Bright, blustery and mild today.
Allotment Tales 18-09-2025
Bright, blustery and mild today.
Straight to the brassica beds. Last week we’d removed the enviromesh to reveal an infestation of grey aphids. Removing the worst affected leaves and changing the netting to a more open weave seems to have helped. Today we started an experiment. We made two sprays – one from boiled down rhubarb leaves, which releases oxalic acid and the other a teaspoon of vegetable oil mixed in water with a few drops of washing up liquid. The sprouts got the first, the cabbages the second. We’ll compare progress next week.
Alan visited for some woodwork maintenance.
After weeding paths, we laid fresh woodchip and mowed the grass.
The spent pea plants were taken out and the bed weeded, ready for a new crop.
Today’s most exciting harvest was the damsons. This year’s crop has been the best for years, with boughs covered in plum-size fruit – purple with a powder-blue bloom. Really striking! A couple were sampled for quality assurance purposes, the flesh tasting intensely plummy though with a denser texture. Pulling a rake down the uppermost branches proved effective for dislodging the uppermost fruit, creating a gentle purple rain. We filled 4 large punnets, leaving half the fruit to ripen further.
Other crops harvested: runner and French beans, chard, sweetcorn, carrots, spinach, beetroot, marrows, autumn raspberries and apples.
Flatworm alert – we found 2 and retrieved some escaping composting worms.
Jobs for next week: complete the damson harvest; prune the damson and plum trees if all the fruit is picked; tackle currant bush pruning too; tidy out the second shed to make apple and potato storing easier; continue to weed and woodchip the paths; continue our aphid experiment.
Recent Posts
