What have you done on the plot today?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Scythe arrived last week. A bit of a learning curve, but pretty fantastic.

Mowed front lawn and road frontage with it. If you include the raking time, it is a tad slower than using lawmower, but not by much.

Working on rough areas at side of property. 2ft deep grass, nettles at waist height. No problem. Even brambles just slow it down a bit, don't stop it.

Absolute joy compared to using a strimmer.

[hatler]

More weeding, just ahead of the thunder and lightning.

[The Family Cyclist]

Remembered I have a raspberry Bush in a pot so dragged that out the nettles and weeded and watered it. Some fruit already growing on it.

Tied up the peas onto the willow poles (have a willow stump about 6 foot across in my garden that supplies these)

Watered a few bits but hopefully it's gonna rain properly tonight

[Bledlow]

Yesterday.
Picked our first ripe raspberry of the year & gave it to Mrs B. She pronounced it good.

[hatler]

That reminds me. I forgot, amongst all the excitement of the weeding report from a couple of days ago, we picked our first two strawberries. They too were good.

[The Family Cyclist]

Bugger. Lost my watercress as our little stream water level came up rather quickly with this pissing rain

[rafletcher]

Planted out the last of my Big Daddy’s, and some Mountain Magic tomatoes. Added a couple of courgettes for ground cover, and sowed some pot Marigold seeds we’d saved around the edges. Wrapped a bit of Wisteria around the top of the arch, and tied in a new shoot on the Creme de la Creme. Dead headed the Maid of Kent. Tied up the drooping (after Fridays monsoon rain) Daphne in the front.

[campagman]

I harvested, and later ate, the first of my Broad Beans.

[The Family Cyclist]

Meant to be up the allotment but it's too wet again.

So down the garden. Put in a pond and a semi wildlife garden in February time  I say semi as its also got veg growing in four baths I acquired from a previous job (basic free raised beds which I need to use due to ground elder)

At the bottom by the stream is a big willow stump. Kinda regret chopping it down years ago bit was between my and my neighbours garden and she was worried it was too big.

However it isn't dead and keeps sending out new growth which today I took back and gained about 15 canes of eround three metre lengths which ill use next year to grow things up. They need a year to die properly as if used fresh they just sprout roots

[rafletcher]

Our neighbour had their fence replaced thurs/fri last week. All 40m of it, the whole length of our 4m wide garden. This meant taking down several clematis, and 2 climbing Roses that we camouflage it with. So Saturday was spent reinstating all the support wires - longer ones than before as it’s a post and rail fence, so the “panels” are around 10ft as opposed to the previous 6ft. And then resurrecting the (thankfully not too thorny) Maid of Kent and the horribly thorny Gloire de Dijon.  The rambler at the bottom can wait for next week, it needs a good cutting back before tying in again. That’s lethal, although my cheapo-off-Amazon pigskin gauntlets help a great deal. Then I’ve 2 roses to plant - a climbing Claire Austin, and some shrub rose our neighbour gave us as a thank you for letting the mini-digger traverse our (thankfully ramshackle) patio. The clematis were stuffed up behind the wires for this season, and will be cut back before next so I can mange them. One may need to be moved.

[MikeFromLFE]

Hedge trimming to start with. Our next door neighbour (right hand side) cut his privet hedge, which left our side looking dreadful. So I did the deed. I fricking hate clearing up the trimmings, so I've ordered a gert big plastic sheet for next time.
But it made me realise how bloody awful that bit of garden looks, so a decision has been made! The mess of a supposed bed is coming out and grass is going down.
Equally, my dislike of hedge fettling has made me make a decision about the left hand side neighbour's conifer hedge / forest - as soon as funds permit I'm buying a hedge trimmer on a stick so I can do the top of the thing without balancing on a ladder. (If I had my way I'd poison the whole lot of it. But it's in their garden, taking up about a quarter of the width of it).

[The Family Cyclist]

Due to it being wet again and us being busy had neglected the plot again for a few weeks. Up there last night. Hacked down a load of nettles in the sof fruit area and picked a few raspberries

Then started digging over the part of the plot where lots of stuff I sowed failed in the hope of maybe picking some sprout plants up to put in

Squashes and pumpkins are doing really wel which is some consolation for pretty much everything else failing

[rafletcher]

Cut the grass. Lollipoped the Spirea. Cut down the spent Campanulas. Cut off the seed heads from the Irises. Lifted the canopy on the Chimonanthus praecox my wife planted on the patio. Cut back the spurs on the Wisteria on the pergola, then took off the majority of the spent flower spikes on the Rambling Rector on the same pergola. Cut off the lower leaves and fed and side-shooter the Big Daddies. Fed them, plus the Mountain Magics, and side-shooted them too. Fed the sweetcorn (Swift), and weeded underneath them. Put up wires across another couple of spans on our neighbours new fence. Annoyingly the new turnbuckles (eBay Chinese instead of Screwfix) are opposite handed to those I’ve used before. Dead-headed the day lillies. Thinned the parsnips. All in all a productive 7 hours on a day forecast to be mainly wet when I looked yesterday.

[hatler]

Harvested the courgettes, runner beans, cornflowers, sunflowers, sweetpeas and the single strawberry left. Dug the first bag full of spuds (mini did that last bit !)

We've been away a week and the increase in volume of green stuff is something to behold.

[Wobbly John]

After getting back from a week’s holiday, we picked pink-gooseberrys , white currants, broad beans, runner beans, french beans, cucumber, beetroot, rhubarb & raspberries for my daughter’s stall.

Tea was tuna salad, with lettuce, new potatoes, beetroot, cucumber & tomatoes from the allotment. Just the tuna, mayonnaise & butter that wasn’t homegrown. 

[Bledlow]

Lotsa gherkins* (salad veg in the right state, for cooking/pickling if not) so we're giving 'em away, runner beans, onions, potatoes. First cabbages ready but yet to eat any. Blackcurrants - I think the old bush is too old. New one too small to produce many yet. Raspberries diminishing, but we're still getting some. A few beetroot. One daikon eaten. Gap in lettuce production: one batch finished & the next lot not ready. Oops!

Lots of green tomatoes but they're taking their time ripening. Assorted root vegetables not yet ready. Plenty of baby cucumbers, but none ready yet. They're late! Romanesco not doing well. Mostly seem to have bolted. A few very small heads. Sweetcorn looks healthy & cobs forming but nowhere near ready.

Turned over one compost bin yesterday. Had been very hot but cooling down. As thought, getting compressed & anaerobic. Mixed it up & hoping it'll liven up with fresh green stuff that's mostly not grass clippings.

*Never grown before. Neighbour gave us four surplus plants. I think one may have been more than enough.

[The Family Cyclist]

Was panicking a bit as with two holidays and a generally mad July and August I'd not got up the allotment much and they have an open day coming up  popped up there this morning to harvest a big bag of party pan squashes and found my mum who technically shares the allotment had been up and tidyed it so looks much more respectable

Need to harvest the garlic but didn't have as much time as would have liked as was on way to work

[Regulator]

I'm going to spend some time on the allotment this evening, with the dog, whilst Jon does his clinic.

I need to plant a couple of hyssops and then dig over the next bed.

[Tim Hall]

Tomatoes stricken by blight. Bugger.

[Bledlow]

First cucumber. Better late than never. Now have a gherkin crisis. How do we find people to take them off our hands?

Had fresh home-grown daikon with dinner, complete with leaves, in miso soup. Mrs B happy.

[CAMRAMan]

Behind one of the offices I work at from time to time I found some very well rotted leaf mould under an oak tree. Using an Amazon bag, thanks Jeff, and a shovel I'd taken along to work for the purpose, I collected a load to place around my young cotoneaster bushes. The rest ended up in my green Johanna. Lovely stuff.

[Bledlow]

Today's salad contained home-grown beetroot, with some marinated (for a few hours) beetroot on the side. Neither of us has ever eaten home-grown beetroot before, as far as we remember. I suppose it's possible I might have eaten some grown by my grandfather, many years ago, but I don't remember him growing any.

Mrs B was well pleased. She'd not noticed I was growing it.

[rafletcher]

Cut the grass. Then, with SWMBO’s permission, nay, encouragement, removed a several of perennial geraniums that were swamping other stuff in the border. Repositioned the hellibore thus revealed. Dug up the pulmonaria from around the similarly exposed small Daphne, and split and redistributed them. Then dug out the compost from bin 3 (2-3 years old by now) and mulched all over the area I’d been working on. Two trips to the (mercifully close) tip (mini rant, what dickhead puts their green waste in the skip still in bright blue plastic bags  ). Also mulched a couple of Vibernums, Roses and the winter flowering clematis (Wisley Cream). Knackered.

[rafletcher]

Destroyed the entirety of my “Big Daddy” blight-struck tomato crop. It’s unusual we gat blight at all, and the Mountain Magic’s show (as yet) no sign of it. That’s two years in a row I’ve lost them, last year to storm damage (though we did get a few to eat, and more to “chutney” last year).

[The Family Cyclist]

I was considering giving up our allotment and have actually gone on the waiting list for the ones 1 mile fro  our house rather then 3 miles but at 131 on the list I'm not holding my breath

However our squashes and pumpkins have been a triumph. Been having loads of party pan squashes, the butternut ones are now ripening and qe have loads of pumpkins

Cycled back from the plot today with I reckon a good 10kg of crop. The pumpkin alone was 7kg, the routes largely slightly downhill once back in town so extra weight and a tailwind meant I was flying home  winder how many people have cycled over 30kmh with a 🎃in the pannier

May need to use the old kiddy trailer to harvest the rest and still have some parsnips growing well