Katrina’s Allotment Diary
It’s the end of Great British Pea Week, and what better time to celebrate my love for the humble garden pea! Starting life as a shrivelled up wrinkly seed, the first luscious green leaves that emerge are a welcome sight in early spring. Once they start growing, they don’t need much encouragement as they soon start to romp away, climbing my natural hazel trellis support with their adorable curly tendrils.
Continue reading “Minted Pea & Ham Soup”
The evenings are getting noticeably darker earlier and there’s a subtle chill and smell to the air as the change in season is underway. The golden hour tonight had the most beautiful warmth and even though I’m frantically preparing the seating area for the bank holiday, I reminded myself that these last few hours of sunlight should be cherished. Continue reading “Late Summer Evenings”
It’s been almost a month since my last polytunnel post, when I planted out the tomatoes with string supports. Everything is growing well, the tomatoes are loving their support system and have lots of flowers and fruits. I keep the polytunnel door open permanently to prevent blight even though it’s quite cool. I also feed the tomatoes every Friday with a liquid feed. Check out the video at the botttom of my post for a tomato tour! 🍅😄 I’ve just harvested the first of honeybee tomatoes and they’re so sweet! I can’t wait to try these in a Mediterranean veg tonight.
I’ve never had a great deal of luck when it comes to growing pumpkins and squashes and I’m yet to harvest a single butternut squash, despite growing it every year. Although, I do harvest a few pumpkins each year but not many. This year however, looks to be a monster year for the squash family!
Varieties I’m growing
Now that the squashes are forming I’ve started to feed them once a week. I didn’t bother coving the ground with a weed suppressant membrane like some allotment people do. Instead, I’ve let the plants freely scramble across the ground to suppress the weeds. It’s amazing how fast they grow once they get going! I also threw in some chard plants for the sake of covering a bit more ground with a crop. I can’t wait to try spaghetti squash for the first time! I have so many of them growing too, so I hope they store well.
You know that niggling feeling you get when you know you haven’t finished a job? My three Marketmore cucumber plants have been steadily creeping across the polytunnel table, outgrowing their small pots and dying to go outside in the ground.
I knew I wanted to save space this year and build a trellis for the cucumbers to grow vertically…but with very limited funds and time I was stuck for weeks deciding how to do it. I was watering the polytunnel on Tuesday when I had a brain wave 💡 I still had the frame of a (flyaway) greenhouse that I dismantled early in the year. I also had some scrap plastic netting left over and even a few metres of wire that keeps chicken wire bound together. With these materials I made a trellis without spending a single penny!
Continue reading “How I built a cucumber support for free”
I’ve put a lot of effort into producing a good strawberry crop this year and my hard work is paying off!
Early in the season I mulched the strawberry patch with manure, removed all the nettles that stung me last year, I kept them well watered throughout the dry spell and even made a strawberry cage to protect them from the bird.
With these improvements along with the warm, dry weather (bye bye slugs! 👋🏻) I’ve been harvesting a good punnet or more every day or so!
How do you like to eat your strawberries? I’m enjoying lots of brandy snap baskets with ice cream topped with berries! I also love to make rhubarb and strawberry crumble which I only discovered last year as I didn’t have enough rhubarb! You should try it, it’s devine!
Homegrown Garden 