broccolli looks like its being nibbled on and there is no sign of catterpillars and the brassica beds are all netted, so with all the wet weather over the last couple of weeks the logical conclusion is slugs. But not to worry, Cillian and I are both off work for 3 glorious weeks after this friday and we are hoping to spend a lot of it up on the allotment.
On Sunday we were on a mission to harvest our first vegetable crop, our Aran spuds which seem to have blissfully escaped the blight. Unfortunately some potato plants up on the other plots have succumbed to blight after all the wet humid weather. We began quite respectably attempting to lift the two plants with a garden fork but as the ground is very stony Jemma and I were reduced to getting on our hands and knees and just digging out the spuds with our hands which was very exciting as we slowly unearthed one spud at a time and had enough from the two plants for a lovely dinner for the three of us. (Eoin unfortunately missed out this time as he had to work).

We were so delighted to find not one spud had been damaged by slugs, wireworm or any other potato pest or disease and were absolutely perfect with little or no eyes. I've never seen such perfect potatoes, creamy and unblemished and we realised how bad the quality of some shop bought potatoes are. We didn't insult these spuds by doing anything fancy to them, just boiled in their very light skins and served with a dollop of home made parsley butter.

They tasted 10 times better than shop bought, and for the first time we really tasted the 'earthiness' people talk about when describing the flavour of potatoes, it was almost perfumed with the flavour of what I can only describe as 'greenness'. My faith is renewed!!! When we started at plot 103 I wasn't overly pushed to put in many potatoes as having been brought up with a portion of potatoes nearly every day at dinner, like most Irish people, I had grown sick of them and I don't eat them very often anymore. But there was nothing humble about these spuds and we're now looking forward to our roosters which should be ready in early Autumn and are growing away tall and strong. Next year we'll dedicate a lot more space to our not so humble spuds, they seem to like it up at Annamoe allotments.

On the Salads front, our lettuce has clearly decided to give us the 2 fingers and has joined the electricians on strike!! They have made it perfectly clear that they just do not like our acid soil with few nutrients so I fear that this year we may have to consider them one of our failures and concentrate on preparing the beds properly for them next year. We'll lime the soil to sweeten it for them and pack it with lots of manure and compost over the winter and try again next year. These are salad bowl (a cut and come again type), ice queen (an iceberg type), rocket, and a type of butterhead who's name I can't remember. They were sown around the second weekend in May and should be much further along at this stage if not nearing harvest, but they've just decided they don't want to play this allotment game and really haven't put on any growth staying tiny. The spinach we sowed around the same time has bolted and gone to seed before it reached 4 inches in height, also on strike.On the balcony at home there is a flush of colour at least as my tiger striped gazanias, having survived lady Isabella Harvey's (the cat) onslaught, have opened up and sit pretty among the deep blue lobelias. My roses are also in bloom but unfortunately I'm still waiting on my summer Jasmine to flower. Summer is most definately here.

Strawberry surprise!!

2009-07-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

We finally got our first crop of 2009 from plot 103!! its getting exciting watching everything start to look like vegetables and fruit. We arrived down to plot 103 to find a few strawberries and raspberries were ripe for the picking. Beneath the plants were a few succulent fruits dotting the place with bright reds!!

Some had succumbed to mould unfortunately due to the warm, humid and wet conditions over the last week and many of the raspberries had been eaten by the birds but we only put two raspberry plants in this year and weren't expecting a particularly large crop but there were certainly a few tasty morsels. We put squares of weed suppressing membrane around the 12 strawberry plants to act as little mats or collars to prevent the strawberries still forming from resting in the mud and rotting. Heres todays few fruits, granted some of them wouldn't win a beauty contest or quite make the 'tescos finest' uniformity test but they were thoroughly enjoyed with some fresh whipped cream and apple tart this evening. They were much sweeter than the ones we are used to in the shops and weren't quite so sharp.

The heavy rain followed by sunny spells over the week meant everything took a good growth spurt. Some of our first cabbages look like they are starting to form hearts.

The beans have thankfully made a full recovery, looking healthy and green they are even starting to bud with their first flowers.

Even our onions appear to have lost their yellowing tips due I'm sure to both the heavy rain and the feeding with seaweed extract and chicken manure. Pumpkin and courgette plants are really starting to bulk up. Unfortunately as all of our veg have taken a growth spurt, so have the weeds. We decided next year when we prepare the beds we will grow as much as we can through weed suppressing membrane.

Our elderflower champagne experiment continued during the week. After 3 days fermenting in the bucket a very faint fizzing could be heard when you stirred it. After 5 days fermenting in the bucket we bottled it on Friday into some plastic screw top sparkling water bottles. Although the recipe on the river cottage website recommended glass swing top or grolsch type bottles we decided against it. A number of people who had tried the recipe posted up warnings of exploding bottles due to the pressure buildup as once bottled, the brew must ferment for at least a further 8 days. Some exploded with such fervor they were referring to it as WMD brew!!! Others told stories of batches of the champagne exploding in their sheds and glass shards embedding in the roof and walls!!! So for the sake of safety, I decided that plastic bottles was the way to go. At least if it does explode there will hopefully be less fallout! The screw caps also allow some of the gas to be released over the additional fermentation stages. I've been releasing the pressure in the bottles once a day and its very obvious that the wild yeast in the flowers is continuing to do its job happily fermenting the sugar into alcohol and producing all those lovely bubbles as if fizzes with a gorgeous smell when I loosen the caps briefly. I can't wait to try some. We did try some of the elderflower cordial with some sparkling water and it was quite nice if not a little too sweet. Next time I think I'll reduce the sugar content. The cordial is now frozen into ice cube bags for use as needed.

Chateau 103: The 2009 vintage!!!

2009-06-28T12:33:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend we finally got our elderflower champagne attempt started. While the elderflowers around dublin are starting to fade, those up in Roundwood are just hitting their prime as we are that bit higher up and things grow a few weeks behind everywhere else. Cillian and I found some elderflower in the fields nearby plot 103 and collected a good few flower heads. They smelled wonderful with a sweet heady aroma and released clouds of pollen at the slightest touch, great for making elderflower champagne, as the yeast is contained in the pollen so the more the better, but unfortunately bad for me. I suffer from very bad hay fever and have been sneezing and wheezing all evening. Hopefully our first brew will be worth it and we'll get a nice batch of elderflower champagne out of it and a few litres of elderflower cordial. I used the river cottage elderflower champagne recipe, you can find it on the net if you just google river cottage elderflower champagne. Its surprisingly simple and requires no fancy brewing equipment, just a bucket, the flowers, some sugar, white wine vinegar, some muslin cloth, lemons and some sparkling water or fizzy drink bottles I'll pick up in LIDL. I melted the sugar in 4 Litres of hot water, topped it up to 6 litres with cold water, added the juice and zest of 4 lemons and 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, added around 20 elderflower heads, a quick stir and covered with some muslin cloth. The brew will now sit for a couple of days after which I hope to see some foam or bubbles to indicate that the yeast in the pollen is doing its job and fermenting. I'll leave it then for another 4 days fermenting, strain through muslin and bottle. The brew will then ferment for another 8 days minimum, (hopefully without exploding with all the gas) at which stage it should be ready to drink. If it all works and we have enough yeast in the pollen we should get something out of it. I believe the brew could possibly come out with maybe 4 or 5% alcohol but as its not a very precise process we'll see what happens.

We spend Saturday working hard on plot 103 weeding and watering all of the plants which seem to be growing well. The potatoes we planted a couple of weeks ago are well up and will need earthing up soon.

The 2 potato seeds given to us by Val, our allotment neighbour back in late april/early may are now beginning to flower. Apparently this means we should soon be ready to harvest the spuds and it might be worth having a 'firkle' over the next few weeks. I first heard this term on the allotments4all forum where people were all talking about how it was time to go and have a firkle.... At first I thought it was some kind of strange perverted ritual vegetable growers might secretly engage in but 'Firkle' I believe is the official term for sticking your hands in the potato mound and having a good feel around to see if the spuds are there, what size they are and if they are ready for harvest....gardeners have the strangest phrases....I hadn't expected potato plant flowers to be quite so pretty but the blooms on ours are quite beautiful, tinted with purple petals surrounding vibrant yellow centres.

Our Chard 'bright lights' is starting to show its colours and stalks are now appearing as vibrant reds or bright yellows.

Our courgette plants are starting to put out their first flowers of the season and are now vigorously growing on our manure filled mound of earth by the pumpkins at the back of plot 103. Hopefully we will begin to harvest courgettes over the next few weeks. According to some books on vegetable growing I've read, 1 courgette plant could provide between 16 and 20 courgettes!!!! we have 3!!!so I'd better start thinking of courgette recipes.

The sweetcorn we planted out is thriving I'd swear is growing centimeters by the day. We planted it out 2 weeks ago and each plant was a single blade, like a blade of grass and now look at them...lets hope it continues. The chickpeas we sowed have also come up and appear to be thriving.

Over the weekend I was thinning out the carrots, again, and found for a nice change, that we have some friendly insects on plot 103. I found 3 ladybird larvae eagerly crawling around the carrot bed which is very promising. Ladybird larvae are certainly a gardeners friend as they are ravenous for green fly, black fly and other aphids, and can be used to control greenfly populations. They can't get enough of them, so this guy may be a little ugly and crawly but leave him be...he'll reward you with helping to keep your plants aphid free before he turns into the more familiar ladybirds we see in the height of the summer.

Of course we couldn't finish a beautiful day like saturday without the obligatory BBQ which was enjoyed by all. Here me Jemma and Eoin are seen stuffing our faces with burgers and hotdogs. On the fishing front, Cillian and Eoin spent a few hours fishing and did catch 2 small brown trout, but as they were so small they were thrown back in, so unfortunately no fresh fish for the BBQ this time round, but theres plenty of summer left...

Save the beans!!

2009-06-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

A somewhat text heavy entry this week as I didn't have my camera with me and had to rely on a phone camera so I apologise for the quality of the photos but you'll get the idea. Over the weekend we found that the beans had deteriorated and became even more yellow. At this stage they also seemed to have stopped putting on any new growth. We needed something and we needed it fast. What is worse is our onions are now also showing yellow tips. I had posted up on the gardenplansireland forum looking for a root cause to our problem and all signs seem to confirm that our beans are suffering from a nitrogen and possibly magnesium deficiency aswell. This would make sense as beans are extremely hungry plants and need a well manured and nutrient filled bed, which we didn't have. We hadn't applied any manure to the beds and the soil nearest the river is so sandy it would appear that without the manure and lots of organic matter the nutrients just drain away too easily. With proper ground preparation this autumn we hopefully shouldn't have this problem next year. So I did some research frantically looking for a high nitrogen liquid feed for our plants and was surprised to find that there is not a lot out there in liquid form that is organic. Plenty of organic tomato plant food, but this is high in potash, and while great for flowers and fruit, would, if anything make things worse for our nitrogen hungry green beans. There were ravings of how good a home made nettle or comfrey and manure liquid feed is but it was nearly impossible to find a good commercially available quick release organic liquid feed. We have plenty of nettles and manure around the site but a home made feed takes a few weeks to brew, a few weeks we didn't seem to have. Things were getting desperate and we began wondering if it would be possible to save our beans at all organically or would we have no choice but to let them go, as we really don't want to turn to a synthetic chemical fertilizer. I had already top dressed the bean bed with fish blood and bone meal, a good organic all round fertilizer high in nitrogen and other trace elements, but this unfortunately is slow release and just isn't acting fast enough for our starving beans although it will go towards sustaining the plants over the growing season if they make it. Our beans had survived the marauding bands of squirrels/rats, slow germination, acid soil, and I couldn't let them go without a fight! we had laboured too much and tried too hard for these beans!! It was then, during a trip to Newlands cross garden centre we discovered the wonders of chicken manure and seaweed!! I picked up a massive tub of chicken manure pellets, high in nitrogen, and on the advice of the assistant a bottle of maxicrop organic seaweed extract. Easy to miss as its not exactly advertised as a plant feed as such, but as a growth stimulant and good all round 'tonic'. Sounds a little airy fairy to me but we said we'd try it anyway. We flew down quickly and I surrounded the beans and onions with some chicken manure pellets, lightly hoed them in and we drenched the beds with a solution of the seaweed extract.

As the sun was splitting the stones for the last couple of days we decided this evening to take a quick spin up to plot 103 to give everything a good soaking. To our delight, the beans had not only greened up in the last 3 days and lost almost all of the yellowness, they had also put out lovely new growth!!

The seaweed extract certainly is a good tonic, is organic, and works extremely quickly, I'll be stocking up on this stuff, I have discovered the miracle of seaweed and will forever sing its praises!!! The onions were also showing greener growth and the yellowing tips were decreasing. As yellowing onion tips can also be a symptom of onion fly, alium leaf miner and white rot, we wanted to just make sure it was none of these. William the allotment gurus onions are also displaying the same symptoms in that end of the plot so we pulled one up just to check, and thankfully there was no sign of onion fly maggots, leaf miner catterpillars or any rot. So it would seem that so far we have escaped these dreaded pests and our only problem is with the nutrient deficiencies which can be easily fixed.

We also ran into our new plot neighbour Noreen who has really hit the ground running having only started about 2 weeks ago, she already has her plot completely covered in lovely raised beds and is planting away. She also let us in on a home made remedy for the midges that plague the site in the evenings. We have all at some stage over the last few weeks gone home looking like we were used as a pin cushion. At first we thought she was rubbing in some sun screen or something until we got a little closer and ...could smell...christmas dinner!!!! Noreen has concocted a homemade mosquito repellant!!! and as long as you don't mind smelling a little like christmas stuffing, it works a charm apparently!!! This is genius!! and really does seem to work. The concoction consists of olive oil, garlic, onions, basil, rosemary, lavender and I'm sure one or two other easily available (secret!!) ingredients I can't remember. Noreen mentioned that the midges really don't like the lavender, garlic and basil portion which would agree with the companion planting guideline of using onions and garlic among your carrots as carrot flies don't like the smell, or planting basil with tomato plants to deter aphids and black flies. This weekend Annamoe allotments is having an open weekend where members of the public are welcome to come and have a look at the plots and see how we're doing. Martin, the allotment owner is also looking to take names for phase 2, another 10 or so plots, in Annamoe allotments for the 2010 growing season and fill the remaining 2 plots left for this year. We're certainly learning something new every week up at plot 103 and thoroughly enjoying the experience.

Chillies Ahoy!!!

2009-06-14T15:14:00.001-07:00

I thought I should really devote a little piece of the blog to my balcony grown plants this year. I'm growing 2 Apache chilli plants and some tumbler cherry tomatos in pots. Its a first for me for the chillies, but I have grown tomatos in pots for the past couple of years. Over the past two weeks the chilli plants have become laden with flowers and since we are on the second floor, I can't really rely on insects to do the pollinating for me, so I've been 'artificially inseminating' them myself with a small brush. To my delight I can now announce that my chilli plants are pregnant!!!! I have succeeded in getting the plants well and truly 'up the pole!' There is a small bulb at the base of each flower now and below you can see the first of hopefully many chillies forming very quickly. This ones been growing millimetres each day! So I'll have to look up some recipes for chilli jam, chilli sauce and any other things to do with chillies. I have to say they are so successfull I could very easily see myself getting addicted to growing these guys and I'm already planning to try different varieties next year. Apache, jalapeno, and perhaps some Thai birds eye. Each plant is supposed to give up to 50 chillies so I'd better come up with some ideas for using them.

The tomato plants are also covered in flowers which are starting to fade and I'll know by next week if these are also going to be fruitful. Hmmmm chilli and tomato ketchup springs to mind.

This week we arrived down to plot 103 to find the slugs had been munching on our pumkins. I checked the slug traps and unfortunately again, no slugs. But the lettuce seedlings so far remain untouched!!

I did however manage to find our traps had been successful at catching something! The evidence speaks for itself really. You see our bean and pea bed is right next to the lettuce bed. Dare I say it, it may be possible that I have been just a touch unfair to the marauding bands of squirrels. It might be just a little possible that I have unfairly blamed the squirrels for the devastation and masacre of our peas and beans. There is a slight possibility that, yes.., I may have been a little...wrong! When I pulled up one of our slug traps I found it had caught something, certainly furry, and certainly a rodent, however most definately not a squirrel. The trap had caught and drowned what I think was a small young baby rat. It certainly wasn't a mouse as I've had mice before unfortunately in my apartment when we moved in and became very aquainted with them!! eeuuw! This guy was quite different, was obviously too small to be an adult and must have been a young rat.

At first I was sceptical that he was a rat as he was so small and I thought perhaps he was a vole until I did some reading and found that surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any voles in ireland. Well, mouse or young rat, It's quit likely that this is the actual culprit for the destruction of our peas, which have now thankfully been replaced with healthy strong seedlings raised on the balcony. To all squirrels, I am tentatively sorry!! In light of the continual failure of our slug traps I think we may need to try and source some organic slug pellets. The beans however appear to be suffering from some sort of mineral or trace element deficiency. I suspect it may be short of Nitrogen, as our soil is slightly acidic and quite sandy, this would impede the uptake of nutrients in the plants and manifest itself as yellowing of the leaves. I've left a query up on the gardenplansireland forum to see if the good people there can shed some light on the situation and hopefully provide a remedy.

Our spuds are doing very nicely and were well in need of some earthing up, which we did. This guy in particular needed to be earthed up badly but they seem to be growing fast and strong, so far with no sign of blight but as there are blight warnings around we'll have to take some precautions. Ireland is particularly prone to potato blight due to our very wet climate, and the recent warm humid weather we've had has most certainly raised the alert.

William the allotment guru kindly offered to give them a quick spray against the blight, the first signs of which may be affecting other potato plants around the allotments, some leaves are showing tinges of brown around the edges. Unfortunately when it comes to potato blight as us Irish know only too well, if you don't stop it in its tracks before it turns into a severe attack, you will loose your entire crop. On that note I just had to put a sneaky photo of Williams plot just so that you know I have a legitimate reason to be jealous and green with envy!!

I'm beginning to wonder if our plot will ever look this good. The weeds have well and truly gotten a hold and we began thinking for next year, definately at least edging all of the beds with wood and perhaps raising them up a little. We'll dig the soil thoroughly in the autumn and ensure everything is well fed, manured and prepared properly for next year. At least then we will have the full year to prepare as this year we got the allotment so late in the season we had to rush to get things in.
The signs of our first crop are very evident, the strawberry plants are beginning to show the first strawberries, and our raspberries are also showing their first fruit. I gave all a good feeding with organic tomato plant food to give them an extra boost while they are hard at work setting fruit.

The sprouts and brocolli we planted out a couple of weeks ago are coming on well and have hardened and strengthened nicely from the weak seedlings I started off on the balcony. The first cabbages we planted out are shooting up and thankfully with no signs of caterpillars thanks to the cheap lidl netting. If we had to be successful against only one of our multitude of pests, It would have to at least be my nemesis the butterfly!! So far, plot 103....1...ugly fluttery hairy thing ...nil......!!

We planted out the sweetcorn we had started on the balcony and hopefully they'll take off as well as all the other transplanted seedlings. We also sowed some more lettuce to have a successional crop throughout the season and a few more rows of carrots.

The carrot and parsnip seedlings were looking very overcrowded as were the spring onions between the rows so I thinned them out a bit and couldn't get over the sweet smell of the the thinnings. It was so strong it got me thinking, how did we ever get so used to mass produced tasteless veg we know from the multinational supermarkets. It really is a shame that with today methods of mass production so much of the flavour of veg and fruit is lost. Many people really don't know what veg should really taste like, the carrots are so much more carroty, the cabbage more cabbagey. When I began growing my own tomatos a few years ago I couldn't get over how much stronger the flavour was compare to the tasteless unripe stuff we've become accustomed to in the shops. Limp watery veg and fruit that has been picked and harvested far before it should, and allowed to ripen artificially on the boat or plane on the way over here. Such a pity! If only everyone could try to grow even just a little of their own food, it doesn't take much space to grow a few tumbling tomatos, or a few pots or window boxes of lettuce, if anything just to realise how good veg and fruit is supposed to be, and of course the true satisfaction that you have grown your own food, cared for and nurtured it, makes it that much sweeter. Irelands 'get growing' campaign has been started by the Green party to promote just that and the website which I have linked in the links section gives all sorts of advice on growing your own, how to get growing in allotments, community gardens, at home or in school. Its one cause I've certainly got to give the thumbs up to. So get out there and get growing!

Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glenn, we daren't go a hunting, for fear of little men!!

2009-06-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

On the bank holiday weekend a rather strange thing happened..Quite unexplainable. We arrived down to plot 103 and inspected the beds to see how everything was doing, and when we got to the pea and bean bed, which had previously been ravaged by the marauding bands of squirrels, we saw this...........

Two full rows of beans!!! Only the week before there was a lone bean plant left and now somehow, two entire rows of beans had appeared and were thriving......most peculiar!! There are two possible explanations to this phenomenon. Either the squirrels felt guilty and replanted our beans, highly unlikely knowing squirrels, or there was another theory to this miracle. William the allotment guru let us in on a secret surrounding the wicklow hills...apparently the hills surrounding plot 103 and annamoe allotments is teeming with fairies!!!! 'maybe twas the fairies, you never know!!' he insisted. Much as I doubt there really are fairies in the wicklow hills, there is a lot of hawthorn which I'm assured will make lovely sloe gin once the berries appear....and according to Irish folklore fairies are known to love the hawthorn, and woe betide anyone who cuts down one of their sacred trees, one of which graces the centre of the car park in annamoe allotments carefully worked around during the building of it!!! hmmmmm fairies or not, it would appear that the wicklow locals know a little more than they are letting on.....and Williams plot is coming on far too well not to have some sort of supernatural help!!

Last week I got my own back on the dreaded butterfly. We inspected our newly planted broccolli and sprout plants to find them covered in butterfly eggs!! Jemma and I took great joy in squishing them before the little caterpillars got a chance to hatch and eat all of our food. We covered both the brocolli bed and the sprout bed in netting to prevent this dreaded pest from getting near them again.

We also planted some potatoes in the 'spare' bed we had in plot 103 under the expert guidance of William the allotment guru who showed us how to plant them. The seed potatoes are roosters and were generously donated to us by Robbie our allotment neighbour up the way.

This weekend was a flying visit to check on things and plant out 5 more cabbage plants, a couple of rows of pea plants which were resown on the balcony and to sow some more beans which grow bright yellow and should add some colour to the dinner plate if the squirrels don't get them, or if we get some supernatural help from elsewhere. Val our allotment neighbour a couple of plots up generously offered us some chickpea seed to try so we sowed a couple of rows of them aswell to try them out.

A quick check on the rest of the plants showed the strawberry plants covered in flowers which had now faded and we're hoping for a good crop....perhaps I should leave some milk and honey by the hawthorn tree as a bribe to our little friends...We also found the chard is coming up which should add lots of colour to the plot.

And now for the verdict!!! We were due to see the results of our experiment with the slug traps we set. Strangely it turns out the slugs didn't like either the Mller or the Tsing tao. We didn't catch a single slug! Having said that there also doesn't appear to be any slug damage at all to our emerging lettuces so perhaps we'll be lucky, although I suspect its because of all the dry weather we've been having. We built a mound of all the sods and earth we had previously dug out of the beds and mixed in plenty of manure to house the pumpkin plants we are hoping will provide us with spooky purple pumpkins on halloween. We had two plants started off on the balcony which are thriving allong with some courgette plants. So they were planted out on our pumpkin mound and will hopefully be successfull.

We are also looking forward to welcoming two more new allotment neighbours in the coming weeks, Noreen and Sandra, who have each taken on a plot in Annamoe allotments and will,I'm sure enjoy the coming weeks of work to be done. Annamoe allotments is also holding an open day on the last weekend of June which will be nice and will give people a chance to have a look around the plots and see what we're all up to. As June is here, Jemma, Eoin, Cillian and I are on the hunt for some elderflowers to make some elderflower champagne. The flowers should be in bloom and now and it will be interesting to see if it works. We also saw a recipe for gorse flower wine on the tv programme river cottage which will be tempting to try. Theres certainly no shortage of gorse around wicklow. Once we source the flowers I will provide a detailed account of our brewing experiment.

The green revolution!!

2009-05-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

Since getting the allotment we've become more and more aware of our carbon footprint and the amount of waste that we generate. We've made a concerted effort to stop being so lazy and recycle as much material as we possibly can. At home, its easy as our apartment waste company provides us with recycling bins in the development. But rather than just recycle all of our recyclables we've been looking at how we can reuse them aswell. We pilfered some wood that was lying around our development and have also made arrangements to liberate a friend of their left over decking to edge our beds. I managed to 'aquire' some 18L water cooler bottles from work to use as giant DIY cloches, and Jemma and Eoin, and Cillian and I are considering getting a 'can o worms' composter for our balconies. During our last visit to the allotment we found that the slugs have been having a field day with our rhubarb which now looks like its had an encounter with Elmer Fudd and his shotgun!! I've been keeping all empty jars and plastic bottles to make into beer traps as our lettuce is planted near the rhubarb and is coming up so well they are going to require some protection from the slug patrols. We tried two types of beer as we are interested in finding out what our slimy friends favourite tipple would be, good old reliable miller or perhaps they have a more exotic palate and would prefer Tsing Tsao. We were all ready to set the traps and we realised we hadn't brought a bottle opener!! clever!! But Jemma came to the rescue and somehow managed to get the bottles open with a garden fork!! ah garden forks, theres no limit to what they can do!!

We sank the jam jars in the ground and began to distribute the beer, one for me, one for the slugs, one for me, one for the slugs, which quickly became one for me, and one for me,....hic! So our experiment is set and we'll find out next week if our slugs prefer miller genuine draft or Tsing Tsao,..I only hope they don't prefer carlsberg!!

The weather was beautiful over the weekend up in the Wicklow hills and everyone was out on the allotment with full summer fever. We dug the last of our beds and Cillian and Eoin now have their thoughts on fishing since all of their work is pretty much done. We planted up some broccoli seedlings into one bed and some brussells sprouts in the other. Our final bed is dug and we'll be hopefully putting in a few seed potatoes next week and thats it, we've finally run out of space!!! nearly all of plot 103 is either allocated or growing something. If theres anything else we need to plant we'll have to do it through catch cropping or intercropping under widely spaced plants such as the sprouts which use up a lot of space and don't need it until later on.

There was a nice surprise in the pea and bean bed as we found a lone survivor from the marauding bands of squirrels...one bean had managed to germinate and stood proudly in the middle of the bed...first leaves aloft...

The peas and beans we resowed have germinated and should be ready to join this survivor in a couple of weeks. Sweetcorn, Pumpkins and courgette plants have also germinated on the balcony and should be ready in a few weeks to go out onto the plot.

After all our work, we had to have what would hopefully be the first of many barbeques on plot 103 and threw a few burgers on to keep us going. I also took myself on a little walk to see what local flora and fauna we have around the site...Robbie our allotment neighbour a couple of plots up managed to get a fantastic photograph of a deer and her fawn on sunday morning standing in the sunshine among the trees staring right at him. I wandered around along the river at the back of plot 103 to survey the bluebells which are past their best at the moment but still looking stunning ..........and thats when it happened!!!!!... I came to the startling realisation that all was not the pretty beautiful idyllic landscape I thought it was,....something was lurking in the bluebells...something hideous!..something horrid..and crawly... .something that could ruin all my plans for a beautiful summer in the coutryside.....an abomination!!!!! It was an enourmous...gigantic...hairy.....fluttering...leggy.....GIANT PEACOCK BUTTERFLY!!!!!!!!

Go on, laugh.. you may well find this hilarious, but I on the other hand am absolutely terrified of these creatures, and I don't mean 'oh its really gross!' disliking them, I am gripped by pure terror upon the very sight of these things and tend to run squeeling like a small pig running from the butchers blade. I don't understand where the fear came from, and I can see why people find them beautiful, they truly are, and have magnificant colours,...just keep them away from me!! The earliest realisation of this purely irrational fear I have was when I was 11 and in the girl guides. We went on a trip to the butterfly farm in Co. Kildare and in the butterfly house I entered with enthusiasm, everyone else was amazed at the beauty of these rare creatures...over a period of 10 minutes I felt the apprehension turn to fear and then to pure terror and ran screaming out of the building, which was covered in net and made it even more difficult to get out. On my way I squashed a dozen rare and endangered species of butterfly and never looked back. I screamed and screamed until they brought me into the lizard house where they let me hold a very cool lizard who's head you could see right through and I finally calmed down. Since then I've known I am truly afraid of these things. But I refuse to let these creatures ruin my allotment experience. I mentioned before that my other hobby is photography and decided this allotment lark is going to have to be my rehabilitation plan, and I couldn't let a photo of a peacock butterfly sitting on some bluebells in the sunshine escape me. So I crept up to the creature with my heart pounding in my chest, as close as I dared ...clicked.....and ran squeeling like a pig from the butchers blade....but I got a nice shot so here it is. Step one of the rehabilitation plan...I will reduce my fear of this monster by the end of the summmer and let you know how I get on.

It's life Jim!!...................

2009-05-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

It poured rain all weekend so we didn't get much done on plot 103 but we did brave the elements to check on things on Sunday. Obviously we were the only ones silly enough to go out to the plot in the pouring rain and there was no sign of any of our allotment neighbours. We were greeted with a lovely sight as signs of life are poking through in all corners after the week of rain we've had.
The onions are doing really well with bright green tops getting longer by the minute!

The salads we sowed last week have all germinated as have all of our carrots and parsnips, and were poking through. You can see em if you look really close! I aplogise for the poor quality of the photos this week, but it was pouring rain and as photography is my other hobby, I love my camera too much to risk getting it too wet. (plug: you can see my online photography gallery of arty farty pics on www.pix.ie/sharonl) Last week we sowed lollo rossa, ice queen, butterhead and rocket, and three varieties of carrot, Autumn king, yellowstone and chantennay on the bank holiday.

We planted out some cabbage and cauliflower plants and protected them from the cabbage white butterfly by covering with the cheap netting I got from Lidl which turned out to be a great buy! The butterfly will lay its eggs on brassicas if it can get at them and before you know it, the catterpillars that hatch will have stripped your plants bare. With seedlings in, at least the allotment is starting to actually look like its doing something rather than just some empty dug out beds.

On the pest front we took a trip into town to Mr. Middletons garden shop on Mary street, Dublin. I could have stayed there all day!! the place is better than any garden centre and is obviously geared more towards the allotment grower. They were selling bunches of 25 cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and sprout seedlings for 3.99euro!!! Now thats what I'm talking about! I always found it strange in regular garden centres that they could charge 4 or 5 euro for maybe 4 or 6 seedlings! Thats nearly more expensive than the supermarket! You see I have a problem when it comes to garden centres, and its not necessarily just garden centres...well... any shop really that stock plants or seeds. I can't resist them, its gotten so bad that even when we go to the supermarket, Cillian has taken to shielding my eyes if there is a stand of seeds or some new plants on display and he has, on occasion had to physically drag me out of garden centres! Yes, I'm ashamed to admit it but I have a problem!! However, Mr. Middletons shop is one I'll certainly be returning to. I picked up some Nema-Sys vine weevil killer. As far as I know they are the only stockists in the country of this product which is completely organic and consists of around 12million little living nematodes per pack. The nematodes are microscopic worm-like parasites that infect and kill the vine weevil grubs but are harmless to anything else. They already live in the soil but not in sufficient quantities to control a vine weevil problem. So you're really just giving nature a helping hand which suits us perfectly as we are going to take the organic approach and not use chemicals. We applied some on Sunday to the onion bed, where I first saw the grubs a number of weeks back, the carrot bed and the pea and bean bed both of which are close by. Hopefully this will sort out any potential vine weevil problems before they start.

Mr. Middletons is a handy place to visit also if you loose your seedlings for whatever reason and are too late in the season to start again from scratch. You can buy seedlings in fairly large numbers for a very reasonable price to replace your losses. I hope we won't be in that position this year but its nice to know its not the end if things don't quite work out.

A Midnight Raid!!

2009-05-11T01:25:00.000-07:00

On Saturday it became very clear that somebody doesn't like us digging on plot103!! We arrived to see some fine beans that we had sown last weekend in places they really shouldn't have been! One or 2 on our 'sort of' paths, one or two in the carrot bed, and the more we looked, the more we found! Upon further inspection we could see little footprints running the length of the drills where the beans and peas had been direct sown! and at the corner of the bed, the culprit even had the cheek to place every fine bean we had sown in a neat little pile as a statement. This was pure mockery of our hard work...'dig in my field will ye!!' While we have chosen to give shop bought veg the two fingers, the local wildlife has clearly decided to give us the two fingers!!!

William the allotment guru reckons it was squirrels as there are a lot of them in the trees surrounding plot 103. And somehow I can't see birds leaving the beans in such a neat pile. Yes, this certainly has the hallmarks of a particularly bitter and vengefull rodent! and of course squirrels are known to carry a grudge! So our new plan of attack is to put our balconies back into a rediculous state temporarily, grow them up to seedling stage and then transplant them into the bed. I've sown new bean and pea plants in newspaper pots, and since they dug up the beans and peas, the squirrels would certainly have dug up sweetcorn so I've sown some sweetcorn on the balcony which will also be transplanted later.

Jemma and Eoin arrived down to plot 103 on Saturday in a unique form of transport! Its become very obvious that we really need a wheelbarrow, I don't know how we've survived without so far. They also brought 2 nice new shiny buckets so we will no longer be borrowing those belonging to William the allotment guru. Jemma has declared a personal war on weeds and we spent a large part of Saturday clearing sods from our 'sort of' paths and pulling some weeds. We also prepared the salad bed and sowed some rocket, lollo rossa, ice queen and butterhead lettuces, aswell as some spinach. The onions are doing very well and now all have lovely bright green tops showing.

Unfortunately, the gale force winds we had during the week proved just too much for my carrot fly barrier, we arrived to see it in a disheveled state after someone kindly tried to tie it back onto the stakes, (and did a pretty good job too) after it made a break for freedom. So we've decided we're just going to have to take our chances with the carrot fly and hope that the smell of the onion bed on one side, and leeks on the other will prove too much for them. We've also edged the bed with chives and sown spring onions between the rows, so we'll hope for the best. Cillian and Eoin got two of the Brassica beds dug and prepared and knowing now that we have acidic soil, we applied some lime to soak in before we sow seeds or transplant seedlings.

I made it down to Lidl on Saturday and managed to pick up one of the cheap fishing rods going, which turned out to be pretty good! It came with little tweezers/pliers type things for pulling the hook out of the fishes mouth, and a little box of tackle full of spinners hooks and lures. Not bad for 25 euros! We gave it a go and Cillian caught the first fish of the season...a small trout. As he was a bit small we threw him back but it was a promising start. I, on the other hand caught a tree, a bush, some weeds, a rock, a tree root and even my own sleeve! but alas no fish! but by Sunday my casting had improved and I wasn't catching my hook on the weeds or anything else quite as much, so we'll get there.

On the pest side, we found adult vine weevil, the war is on!! These ugly beetles lay up to a thousand eggs over the season and these hatch into vine weevil grubs, one of which we found a couple of weeks ago while digging the beds. The grubs eat away at the roots of plants and the adults will nibble U shaped notches in any vegetative leaves. He was duly squished and the search is now on for an organic solution for the launch of a full scale attack! This is WAR!!

And now for the science bit!!

2009-05-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

Jemma and I are both scientists by profession, I am a microbiologist and Jemma is a biochemist, so of course we couldn't turn down the opportunity for some field science....CSI style!!! Complete with soil pH test kit we set out to check if our soil was acid, alkaline or a neutral pH. For the uninitiated the pH scale runs from 1 to 14 and measures how acid or alkaline a material is with 1 being extremely acid, such as battery acid, and 14 being extremely alkaline, such as lye. Both extremes of pH will cause burns. A pH of around 6.5 -7 is neutral and would be the ideal for growing most vegetables and fruit with the exception of a few acid lovers such as blueberries. On our soil pH kit very acid was indicated by dark orange colour, acid by dark yellow/light orange, neutral by green and alkaline by very dark green/blue

So with expert precision, a bottle of water, soil sample and test kit we shook it all up and waited patiently for the sediment to separate and show us what way our soil was......please be green...please be green...

.........it was yellow/orange...indicating we had acidic soil. So our plan of action began. We will have to get some garden lime to spread on the soil and hopefully bring our acid soil to a more neutral level. This is particularly important for brassicas such as cabbages, cauliflower, sprouts and broccoli, all of which have yet to go in. Brassicas don't like acid soil and it can harbour the clubroot fungus which will damage your crop, and cabbage can develop a condition known as whiptail where the leaves fail to develop properly around the stalks. So we will dig over the brassica beds before sowing/planting out and dust with some garden lime and see how we go. This however leaves us with quite a predicament. As we got the allotment late in the season, we haven't manured the beds and were planning on using manure as a top dressing during the growing season and supplementing with a feed. Problem is when you mix lime with fertilizer or manure you get urea formed as a by-product which really smells and isn't very good for your crops. The lime and fertilizer also cancel each other out so you don't get the effect of reducing the acidity as well. So, we'll try liming before we sow and plant out the brassicas and hold off feeding for a month or 2 to give the lime some time to soak in and hope for the best when we do apply a feed. I only hope we won't get complaints from neighbours about 'smelly' plot 103.

Late on Sunday evening Cillian and Eoin quit digging for the day and just had to try out their new fishing rods in the river at the back of plot 103. After an hour or so their catch came to a grand total of....a rather damp stick!

However, we did get some inside information from one of our allotment neighbours that another allotment holder had gone a little further up river and caught a total of 16 lovely brown trout in one day!! and another 12 the day after!! I 'kind of' learned how to cast fish and will therefore be heading down to Lidl this Saturday to try and pick up one of the cheapo trout fishing rods for 25 euro and try the new spot at the weekend. Keep the BBQ warm I plan on bringing home a whopper!!!

A pre-emptive strike!!

2009-05-05T04:22:00.000-07:00

Things really came along nicely over the bank holiday weekend up at plot 103. Friday and Saturday were a wash out due to a friends wedding and a nasty hangover which prevented anything being done. But Sunday and Monday the gloves came off as we prepared a pre-emptive strike on the dreaded carrot fly and other pests we anticipate may be a problem in the future. We've already confirmed that vine weevil grubs are present on the site and on Monday I found a nasty little cutworm which was duly squished, so we'll be looking at obtaining some organic treatment like nematodes for use on these guys.

A nasty cutworm. (This picture is not my own, but this is the guy I found)

Our primary tactic against pests, where possible, will be physical barriers and we're trying some companion planting, which should, in theory reduce pests. Companion planting works by interplanting your crops with a particular plant know to repel a certain pest, for example, carrot root fly apparently doesn't like the smell of onions and gets confused. So planting onions or other smelly alliums with your carrots is known to reduce the incidents of carrot fly larvae eating your roots before you do, as the fly can't find the carrots to lay its eggs on because of those smelly onions! So our first line of defence went up as we erected a carrot fly barrier, approx. 1 meter high around the carrot bed. Carrot fly doesn't fly higher than approx 2.5 feet, he's a little lazy, so 1 meter should be more than high enough to send the little guys crashing into a barrier of horticultural fleece, and hence unable to get at our carrots. We sowed 3 varieties of carrots on sunday, a row each of autumn king, yellowstone, and chantennay, along with a row of parsnips, and we'll sow a second lot in about 3 or 4 weeks time to keep us going. As for our second line of defence against the carrot fly, we sowed rows of spring onions between the carrots and edged the whole bed with some chive seeds, both garlic and regular.

Cillian and Eoin got ahead of themeselves and got not one but 2 beds dug, one for our peas and beans and one for the salads and sweetcorn. We sowed 2 rows of dwarf type french beans, and one row each of kelvedon wonder peas and onward peas. Again there will be a second sowing in around 3 or 4 weeks. One of the main pests we will encounter with peas and beans is aphids and blackfly, so, companion planting table in hand we found that apparently aphids and blackfly don't like the smell of marigolds. So our pre-emptive strike was to sow 3 types of french marigold all around the pea and bean bed, which also has the advantage of making the place look pretty with some well needed colour when they germinate and flower. We hope to sow salads and sweetcorn next week. We also got the leek bed raked and 3 rows of leek seeds were sown. We found through our companion planting table, that onion fly doesn't like parsley, so we also sowed some parsley seed throughout the onion beds. The onions are happily showing tiny green tops and so we're starting to see small signs of things to come.

I managed to acquire a rosemary plant and a thyme plant in Dunnes stores at 2 for a fiver! due in part to a mistake by the checkout girl, I said nothing! These were duly planted out on Monday near our future brassica beds as yet again, according to our companion planting table, cabbage root fly doesn't like thyme or rosemary, or any type of smelly herb for that matter so hopefully these two guardians will see them off.

The allotment was full over the weekend, with all of our new neighbours out at some stage and community spirit was in full swing. Our neighbour, Val, a few plots up, generously offered us a handful of red onion sets and a couple of seed potatoes to try as he had them left over. His plot looks impeccably neat, with nice small neat, perfectly flat beds all strung up to protect from birds, and paths perfectly level courtesy of having his daughters tread up and down all day a couple of weeks ago, I'm sure the girls will regain their enthusiasm again soon. This got us thinking how messy ours looks with all the sods we've dug out strewn all over our 'sort of' paths blindly hoping that we'll eventually walk on them so much they will magically flatten into perfect paths as opposed to the small mountain range we have now. Cillian managed to dig the remainder of the fruit bed which runs the 20m length of our allotment and I took the opportunity to sow some pumpkin seeds. They are called 'invincible' and have grey/purple skin with bright orange flesh and will look fantastic at halloween if successful. I also sowed a few rows of chard called 'bright lights' (I think!) which grows brightly coloured stems of red, pink, and yellow and should add a splash of colour at the front of our plot.

We sowed so much over the weekend it really drove home that next on our shopping list is plant labels, or we'll soon be playing guess the vegetable. At the moment we have rows marked out with sticks and have taken a note in the allotment notebook where we've sown everything but before long we could end up 'weeding' our leeks and feeding our weeds!

The onions are in!!

2009-04-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

There was trojan work done on plot 103 this weekend and we're on a roll getting the place ready for some direct seed sowing over the next few weeks. As me and Cillian had to go to Ballina on Saturday overnight, Jemma and Eoin were on their own Saturday with their nephew Scottie who's 5 and found the digging too boring, but found endless things to do with his stick and ran manically around the plot waving it at anything that moved! somehow I don't think we'll have a problem with birds eating our fruit when he's around and the contract as a human scarecrow is being drawn up as we speak.

Jemma and Eoin got not one but two more beds dug on saturday, one for the carrots and parsnips and one for the leeks which we will start sowing from seed this friday during the nice day off from work I've secured.

The 2 new beds roughly dug and ready to be raked before seed sowing.

Lidl had some great bargains during the week which I snapped up with a pack of 2 10x2m nets for 6.99 and some rhubarb plants at 3 euros each, so into the trolley went two of them. A 20m garden hose for 9.99 also made its way into the trolley.

On Sunday evening myself and Cillian made our way back up to dublin, picked up Jemma and went up to the plot for an hour of two to plant 12 strawberry plants which have flowers appearing already and needed to go in, 2 rhubarb plants, 2 raspberry plants which also have masses of flowers starting to appear, and 100 onion sets to put into the newly dug onion bed, or as many as we could fit given the 5 inch spacing recommended on the pack. We arrived to the plot laden with plants to cries of 'Cheat!, Cheat!' from our allotment neighbours, so I have to say I did feel a bit of a cheat bringing relatively established plants bought in Lidl, Atlantic homecare and Johnstown garden centre as everyone else dilligently sowed everything from seed. But since its just the fruit plants that are established and everything else is being sown from scratch I think we can be forgiven for that.

We planted approx 70-80 onion sets in the new onion bed, I love onions! and use an awfull lot of them so this amount doesn't scare me.

We planted the 12 strawberry plants in one row alongside our 'sort of' path.

Two healthy raspberry plants gone in and will be staked eventually with some wire accross the back for support.

Two rhubarb plants rescued from Lidl and looking a little better than they were, believe me!!

The allotments have become a hive of activity over the last 2 weeks with everyone getting out and preparing their plots since the deer and rabbit fencing went up and so its become a great opportunity to meet our allotment neighbours. We met our next plot neighbour on Sunday, William and his little dog Sid who likes to chase stones, a very nice man who lives locally and was only too happy to give us all sorts of advice and is well clued in when it comes to growing veg. So he's become our allotment Guru and will I'm sure over the coming weeks get tired of us asking 'Do ya think that looks right?, how do we do this? can I borrow your bucket....again...' The well rotted manure also arrived on site and I've never been so excited about poo in my life, but it now graces the surrounds of the rhubarb plants upon the advice of William the allotment Guru. I'll be watching his plot like a hawk to pick up lots of tips.

News also seems to travel fast when you decide to grow your own veg. A colleague in work has his own plot up in Mayo, and kindly brought in 6 healthy young cabbage plants from a load of 70 or 80 he says he bought from a 'fella down the road' in Mayo for about 7 euro!!! Talk about a bargain!! So if our direct sown cabbage seeds don't do too well, at least we have some comfort in the knowledge that we will hopefully have 6 nice cabbages anyway.

Purple polka dot wellies!!

2009-04-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

The purple polka dot wellies finally came out over the weekend as we spent our first day on plot 103. Which is just as well, as my balcony is really getting ridiculous at this stage and Lady Isabella Harvey (the cat) has become increasingly indignant that a number of plants have taken over 'her' balcony. She promptly aired her grievances by digging up one of my window boxes and depositing not one, but two little surprises in my gazanias and busy lizzies!!

Her ladyship is not impressed!!!

The Balcony in a ridiculous state!

On the plus side, THE SPROUTS HAVE SPROUTED!!! Broccolli is also poking its head above the surface but the few leeks I started off a 2 weeks ago in the tray have yet to make an appearance.

Sprouts sprouting!!

Well we couldn't have gotten a better weekend to get started. We got all the beds marked out and even got the onion bed dug and ready (I think!) for the onion sets to go in next weekend. We have strawberry, raspberry and rhubarb plants sitting on my balcony, (so far untouched by the cat but every now and then I catch her glaring at them!) so hopefully we'll get the onion sets in, and the beds prepared for the fruit bushes and if we're lucky another bed for the leeks. We found that the soil seems to be somewhere between nice loam and probably a bit sandy, which I think the strawberries will love. I also found one little grub which turned out to be either a chafer beetle grub or possible a vine weevil grub (fat white body with brown head). So if anyone has any tips on getting rid of them, answers on a postcard please!

Jemma and Cillian hard at work marking out the beds.
Me and Jemma digging away.

The finished onion bed!!! (hopefully)

And so it begins!!!

2009-04-14T02:44:00.000-07:00

Well, lets start at the beginning, when a number of months ago, I contacted Dublin county councils to take on an allotment after my balcony turned into a jungle and the strawberry plants that dotted it last summer provided lovely strawberries but alas only about 8 of them!!! I was kindly told by the county council man, 'oh yes, we have 4 or 5 allotment sites in south dublin county council, you can go on the waiting list as number 187!!' At that stage I decided the hunt was on for a private allotment.

Serving my addiction to internet forums, I found one that was in the process of being set up in Roundwood Co. Wicklow through the garden plans ireland website. A quick text to a load of friends looking for someone to go in on it with me found that most were more than happy to just pilfer the excess produce but thanks to a drunken rant a number of weeks before about how people should grow their own, Jemma came to the rescue and wanted in!! And so it began!!

We took a trip down to the site and found the most idyllic location, in a valley in wicklow, flanked by a beautiful river and surrounded by birch trees typical of the wicklow landscape. I could already see lazy summer days, tending the vegetables, fishing by the river and throwing some nice fresh caught trout on the BBQ to go with some freshly picked greens!!!

So come last weekend Me (sharon), Jemma, Cillian and Eoin went down to sign the lease and officially take residence of plot 103. Fencing is still to be finished but the ground is rotorvated and the next few weekends will be dedicated to the back breaking job of laying out the beds, raking and manuring, and racing to get our onions in before we run out of time. So far, we have decided on what to grow and how its going to be layed out. Onions, garlic, leeks, spring onions, lettuce, spinach, rocket, chard, cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, beans and peas, sweetcorn, courgettes, rasberries, rhubarb, strawberries, and we're trying a purple pumpkin for halloween.

Now I know the above is extremely ambitious for first time allotment holders but hey, Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it. Plan far more than you can do, then do it. Hitch your wagon to a star, keep your seat and there you are! or so an old school teacher used to tell me. We'll give it a go for our first year and consider it a learning experience!!

Jemma, Cillian and Eoin by the river at the back of plot 103.

Me and Jemma, standing in plot 103. It will improve, I promise!!