Alans Allotment

Afternoon visit to the allotment today, as cover could not be arranged to assist Jen in the morning. The weather brightened up, and although stuffed and ready for a snooze after an early Sunday dinner, I made my way to the allotment just after 2pm and was their until about 4:30 ish.

Harvested the last of the Sarpo Kilfi spuds in buckets

There were a number of green spuds on the surface that had to be thrown, but I was happy with the harvest and decided to weigh the spuds, although this variety has suffered from Common Scab.

Common scab is caused by a number of different species of Streptomyces, and powdery scab by Spongospora subterranea f. sp. subterranea. Both are pathogenic micro-organisms and cause rough, scabby patches. Scabs appear during summer and is worse if the soil conditions are dry and persist on harvested tubers throughout storage.

Using the luggage travel scales and an old school carrier bag suspended off the greenhouse door frame.

2.78 kg of spuds from four seed potatoes is a good haul. This being the last bucket of spuds to be harvested I then turned my attention to the bed in front of the plot 1 shed in the photo below.

Green manure had been grown in this bed, it was strimmed and covered with the weed membrane and the buckets of spuds were placed in the bed, However some of the green manure decided to grow around the edges of the weed membrane.

All the buckets of spuds that have been harvested can be see around the bed behind.

The weed membrane was removed the green manure dug into the bed and then all the compost and coir in the buckets was emptied onto the bed. This particular bed is where there was a drop in ground level between plot 1 and plot 1A.

I roughly levelled the soil in the bed

And then covered it with weed membrane for the Winter, to keep the ground warm and to reduce any weed growth. The net covered bed in the background has the last of the main crop potatoes in and the plan is to harvest next weekend, weather and help for Jen permitting.

Its nice to see the plot getting ready for winter and the start of the Spring growing season in 2022. I'm not overwintering anything this year as I want to get all the infrastructure in and my time is limited. Once all the infrastructure is in place it should be easier to maintain the two plots.

Next on the agenda was disposing of the two and a half buckets of cut cardboard and shredded paper into the two active Daleks on plot 1 which are again both down to 50% capacity.

So many new Raspberry shoots of the second row of Raspberries Tulameen Pearl, and a number of raspberries to harvest off the 3rd row Autumn Treasure. The 4th Polka have has a couple of raspberries, but not going in until March have suffered from minimal growth, but I'm hoping for good things from them in 2022.

There is mares tail growing around the raspberries and my intention is to pull those on the next visit and also if time allows to work on the 3rd Rhubarb bed.