Anyone with an allotment?

Same here, back from a fortnight away expecting a tomato massacre but my bodged irrigation seemed to do enough to harvest a decent trug.
The 🐛 weren’t too impressed to see me back.

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Managed to fill this builders bag.

Now it’s a waiting game before I can put it on the plants

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I enjoy everyone’s updates, I particularly like seeing newly acquired plots getting whipped into shape.
Photo dump from today. I’m really lucky that my partner is equally into it and we have a couple of great neighbours on the site who’ve guided us just enough since we started.
We’re trying to do a little bit more often so it doesn’t seem too much hassle. That said once the new bed is in we’ll have almost doubled our available growing space this year.
Quick visit this afternoon to plant some daffodils and wild garlic in the ground, along with elephant garlic corms inside in pots. They started sprouting after soaking in water 24hrs so want to keep them in pots over winter and see what happens planting them out in spring.

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Onion bed finished(bottom left in pic). Ended up chucking 150l of manure and 150l of multipurpose from Wickes on it cos had to pop in there anyway. It was damn cheap which makes up for it being a bit old and dusty hopefully.
It’s about 2.5m x 1.5m so hopefully big enough to do all our onions and garlic when they arrive.
Partner whacked around 100 tulip, alium and daff bulbs in at the back and the little gap in the flowerbed at the front.

I really want to paint the clubhouse wall at some point if I can get permission, it’s so bleak.

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You could put trellis all the way along

The wall isn’t the boundary of my plot sadly so I can’t trellis it. There’s a 1m wide path between those metal arches and the wall. Hopefully in a year or two once the berries have taken over the frames properly I won’t be so bothered by the wall.
The building needs a little love anyway so hopefully the council can be cajoled into sprucing up the outside a bit.

Plot looks great pal, testimony to the hours you’ve put in. Ours is back to jungle status but will get up there tomorrow and strim it within an inch of its life.

I only get to cook my pork chile verde recipe a couple of times a year depending on tomatillo success and I’ve got a good mind to freeze portions and not share with my family, the unappreciative gits!

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Do you let it sit for 6-12 months to decompose a bit more? I guess it is still quite lumpy…

No not yet. This is fresh from the stable. So I’ve got two tonne bags full ready to go on the beds in a few months. The plant is to cover the beds in cardboard over winter then cover with manure and wood chips. This is for the dahlias. I’m not digging them up. It’ll take too long cba.

Bit of processing over the last couple of days. Chilli jam(our chillis but shop sweet peppers), yellow tomato passata and red tomato chutney.
Got another bag of toms to go through later on today. Freezer is getting pretty full of beans and pesto as well.

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Awesome!

Some before and afters of the jungle, needed to enlist full family power on condition my son had his fill of blackberries.
Current plan is to just harvest, weed then cover in order to catch our breath, the biggest takeaway from our first year has been time management or lack there of. I need to get some proper beds and paths because although I like the idea of the traditional square of turned over soil with rows of vegetables, there is no way on earth I can sustain the upkeep. Tis all a learning curve.
Ps. And Zombie pumpkin!

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That looks like a solid tidy up. Yeah the perfectly tilled plot appears to be the preserve of the retired gents and the large extended family that run a couple of plots together, on our site at least.
A mix of paths and beds has worked for us, are you thinking raised beds in future?
We haven’t so far as we have moved/changed a couple of beds over our time so only just reaching the point where we’d consider it. Paths can be dug over/moved easily enough but raised bed structures less so.
Each year we’ve probably put less time in overall but more visits- just going up for an hour or two a couple of times a week is often more productive than a whole Saturday for example.

Harvested a boatload of cherry toms on route to do some diy for a friend today. There'll probably be another bag full tomorrow as well.
As it seems we preserve most of toms as opposed to eating them fresh I think we’re gonna do big Italian plum ones next year instead of cherries.

Has anyone ventured into solar powered irrigations systems?

My local garden centre is selling some old stock quite cheap. I say cheap £89. But I’m thinking it’ll save me going to the plot to water my greenhouse ever other day.

I like the sound of that. I’ve also been considering trying to do some sort of gravity fed drip system from a water butt to take care of our seedlings and maybe a bed but no idea where to start.
So is it a solar powered pump/timer? Presume it runs from a butt not mains water?

I want to try and set up something for our Raspberry canes; the ones that fruit on last year's growth always do fine, but the others [edit: that fruit on new growth] always seem to dry out in the summer and not fruit. Would be interested in seeing any solutions people find

This is similar

https://www.paramountplants.co.uk/plant/fpiesw/flopro-irrigatia-eco-smart-watering.html

I tempted to give it a go. Fit to my ibc tank.

I tried to set up a siphon this year from a water butt that is slightly more elevated than my plot. Worked once and never again, was considering getting the Lomo bilge pump to help start it off but then it started raining and never stopped.

Anyway, when I looked in to it, turned out hosepipes are banned in all forms under our rules. But then again it also said no one should enter the site after sunset which definitely happens.

This is how raspberries work. They are either primocane or floricane, which describes how they fruit. If they fruit on last years growth, I think, it’s prune (in winter) the canes which fruited the season just gone as they won’t fruit again.

Oh, no I mean the ones that should be fruiting now just don't really grow well because of dry soil in the summer, whereas the ones that grew last year and fruit earlier when it's damp do much better, so hoped that an irrigation system might get them both growing well

I seem to have two different types of summer raspberry.

Are those blackberries enormous or do you have tiny hands?!

Sorry I misunderstood you. Hope you can get a watering system to work.

Ha, both! The largest I’ve ever picked combined with a 6 year olds hand…

@Light_EDDed I panic bought a solar rig for my greenhouse, wasn’t much of a bargain but I have been pleasantly surprised. I think whatever you buy, expect quite a bit of faff in getting it to do what you want it to. I’m still buggering about with measuring jugs to determine how much water is actually going to each plant.

First day back in the office so will reply with more depth this evening!

So this is the one I bought, the Harvst Mini. It's totally stand-alone version - solar powered with a pump into a water butt. Yes it was pricey but really well thought out and manufactured, if anything it's a bit too over complicated for a tech luddite like myself but luckily I can't connect it to wifi anyway. The only upgrade I got was the 10W panel.
The drippers it comes with can only provide 4L/h and the battery in these stand alone units can only run for ten minutes total in a day (in two 5 minute hits) which considering the pump can deliver 10L/m seems a bit daft. I modified the ones it came with and have ordered some 'shrubblers' and 'misters' which should give me what need: 500ml per pot per day and misting when the temperature gets above 40ºC.

It took a medium level of faff to install, made all the more difficult by having a greenhouse full of plants! Understanding how to get the module to talk to my phone was the hardest part but now it's set up I feel a sense of relief that I'm not constantly thinking about watering. Now I just worry about the rest of the garden and allotment.

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