Sep wk 1

Thursday, 01 September 2016

Race Against Time

September has started off rather nicely, lets hope it continues for a while.

On the plot our late sowing of Onward peas have a race against time to see if we can actually get any peas before the plants succumb to the colder and darker days of late autumn.

Peas Onward on 28 September 2015

Last year we sowed our last row of peas on 08 August 2015 and they didn't come into flower until 28 September 2015. It was a cold September which didn't help and although the peas did produce some pods they didn't go on to fill up with peas.

This year we are trying another late sowing. This year's late sowing was made on 24 July 2016, a little earlier than last year to see if this time we can get a crop of peas.

Peas Onward 01 September 2016

This year's peas are already starting to flower. No doubt a few wet and mild days towards the end of August have helped . So this year's plants are now about a month ahead of last year's. Now we need a better September than last year and we may be lucky enough to get some peas.

Friday, 02 to Sunday, 04 September 2016

Hot Composting Additions

We had a couple of days in Norfolk at the end of the week. It's what I think of as one of the drier areas of the country but on our visit it managed to rain.

RSPB Titchwell Marsh

On our visit to RSPB Titchwell Marsh on Friday the skies were rather threatening but we only had a little light rain late in the afternoon. It was a different story on Saturday as although we had a lovely sunny morning it didn't last and by mid afternoon it was pouring down.

Holt Station - North Norfolk Railway

You might remember I posted recently about trying out hot composting on the allotment. The heap consisted of chopped up twigs selected from the wood chippings delivered to the site. I thought that this heap might benefit from the addition of some green matter and as we are clearing away lots of spent summer crops there was plenty of material available. In keeping with the experiment all the green material was cut up into smaller pieces before adding to the heap.

Chopped Comfrey Leaves

So the hot composting heap has finished up consisting of the following:

5 barrowfulls of selected wood chippings

1 barrowfull of chopped tomato leaves

1 barrowfull of chopped strawberry leaves

1/2 barrowfull of chopped comfrey leaves

1/4 barrowfull of grass clippings

All the materials were given a good mixing. Although the heap is now pretty large it wasn't too difficult to mix at this stage.

The heap was then recovered with a piece of weed control fabric and will be left for a about a week before I give it another mixing.

Monday, 05 & Tuesday, 06 September 2016

A Double Whammy

The last couple of days have been warm and muggy. We've only had a few limited spells of sunshine but it's felt very hot in any brief sunny spells. Much of the time we've had dark clouds giving the impression that it might tip down at any moment but it's remained dry.

Temperature & Sunshine Records 04-06 September 2016

It felt too warm to do anything too energetic on the plot but our brassicas that had been growing on in the cold frame since arriving in the post on 19 August were ready for transplanting into the allotment. The plants are to replace a few weak specimens already planted and to plant up a new bed of autumn and winter cropping brassicas.

In this photo you can see that our cauliflowers (Clapton) are growing well and I'm expecting some decent harvests from them in the coming weeks. However, if you look to the left of these plants you'll see some weak looking specimens of a Romanescu type of cauliflower planted at the same time as the Clapton ones.

On removing the weak looking plants it looked like they were suffering from club root.

The other possible cause might be from cabbage root fly but in that case I would have expected to see little maggots in the plant roots and I didn't. Cauliflower Clapton is considered to be a club root resistant variety and on this showing it certainly lives up to its billing. My only concern is that the replacement brassicas aren't club root resistant varieties either so it will be interesting to see how they perform.

Making it into a double whammy our outdoor tomato plants have succumbed to blight.

It's taken just a few days for them to go from healthy looking plants to this. The tomatoes in the foreground are Crimson Crush and are supposedly more blight resistant. They are certainly not as badly blighted as the other varieties but I'm not holding out much hope for them over the next few days.

If you're interested in checking out the varieties of brassicas that I've planted up you can check out the details here.

Wednesday, 07 September 2016

Not Much Room as Tuesday Breaks a Record

Sometimes I write up my blog post the night before it's posted which means that sometimes I can miss the odd weather record. As it happens Tuesday's average temperature was the highest September average I've recorded in seven years of keeping records.

Ossett September Average Temperatures from 2010 to 2016

The daily average temperature for Tuesday was 20.8° C (69.4°F) unusually high even for early September. Although the daytime high was 25.6°C (78.1°F) we only managed a little over two hours of sunshine. The nightime low was a very high 15.6°C (60.1°F). We will soon be wishing we could have that as a daytime high never mind as a nightime low.

I had to take a photo of these cyclamen flowering in a corner of our small pebble garden.

I'm not sure what they'll make of such high overnight temperatures but I'm sure the weather will cool down soon.

Disclaimer

This weather site is operated as an amateur weather station site and should not be used as official data. I make every effort to ensure my data is as accurate as possible but I cannot guarantee that the data meets the requirements of the Meteorological Office or other professional weather monitoring organisations.