Allotment update after 2 week break

Things are looking grassy. Its not pretty.

I can't believe how much its grown in 2 weeks. Maybe if I was working on it full time, maybe I'd be able to keep ahead of the weeds, but I doubt I would have been able to anyway.

The wild flowers are loving it, as are the bees. So I'm feeling bad about having to dig them up. But I do not want them to go to seed for next year. 

At the least the carpet patch is doing its job!

Cleverly went to the allotment with my new boots. 

I had a quick check up on the tree cuttings I stuck in the ground.

 

Deed.

Again, things are looking bleak. I'd say most of the bits I put in the ground are dead. Fairly dead. I'd maybe need to plant them again at this time of year when the plants are dormant. However, nothing lost. It was worth a go.

There has been some success though! The American honeysuckle and the willow cuttings seem indestructible.

Hopefully by next year they'll start pushing up new shoots. Next spring, once the place has been rabbit proofed (the sooner the better really, I noticed a lot of the cuttings had been nibbled to death).

Speaking of rabbits, they have finished off all my onions that I put in the ground.
This is the patch the onions used to live in.

No onions. Replaced with poop. Probably infused with onions.

 

My brussel sprouts are looking good though! The lower leaves near the edges of their protective buckets are looking rather nibbled. However, they're looking so much better than they were a few weeks ago. Starting to really fill out. I hope they buckets protect them from the wind.

With any luck these nubbly bits will produce some sprouts! But we'll see. Ever pessimistic.

Back from holiday to a broccoli explosion

My partner and I have been away for 2 weeks to Tenerife. It was great, but towards the end I was looking forward to getting back to my plants.

It turned out that I'd totally forgotten where I'd planted broccoli and where I'd planted brussel sprouts.
The sprouting broccoli wasn't finished and there's now 2nd huge crop with much slower growing plants. Great! But many of them had gone to flower. If I'm extremely lucky I may get a few more heads before they die off for the winter.

Not only that, but I have 4 peas! Yay! I steamed them, shells and all, because to be honest I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with them, which variety I'd sown. After doing so, I can only assume they weren't designed to be eaten pods and all, haha. 

Broccoli bouquet

I thought I wasn't going to get any peas this year as I sowed them so late! But this is extremely cool. I know what not to do this year and so next year's will be better attempted.

Turriefield Inspiration

I first came across Transition Turriefield, an organic Shetland croft, on the Shetland food blog. It was around early July on a tuesday in teabreak. I discovered their blog and couldn't believe that anyone else up here was doing the exact thing I wanted to do. Growing primarily vegetables organically, in quantity.

After reading everything I could, I decided my mission was to go and visit them and absorb everything I saw, haha! I took the afternoon off work on a sunny Thursday and had an adventure to Sandness to visit them.

I phoned in advance, but got no answer, but was too chicken to leave a message. So I plucked up my courage and rudely invaded them anyway. Poor folk! I didn't know at the time, but Thursday was their extremely stressful and busy packing day. I'd caught them just after they'd finished and were hoping for a rest.

They very kindly let me wander around their croft and I took photos. They have several large polytunnels full of vegetables that would otherwise never grow in Shetland.

Its heaven on earth.

Beautiful bright salad leaves

Tomato plants

A fence along which grows peas and broad beans, salad in the foreground

Marrows that would grow outdoors in england can only grow inside in Shetland

Far left, brassicas, middle onions, right leeks

Corn growing indoors

I was so inspired. Polytunnels are definitely on my Christmas list! The possibilities are endless with one.

I signed up to become a monthly Turriefield volunteer to help with whatever needs doing. It was the least I could do. And through helping I can only but learn more to apply to my own garden. Its a win win situation. :)

Rhubarb Madness

In mid July I decided I had to harvest Rhubarb.Not much later in the summer, the rhubarb would be too old and starchy to eat.

Its an activity with bittersweet memories for me. For years I picked rhubarb for my ex boyfriend's mother. Rhubarb was one of her favourite foods.I loved nothing more than surprising her with a black bag full of stalks. I would spend hours cutting it up for her into bits, ready for freezing. The first time I arrived with a bag full of stalks she looked at me with astonishment "Oh THANK YOU. How did you KNOW." I'd had no idea rhubarb then was so dear to her. Over the winter she'd delight in taking out a bag and making crumble, sorbet, jam and juice.

I hadn't picked any since my ex's breakup in 2013.
Determined I would do it, this time for ME, I set off with a trug and a knife.

The final haul. Hand for scale

Sitting ready on the freezer

The Rhubarb in Heylor is spread over a few plants in odd locations.
The main Rhubarb patch is at the back of my grandad's house, in a grassy park.

As all the patches do, they seems to thrive on neglect, producing huge stalks year in, year out. As plants and weeds in my neglected granny's garden gets wilder and wilder, it gets more difficult to get to it. After struggling over fences, overgrown gates and through nearly waist high grass, I got to the rhubarb.

There's something deeply satisfying about hauling out rhubarb stalks from the plant base, cutting off the huge (poisonous) leaf and plunking the stalks into a bucket. Listening for the thunk on a quiet summer night with the lapwings pleeping over the hill behind you.

It was a beautiful summer night. Despite the midgies biting, I got a bit trigger happy and took back upwards of 50 stalks. I wish I'd taken pictures! If I remember right, my phone's battery was almost dead.

Borrowing the use my grandad's kitchen, I washed every stalk (removing the odd slug and creepy crawley that had been evicted from its home) and cut up every stalk into cooking ready chunks.

The process took 2 and half hours. By 10:30pm I had 3 bags of 4-5 pounds of rhubarb ready for freezing. Rhubarb is difficult to cut. You have to rotate the stalk as you cut into it. Otherwise long stringy strands peel the length of the stalks, mislooking it. My hands ached.

We're nearly into September and I still haven't yet cooked any of it! I've irritated my partner as I've taken up a good 50% of our tiny freezer with a single bag. I need to get on with it, but I feel like crumble deserves a good stormy winters day before it'll be really appreciated. I'm sure the storms will come soon to set me cooking.

Heylor summer nights

Seedlings galore

Late 2014, my mam was clearing out my grandad's cupboards. She found my late granny's old seed box. She found rocket and a few other things that she gave to me to try. The seed was 15 years old. Not much hope for germination, but it got me thinking, what ELSE could I grow the following year.

Around March/April this year, my mam was starting to propagate her seeds for the coming summer. I was inspired.
A few weeks later I agonized over seeds in the Planticrub at Tingwall. I knew I couldn't try everything at once, as much as I wanted to.

I came away with Kale, Leeks, Corncockle, field cornflower, primroses and strawberries.
My mam decided she was going to try her usual assortment of annuals including pansies, livingston daisies and for the first time, tomatoes.

I sowed my seeds in my garden shed. Unheated, dark, cramped and not much light. Having no shelves, I constructed flat surfaces out of old bird suet boxes on which I laid propagation trays. It was a mess.

After a few weeks some of my seed trays showed life, others none at all. It just wasn't warm enough to make the seeds happy!
In desperation I bunged everything I had in the back of the car and headed north to Heylor with them. I begged my mam to find room for my trays otherwise I'd have a very bare garden.

Being the wonderful mam she is, she squeezed my trays in among hers in the considerably warmer and lighter potting shed.

My granny's potting shed

Old school glass sheets instead of plastic to trap the heat and moisture

Shelves and shelves of plants!

After I handed over my seedlings to her, I had a very lazy few weeks, gardening wise. It was an awful time at work as we were in our busiest period of the year at the same time as having our office refitted with custom built units. Whilst that was going on, I was also working on a huge commission for a children's book.

My mam soldiered on and pricked out all my seedlings and brought them on for weeks by herself. Poor her!
However she did pinch all but 2 of my primroses and strawberries and a kale plant. So it worked out not too badly for her.

I caught the growing bug

I want to make a diary of what I've been doing with my adventures in gardening.
As this year has gone by, it would be easy to forget how I started out. This blog and posts will have to backtrack over this past year, as I'm only starting in the last few days of August 2015

But for now, lets go back in time!

In 2013 I moved in with my boyfriend in Lerwick. We live in a small Hjaltland 1 person, 1 bedroom flat. TINY! We have a small garden, 4 x 3 meters or so. Better than nothing, I refer to it as my post stamp garden.
It looks south east out onto a very uninspiring view. Noisy from the north boat coming and going daily. Currently a new pier is being built nearby. A few times a day, the flat shakes as workers explode rocks a few hundred meters away to create it. In winter, the light barely reaches it, as the sun hardly rises above the surrounding houses to reach us. All year, the sun is extinguished by the hill to our west, cutting out all direct sunlight after 4pm.

All in all, its not all that inspiring.

In late 2014 in a bid to brighten it up, I bought a few plants to decorate the flat patch of grass. I had a total of 3 pots. 1 large pot with a small blackcurrant bush to grow into. 1 large ceramic teacup with chives and mint in it.  And one strawberry planter with 4 strawberry plants in it.
They all lived outside the backdoor and survived the blasting of wind over the long dark Shetland winter.

THEN. As if by magic, a switch seemed to flick on in my brain and I needed to grow more. LOTS more.
I'm not sure what triggered it exactly. I'd grown up with my mam and granny who were avid gardeners. When I was young, I was never really interested in growing things. I helped them sometimes, but it was boooring.

I think the trigger was the satisfaction at seeing my baby blackcurrant bush suddenly putting on lots of new growth in the spring and thinking "Hey, I did that. I made that plant happy enough so it could grow. That is so COOL. Hey, what else could I make grow." I was so proud of my little bush and from then, I was hooked.

The bug doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon!