Plotting and planning on the plot

Hurrah! 201 has new bunting!

And what are we celebrating? Nothing, yet, although the tops of the first earlies have just peeked through the soil so we certainly hope to be celebrating potatoes soon. What we intend to celebrate is the moving of the brassica cage, seen at the bottom left of this photo. Hopefully, when I next post, it will magically appear at top left! We need to move it for crop rotation purposes, so that we don't end up with club root in our brassicas.

However, for that magic to happen, not a little blood, sweat and tears has to happen first. We have to dig it out where it’s bedded in, and then one of us stands one side of the fence, one the other, and we ‘walk’ it up the allotment to its new home. Why do we have to walk it over the fence, which is obviously a complicating factor?

Um, because my wonderful new triumphal arch means we can’t carry it up the path … and we've got crops on both sides of the path that can't be walked on so we can't take it either side of the arch either.

Sigh.

Bit of a planning failure there, eh?

Labels: allotment -crops, allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-first-earlies, allotment-paths

First earlies in the ground at last!

We finally got to plant out our first earlies on Monday, or at least the first batch – we got two rows in the ground, running North to South, where the peas were planted last year. Our crop rotation, given that we’re still bringing areas of the plot into cultivation, is that the potatoes and the peas/beans have essentially swapped places from where they were last year, our brassicas will be going into the area of the plot which was rotovated in November and nearly everything else is going into raised beds.

I’m happy to have made a start on the spuds, although I can tell that Himself and I will fall out over the rest of the planting because I want to make sure we have enough room in the best soil for our maincrops, which were a dismal failure last year through running out of room and having to plant them in relatively unimproved soil that hadn’t been used for several years as far as we can tell.

Himself, on the other hand, has confidence that we’ll get all the potatoes: first earlies, second earlies and maincrops into well prepared soil in good time. As earlies don’t keep as well as maincrops, I’m willing to throw away a row of first earlies that are ready to be planted, in favour of getting a row of maincrops into that spot in a few weeks. He isn’t.

My argument is a good one, I think. It’s that we actually only got 8lb of maincrop potatoes for our 5lb sowing – which is a truly pathetic result by anybody’s measure! His argument is that we’re better organised this year, which is year 2 on plot 201; the soil is in better nick; and we won’t be co-working on another plot so our energies won’t be divided.

I wonder who will win?

Labels: allotment-first-earlies, allotment-potatoes