Did you notice that I’ve been unusually quiet about the allotment? That’d be because it’s been a disastrous year. After a promising start (I got the seedlings going early, got the potatoes in on time), things went downhill.
Our going away for two and a half weeks in July didn’t help. Nor did the awful weather: very slow to get warm and then insanely wet except for a week, during our absence, of scorching heat. When I came back at the end of July, the weeds were strangling the potatoes, tomatoes and courgettes. The tomato plants looked finished. The courgettes had run to marrows and the foliage was devastated by snail and slug attack. The potatoes had largely succumbed to blight, or something similar, and had mostly withered and browned.
I did some salvage work, mostly weeding, supporting and feeding the tomatoes, taking diseased leaves off the courgettes. The tomatoes have recovered somewhat, and the courgettes have continued to crop well, as did the cucumbers in the greenhouse (the peppers, though, have done less well and are much liked by the slug and snail population, the like of which we’ve not seen here in Cambridge previously). But the allotment has been a depressing site with waist-high weeds growing in the potato rows and fallow beds.
This weekend, however, we set to bringing the potatoes in and started to sort the plot out for next year. We decided it would be good to look at this time as an opportunity to tidy up and make the allotment a place we’d all be happy to come to work and play. Isa did fantasic work clearing up the front end around the water butts and then around the sheds. It’s going to look great.
The potatoes fared a bit better than expected. Many were, unsurprisingly, undersized, but there were fewer rotten and wormy ones than expected. I should try to weigh them at some point.