Back to spuds

Lovely big poppy, apologies for misframing. Six weeks of work in London came at just the wrong time of year for the allotment. I managed to get back for just one weekend, and spent a few hours of emergency weeding, which just about kept it from going to jungle on me. Been home three days now, and spent everyone of them, a few hours, at the plot.

It wasn't as bad as it first looked. The whole SE bed, formerly known as the midden and the East side of the old-greenhouse-foundations is choked with weeds.

Which is an improvement, actually, it covers up the rubble and the rubbish that has been there in ever so slowly decreasing quantities since I moved in. When I get this corner sorted, particularly the old shed, a last piece of the puzzle will slip into place.

And that old shed, oh my goodness me, is sliding blissfully westward, at the rate of maybe a millimeter a day.  It means the new shed is becoming a priority now, I doubt the old shed will see the other side of the approaching Winter, it's just going to keel over when Lawrence bustles in from the Atlantic.

It's so leaky, to the rain and to the mice.  So that's another reason to get a hurry-on with the new shed. I took a row of the maris peer 2nd earlies yesterday, not bad, carrier bag half-filled. But the next row today yielded half a coffee sack full. And I've no where to store anything. The lobby press at home is already pretty full, and not cool enough anyway. It has to be a shed. A mouse and water proof shed.

Some of the maris peer from the 1st row

So I cut back the comfrey from along the path, where it was becoming rather too dominant. Lots of supercharged material for the compost, anyhow, which was the idea. It's going to need some management, though, staggering 3 harvests a year.

And then I got to work on the tattie patch. King Edwards planted in early June did not do anything. I dug one of the seeds up when i was weeding the area where they'd been. Almost pristine, as if you'd just taken it off the supermarket shelf, after two months in the Glasgow ground. Weird, eh? What must they have done to these poor spuds?

But the desiree, which went in end of May, they're growing like crazy. A bit too crazy, I probably would have been banking them up every week or so, if I'd have been here. So I've embarked on harvesting the maris peer, (2 rows down, 3 to go), so that I can get to the desiree, (3 rows), to do some kind of banking up with them, but they're sprawling all over just now. I'm hoping they keep growing for another couple of months, when I might have made some progress on the shed.

I've got a row of sage, another of beet, and two of turnips. They were all part of the emergency weeding a couple of weeks ago, and I've re-weeded the beets and sage today.