Chillis and tomatoes
Compost conundrum
We’ve really struggled to grow plants this year. As usual, we started seedlings under a decent quality grow lamp, and they germinated fairly fast and got to a few inches tall. The chillies especially just seemed to stop growing. This was frustrating, but made all the more frustrating by our difficulty in identifying the root-cause. The plants showed some signs of distress from water, but nothing serious, and the leaves were slightly yellowing. We thought this was because of water and/or light issues, so we tinkered with watering schedules, light intensity, and distance from the light to the plants. The mild yellowing went away, but the plants remained stunted. We also thought it might be pests, especially fungus gnats, but again we did some pest control and the plants didn’t seem to improve. All this experimenting took several weeks. It affected several types of plants, our chillies were the worst affected, but it also seemed to make our tomatoes and sunflowers struggle too. The only plant not affected seemed to be the cosmos. We suspected a nutrient deficiency in the compost, so we switched from Westland Multi-purpose Compost with John Innes № 3, to Miracle Grow All-purpose Compost. This was a bit of a mistake, this compost (also peat free) retained moisture far more effectively than the Westland compost, and the roots of the tomatoes rotted off.
In hindsight, the cosmos were probably giving us the information we needed. According to the RHS, cosmos is well adapted to poor soils, and flowers more prolifically in those conditions too. All-in-all it’s a significant damper on our season’s growing, but we’re willing to “cheat” a bit and buy nursery plants.
Pumpkins and squashes
TODO: fix the planting/sewing dates
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We’re not really interested in eating these, although we may try, but they look adorable at Hallowe’en!
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Probably also for autumn decoration, but I like pumpkin soup also.
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Mum always grew half a dozen of these and couldn’t give the courgettes away, hopefully 1 is enough!
The most exciting plant is an aubergine, I’ve never grown these before and they’re meant to look pretty weird!
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Never grown these!
Finding second-hand gold
We bought a few tools from Facebook marketplace. First of which was a petrol lawnmower – we inherited an electric strimmer when we took on our patch, but now the summer is here we need something a bit more robust to keep the paths and grass in-check. So after a couple of evenings of searching, we found a decent lawn mower 2nd hand for £65 on Facebook marketplace.
The same week, we also contacted else whose allotment association forbids glass on site and needed to get rid of the glass from his greenhouse. He was very generously giving it away for free, so we popped up on a Tuesday night and collected many 2ft by 2ft panes of glass, and some triangles for the ends! Thank you very much Pawel!
I could (and might) write a whole extra rant about portions of civic society being walled off behind a Facebook/Twitter account, but I’ll save that for a different time…
Re-glazing the allotment greenhouse
The frame is sturdy and secured to a new base, as of February’s work.
With all this free glass, we need to fit it to the greenhouse. To do this we had to get a few new items. The rubber gaskets which the glass rests on had all perished, so must be replaced. Apparently a 6x8 greenhouse requires 64m (!) of glazing strip. We also need some normal greenhouse hardware: W-clips to hold the glass in the frame and Z-clips to stack 2x2 panes of glass on top of one another. These are readily available from hardware stores and Amazon.