We Grow Our OwnThe trials and successes of life on our allotment

Apologies again for this being a few days late, but here’s my guide of what to do on your plot in September.

I know this is a little bit late, but then again the growing season is late this year as well, so here goes anyway ….

July is usually one of the driest months so a lot of time may be spent watering. You can reduce water loss and save yourself some time by preventing water loss. Mulching with a layer of organic matter will help preserve moisture but may encourage slugs so you will need to take action against them.

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.

As you will have picked up from yesterday’s post, I’m a big fan of Cafe Direct’s ‘Sow Your Own’ campaign.

The lottie took a back seat this week, as I had to pot on the numerous chilli plants from the 19 different varieties of chillies that I’m growing this year.

I was worried earlier this year that the majority of the crop was going to fail, as they took such a long time to get going compared to last year. It must have been the long winter/cold spring, as they have most definitely cranked into life. It is a good job, as I’m now reaching the end of last year’s crop which were either dried, pickled or frozen, as I had more chillies than I knew what to do with at that point.

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.

The chillies and tomatoes were loving the weather today, but it was too hot to do much at the allotment, and it was touching 50 degrees in the greenhouse at times today!

I potted on all my chillies, and sowed lots, including some Papalo seeds, which is used in Mexican cooking.

I still need to dig over the other half of my plot, but that will have to wait until next weekend!

I decided to bite the bullet this weekend and plant up the rest of the broad bean and sweetcorn plants that were growing too big for the greenhouse.

This weekend’s plans were scuppered by the typical Bank Holiday weather, so the idea of moving all of the seedlings down to the allotment to be planted had to be put on hold for another week.

I desperately need more room in the greenhouse, but the temperature dropped like a stone everytime it rained or started to hail.