Home Grown Allotment Pest

I seem to be personally responsible for breeding the most destructive allotment pest that I have yet encountered. When I was out working yesterday my daughter went to the allotment with her friend. Before coming home she forgot to close the greenhouse door (What she was doing in the greenhouse in the first place  is yet to be satisfactorily explained). I was not aware that she had been in the greenhouse until I popped round there on my way out this morning. I found the greenhouse door wide open and I was devastated to see my seedlings hanging limp and tinged with grey and all suffering obvious damage from the overnight frost.

The leeks and peas will probably survive but the courgettes have certainly had it. At least half of the tomatoes are gone, the runners are goners, the corn is hanging limp and the beetroot, sprouts and broccoli all look very poorly. I have got a few back-up seedlings on the window sills at home but I will still now need to start sowing again. It feels like I'm back to square one. I feel very deflated.

I was so angry at her carelessness that I've told my daughter that our bank-holiday kayaking trip planned for tomorrow is cancelled and the time will be spent on the allotment making up for wasted time. The trouble is that I was looking forward to our day out with the kayaks more than anything and so I may relent and still have the day out. Whether I take my daughter with me or just leave her in the greenhouse, with the door wide open, is yet to be decided.

No Weeds Today

Due to work commitments I have been struggling to find time to do much on the plot over the Winter months but bit by bit, by nipping up there for an hour or so whenever I have been able to do so, over the last few weeks I have managed to pull up a mountain of weeds and dig over most of next season's beds.

I have also cleared out the greenhouse and repaired the storm damage from the high winds which we had a couple of weeks ago. I got off lightly; a few greenhouses on our site suffered severe damage and my neighbours on Plot 26 lost their greenhouse altogether. Fortunately I only had to replace one pane of glass. Other panes had slipped and moved position and some were hanging precariously but only one had shattered.

I have still got a fair bit of digging and weeding to do before I'll be ready to start planting but compared to last year I think I am slightly ahead of my allotment work schedule. The problem last Winter was that the ground was frozen solid from about November until to the end of January and then when the thaw came a large section of the plot resembled an unworkable paddy-field until March or early April. The comparatively mild winter we have had this year has meant that at least the ground has been workable when I have found a few minutes here and there for digging and weeding.

As you can see from the photo above, when I called round at the allotment this afternoon all the weeds had miraculously disappeared.

Aow wouldn't it be loverly?

 As Eliza Doolittle once said,
"All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air.
With one enormous chair,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?"

Well Eliza, now I've got it, the room, the chair, the plot!. The greenhouse is up and running. Big thanks go to Blogger Zeb from Zeb's Plot for kindly donating the 10 panes of glass I needed to finish the glazing and also to fellow allotmenteer Rick for giving me a handful of spare "W" glazing clips which saved me another trip to the garden centre.

I have placed the greenhouse on an 8 inch high wooden base-frame into which I have incorporated a couple of 6ft by 2ft beds. One of the beds now has a couple of growbags with tomatoes and chillis in them. The other bed has a few trays of various seedlings in it at the moment but eventually will be used for cucumbers.

 Best of all, I have installed an armchair in the greenhouse. Not quite the enormous one from Eliza's dreams but it really is a comfortable one and it beats the perching on the edge of a compost box or squatting on the floor which I've been doing for the last couple of months when I have needed somewhere to sit while I have a cup of tea from my flask.

I went up to the plot on Sunday afternoon with the intention of hoeing a few weeds but accidentally left the hoe at home. There was nothing I could do other than pour myself a cup of tea, put the football commentary on the radio and sit back in the armchair and watch the weeds grow. Now that's what I call leisure gardening; I could get used to this.

Bud Burst!

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I have had a very busy couple of weeks. I have changed my job and returned my laptop to my previous employer and I now find that I am well down the pecking order when it comes to the use of other computers at home. The last two weekends have been taken up largely with family celebrations and parties for my daughter's birthday and my parents-in-law's golden wedding anniversary.

I have however still managed to fit in a few hours work down on the plot and today I am having my own private celebration to mark Bud Burst. Eight out of my ten Rondo vines now have buds growing through the wax coatings. I have put pop-bottle cloches over the other two vines and hope to see buds on them soon.

The other significant news is that the contractor installed my three large raised beds last Thursday. This weekend I have transplanted onions, spring onions, calabrese, broccoli, and brussels sprouts from the coldframe and into the raised beds. I have also planted a couple of rows of onion sets, red and yellow, along with some solent wight garlic into one of the beds. I had bought two garlic bulbs but unfortunately found that one of them had started to rot when I came to plant it. The garlic and onion sets have been hanging around in my garage for a few months awaiting the arrival of the raised beds and ideally should have been planted a long while ago. I have also now planted rhubarb and asparagus into two of the smaller raised beds.

Finally, I am pleased to report that the greenhouse frame is still standing. I have aquired some eight foot lengths of treated timber (8inches by 2 inches) from which I will construct a base-frame for the greenhouse. I plan to incorporate a couple of raised beds into the base-frame inside the greenhouse. Once the greenhouse has been securely fixed to the base I can start to think about glazing it. At home I have tomatoes and chillies which are itching to be moved into a greenhouse. Small flowers are appearing on the chilli plants which I assume is a good sign but I could be wrong.

Bed Time

As promised in my previous blog entry (and as requested by Nina) here are a couple of photos of the vines which I planted on Good Friday. I have planted 9 Rondo vines on the allotment and I have another one to grow against a South facing garden wall at home. The vines have been imported from Germany by Winegrowers Supplies of Somerset and have come with their own plant passport which I am told I must retain. I don't know why; perhaps the vines are planning a trip abroad. The vines are grafted onto rootstock and are coated in wax. When the buds grow they will burst through the wax coating (hopefully).

The third photograph shows the three small raised beds which I have made. There are strawberries in the middle one and the others are awaiting rhubarb and asparagus.

The good news today is that the contractor has made a start on constructing the large raised beds on the site. There are about 90 beds to be built. He seems to have made some good progress today and the weather forecast for the rest of the week appears ok and so I am optimistic that by the weekend I will have three large raised beds in which to plant my onions and garlic. I should also be able to transplant a few items from my desparately overcrowded coldframe and get cracking with some direct sowing of the various seeds for the numerous varieties of salad leaf which I seem to have accumulated.

I spent yesterday afternoon disentagling the greenhouse which resembled a large christmas cracker wire puzzle. I am pleased to report that it has gone back together quite nicely. After replacing the previously loose-fitting nuts with new ones and hammering out a few kinks in the aluminium struts it seems to be significantly less flimsy than it was the first time I put it up. Once I have anchored it down to a firm base I will set about glazing it. I have not yet decided upon the best type of base to construct for my needs but my initial thoughts are that I will need to raise the height of the greenhouse by a good few inches to reduce the risk of me smashing my head through the glazed roof; I am tall and quite clumsy.

Gone with the wind

This is the greenhouse frame which I erected on Sunday afternoon:-

This is what I found when I came home from work tonight:-

It looks like we have had a bit of a storm blow through today. The allotment is like a swamp and, as you can see my, pride and joy, greenhouse frame is now a tangled mess of aluminium sections. I did notice as I put it up on Sunday that there was one cross member missing from the back of the frame and a couple of the nuts could not be tightened up as they just spun around on the bolts when I tried to tighten them up. I had planned to fit a cross member this weekend and replace the faulty nuts and bolts and then fix it to a base frame. The greenhouse seemed quite secure when I left it but I can only assume that the structural integrity was compromised by the missing strut and the loose nuts and the wind today took advantage of that. 

I was a bit pressed for time before it went dark tonight so I haven't been able to examine the full extent of the damage but hopefully it will be salvageable.

My 10 Grapevines arrived last night and I need to get them planted this weekend so I went up to the plot after work today to dig holes ready for planting. I put a dollop of manure and a scoop of slow release plant food into each hole and then covered it lightly with soil. I will stand the vines in a bucket of water for 24 hours and then plant them in the holes this weekend. However I am a little bit concerned that the site does not seem to be very well draining. It is like quicksand in some parts. In the picture below it is not easy to distinguish my planting holes from my deep sunken welly prints. I will just have to wait and see if the vines take to it.

Hopefully the swampy conditions and greenhouse damage will prove to be only minor set-backs. Everything seemed to be going so well last weekend. The composting boxes arrived;  I collected a nice pile of well rotted pony poo with assistance from Lucy; I also planted three rows of first early Duke of York potatoes.

Greenhouse

I have been keenly following second-hand greenhouses on ebay for the last 3 or 4 months but I have had no success with my bids. I suppose it is because I am too tight. Last week someone asked if I had tried Freegle. I had never heard of it. I had previously attempted to register with Freecycle, which is a similar kind of group, but the moderators of my local group at Doncaster rejected my application for some unexplained reason.

These groups have the objective of keeping reusable items out of landfill sites. They put people with things to throw away in touch with others who might be able to make use of those things.

On Friday evening I was accepted by the Scunthorpe Freegle group  http://www.ilovefreegle.org/ . I posted a message saying I was on the lookout for a greenhouse. Later that night I was offered a greeenhouse (without glass) by Lee, a Freegler, who lives about 8 miles away from me. I have been to dismantle and collect the greenhouse this morning. It is a beauty. 8ft x 6ft aluminium frame, manufactured by Eden. Best of all it was free!

I will re-assemble the greenhouse frame on the plot this afternoon. Now I need to source some glass or polycarbonate sheets. I will probably end up buying the glass but I can't complain about that given the money I have saved on the frame.

Activity on other plots

After setting a few chilli pepper seeds off in the propagator this afternoon I went out for a stroll. Naturally this took me to the allotments. No sign of the topsoil and raised beds yet but there was some activity taking place on a couple of the plots. Nick (Plot 15) was glazing his new greenhouse, Chris and family (Plots 13 & 14) were laying a paved base for a shed and Rick's 14 tonnes of farmyard manure was simmering away gently on Plot 11.