Fruit bushes in… Rhubarb doing well!

Popped down to the allotment yesterday afternoon, before the Rugby (Wow what a game, shame England weren’t playing like that six weeks ago!!). I managed to get hold of a number of fruit bushes from Lidl for next to nothing so I thought I’d plant them up. I had prepared an area for raspberry canes, but as Lidl only had one individual plant I thought I’d give that to Dad to plant at home. I was really looking for somewhere in the region of 10 plants to put up.

But, as the bed was ready, I thought I’d plant the 2 gooseberry, 2 redcurrant and 1 blackcurrant bushes there.  They seem to be at home. As you can see from the right of the picture I still have quite a lot of clearance to do up at the top half of the plot – and we won’t even discuss the bottom half just now, OK! :)

The fruit trees seem to be at home where they are, quite closely planted together, but this is by design, I am hoping to force these cheap trees to grow small – we’ll see how we go with that – it may be that next year, after they have been where they are for a little while, I may move them about a little bit – but we’ll see. I was concerned that they wouldn’t do anything as they were just ‘heeled’ in over the Christmas months as time didn’t allow me the trip. I’ll just keep a close eye on them…

 

Finally, this year, after being in the ground for 3 years the Rhubarb actually looks promising! The asparagus that was planted in the same “permanent” bed has, however, not faired as well and I have written this off as a crop. I’ve planted some gladioli in this bed now so that I can pick my wife some nice cut flowers a little later in the season. Very exciting to have the rhubarb up though – a little bit of Rhubarb and blackberry crumble later in the year perhaps :) And, of course, the childhood memories of rhubarb dipped in sugar just eaten raw!

I’ve got a day at home today, so I’ll tidy up the back-garden plot and fit the mini poly tunnel that was also a bargain from Lidl and plant out some seeds in trays to get the season going – I’m a little behind really.

Bread and Baking

It’s a really beautiful day! For some reason I awoke this morning at 5.30am naturally (honestly it was nothing to do with the amount of lager I’d drunk the day before whilst watching the rugby)

We have got nothing in the house at the moment - we are striving to empty the fridge, freezer and cupboards of all the things we have “stored there for later” – so I decided to make some bread. I made a yeast mix up with some Allisons dried yeast, and left it to go to work – but it seems this batch of yeast is no good, so it’s going to have to go out, it just didn’t foam up. Luckily I had some more dried yeast so I made a new batch up with that. This has been wholly successful and lovely light loaf has been consumed :)

Now, whilst I was waiting for the process to happen (rising, proofing etc) I got to reading and discovered many interesting website on leavened bread. This is something that is of interest, I like the idea of something living for me to keep in the fridge, dormant, and then bring back to life like Frankenstein! So now I’m making up a batch of leaven following a recipe from “River Cottage Handbook No.3 – Bread” which refers to it as Levain or Poolish.

So now I have a 1 litre clip-top Kilner jar with a mix of flour and water it it, sitting underneath my combi-boiler trying to get going – I’ll update you when I see how it’s going ;)

Just out of interest there is an interesting “community” of sourdough lovers (the name for any bread made for Leaven) here

Starting from the top

I went down to the allotment today, in the C5 (Hurrah! Finally got it back). I’ve only got a couple of pretty duff batteries so I can do one trip per battery (I should be able to go there and back on one really). Anyway it was great fun to get down there in an ecological manner (let’s just forget about the fact that I’m charging it from home using fossil fuels shall we! I’ll get to that a little later)

Anyway, I’ve decided to start from the top on the allotment (physically as well as metaphorically). A few weeks ago I finally planted out the fruit trees that I purchased from Lidl’s for a bargain £3 each. There’s a Jonagold, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Stella Cherry and Pear (I can’t remember the variety at the moment, it’s labelled so I’ll sort that out later!). Whilst planting these I also set about starting to mark the border with some very make-shift low fencing made from old pallets (they are a swine to take apart without ripping the wood though!!). This isn’t being done to define where my boundary is in a territorial manner but for me to be able to see where it is so I can ascertain just how much I’ve got to do. I need to be able to see boundaries so that I can plan just how much more I’ve got to do! I am also planning on losing the slope that my allotment has. At the moment the bottom edge of my plot is probably 2 or 3 feet below the top edge and, as a result of that, the rain causes most of my nutrients to end up on other people’s plots and leaves me with a VERY sandy loam.

Lidl , starting Saturday the 7th, have got fruit bushes for the bargain price of £1.45! They have Blueberry, Gooseberry, Redcurrant, Raspberry, Blackcurrant and Blackberry. Well I’m up for a bit of all of that action (excluding Blackberries which are more than prevalent enough behind my plot). I’ve started preparing an area at the top-left corner of my plot for some of the fruit bushes – probably some raspberry canes. I found some interesting square metal poles which have holes in at just the right height for cane support, just need to add wire and we should be good to go. I think that the area to the right of this, where currently there are some very sorry looking gooseberry bushes which were strangled out of existence by nettles, weed and bramble and are now dead will be a good place for the rest of the berry bushes – probably in a nice square formation.

I can work on the top area because the height is already correct. The lower edge of the allotment will require some retaining walls built out of old pallets, lots of nails and some more of the handy metal poles. I can then work on backfilling this area with organic matter and soil. Ultimately I plan on covering almost the entire plot in around 1 or 2 feet of manure (where the slope dictates) and leaving it covered in black plastic for around a year – in the meantime I’ll continue growing goods at home. The fruit bushes and trees should be quite happy up the top with just a light mulch (I hope)