Allotment planting February

We finally managed to get our Golden Gourmet shallots in the ground – just in time for predicted snow in the week! We’ve sown three rows, with some sand added to the soil to give them the lighter conditions they like, and we’ve covered the rows with a little netting because we’ve had problems in the past with pigeons pecking out both shallots and onions. No photo, because, seriously photos of shallots being planted are really not interesting! What I do is scrape away a little soil and drop the shallots in – making sure they are root end down – and then just rearrange the soil around them. Lots of books recommend that you ‘simply push the shallot into the soil’ but they don’t presumably, have the clay that we do and the writers don’t presumably, mind losing a few shallots to rot as you push them down onto what turns out to be a stone, puncturing the bulb, which then sits in the cold, and usually damp, winter soil, gently mouldering away instead of growing. I am a pinch-penny gardener and I think the extra couple of seconds required to scrape a shallow trench into which to drop them is worth the effort!

I also transferred two barrows of lovely manure from the heap outside the shop to the bed for our first early potatoes – it’s a pretty long walk with a barrow so two a day is the most I can manage. I’ll need six barrows for the firsts, seconds and maincrops, so I’ll do two a weekend, and still have a couple of spare weekends to dig it in before I have to think about planting the first earlies.

In the greenhouse we’ve started off Feltham First and Meteor peas in toilet roll inner tubes (aka anti-mice devices), a tub planting of Nantes carrots which I’ll hope to be harvesting as baby salad carrots in six weeks time, and two trays of Elephant leeks for transplanting into pots when they are two inches tall, and then again to the plot a little later on. All in all it’s been a productive weekend!

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-leeks, allotment-peas, allotment-shallots

Early potatoes and how to grow them

Quite a few people we know don’t grow potatoes and I can understand why – they take up a lot of space, and require a lot of work, compared to simple plant and harvest crops like carrots or beans. However, there are good reasons to grow potatoes if you have the room: you can invest in non-supermarket varieties that are often tastier than shop bought ones, you can grow enough to store for the winter months when potatoes can become expensive or get the earliest croppers which taste delicious and are much cheaper to grow than to buy!

Very early potatoes are called ‘earlies’ when you grow them yourself and ‘new’ when you buy them in the shops. They are planted at almost the same time as maincrop (standard) potatoes but you harvest them much earlier in the year.

Soil preparation is essential – if you’ve dug the ground over and added as much compost as you can, you should get a good potato harvest. Last year we ended up putting seed potatoes in ground that hadn’t been adequately dug – it really wasn’t worth it as we barely got a crop from them.

Position is key – potatoes like sun, and are best grown in north-south rows to make the most of it – they need lots of space and you can’t grow them in the same ground two years running without risking the development of diseases that will run rampant through your crop. Be aware that potatoes and tomatoes are both part of the nightshade family, so you can’t grow potatoes in soil that held tomatoes in the previous year.

Chit (encourage sprouts on) your seed potatoes by putting them in a cool, light, airy position from around mid February . Lots of people put their seed potatoes in egg boxes – I used to, but now I just put them in a shallow tray and have done with – it doesn’t seem to affect their ability to sprout!

I know people who rub off all but three sprouts. I never bother with that either, although it is supposed to produce fewer but larger potatoes. The key thing is to ensure that the growing sprouts are green – if they are yellow or white the plant isn’t getting enough light.

In most places you’ll want to set your potatoes out around mid March – early potatoes need to be about a foot from each other, with the rows about two feet apart.

And later on we’ll get to the mysteries of earthing up …!

Labels: allotment-chitting-potatoes, allotment-new-potatoes, allotment-potatoes

Purple sprouting broccoli in January

We just, just, just managed to pick enough broccoli on 31st January to make a meal out of. The pigeons have obviously done better than we have from our overflow plants, but now the secondary shoots are appearing and the pesky birds seem to be leaving them alone (at least for now).

We also harvested a monster parsnip. I’m not sure how we managed to overlook this goliath and he’s got his shoulders a bit nipped, possibly by the frost that preceded the snow, but even so there’s enough on this baby to make a very good soup, which is great, as the weather’s turned cold again.

What we didn’t manage to do was get any shallots planted. This made it all the more galling to do our monthly tour and discover that many of our neighbours already have the fine green shoots of shallot growth poking out of the frozen ground. On the other hand, Peter-from-two plots-up found that he’d had a whole tray of apples and a bag of shallots nibbled by rodents, so at least our shallots are still whole, and still in their bag, rather than inside a rat!

Speaking of wildlife, as we were heading for the gate we saw a large dog fox mooching around an apple tree on a plot, obviously finding rotten windfalls that were tastier than anything else around. What made it remarkable was that less than three yards away was the plot owner, digging in some manure! She said that the fox often came to within a couple of feet of her and she thought it was because she works shifts and is sometimes the only person on the site early in the morning or late in the evening, so he’d got used to her presence. I wish I’d had my camera handy.

Labels: allotment-parsnips, allotment-purple-sprouting-broccoli, allotment-rodents, allotment-shallots, allotment-wildlife

Parsnip Curry

One of my fellow allotmenteers was moaning about not knowing what to do with all his parsnips, so I suggested parsnip curry. Apparently he’d never thought of this, but I assured him it’s very tasty. And it is.

This hit and miss recipe serves two hearty eaters or four polite ones:

• Around five large parsnips, peeled and cubed – if they are very woody, remove the hard core by slicing the parsnips in quarters lengthways and cutting diagonally across the right angle to remove the woody bit
• 2 chopped onions
• 1 tablespoon oil
• Garam masala (garam means hot, masala means blend, and garam masala is the standard mix of hot spices used in many Southern Indian curries)
• Chilli flakes or powder (if you like a mild curry, leave them out entirely, but we like the extra kick from some pure chilli flavour)
• Vegetable stock
• Coconut milk or cooking coconut (sold as a brick of coconut solids that you slice in specialist Indian stores)
• Chopped nuts

Choose a big saucepan and fry the onions in the oil until golden, before adding the spices to taste and cooking for one minute. Because parsnips are sweet and coconut milk is mild, you may want more curry flavouring than you would use for an ordinary curry.

Add parsnips, and enough stock to cover them, stir and bring to a boil before lowering the temperature and adding about a cup of coconut milk or an inch of coconut solids and then simmering for 20 to 30 minutes until the parsnips are tender and the sauce has thickened.

We garnish it with toasted cashews and eat it with naan bread, but it’s just as good garnished with thinly sliced pepper and served with plain white rice. If you have leftovers, you can add some extra water and liquidise them to make a tasty spicy parsnip soup!

Labels: allotment-parsnips, allotment-recipes

Chitting Early Potatoes

We’re keeping an eye on our Maris Bard which are chitting nicely – lots of people say you don’t need to chit maincrop potatoes, but if you want the earliest earlies, like MB, chitting is essential as it means the plant starts growth with strong but quite short shoots that then become potato food – leave it too late and they waste time growing the sprouts, and leave them in the dark and/or warmth and the shoots will be long, white and weak and the food value of the tuber will have been dissipated in growing the shoots rather than going into the production of new potatoes.

Of course then there’s the question of when you can get them into the ground – we’re hoping to get ours planted by the second week of March. But then again, we were hoping to get our shallots in the ground in the third week of December and they still aren’t there …

Labels: allotment-chitting-potatoes, allotment-early-potatoes, Maris Bard

At last – allotment not under snow!

We managed to get to the plot on Monday and were half-thrilled, half- horrified at what we found,

First, the broad bean seedlings have held up pretty well under the snow and rain – a couple of them are lying down and I don’t know whether that’s the effect of the weather, and they will perk up, or whether it’s the result of depredations by our unwelcome visitors.

Second, those unwelcome visitors – pigeons! To our great chagrin, most of the purple-sprouting broccoli that we planted in the open air has been denuded, not just of florets, but of top leaves. We had anticipated that this might happen, as this was our ‘overflow’ broccoli, and it’s sort of a sacrifice crop, but we didn’t expect to sacrifice all of it! On the other hand, the broccoli in the brassica cage is fine, but seems to be a bit behind its outdoor cousins. I’ve been trying to work it out and the only conclusion I can come to is that because the cage roof was supporting a layer of snow for a week or so, the plants inside it got that much less light than the plants outside, so they’ve developed slower. Can anybody tell me if that sounds even slightly logical?

So we came home with: kilos of parsnip to make delicious parsnip curry as well as spicy soup; heeled in leeks; red Brussels sprouts tops; fresh sage and NO broccoli.

And the soil is too wet to plant shallots so we thought we’d try and get them in at the weekend, although as it’s been pelting down with snow/rain/snow all day today, that too may end up being a forlorn hope.

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-broccoli, allotment-pigeons

Allotment composting

Today we don’t have snow! Instead we have torrential rain and gale force winds … can you hear me sighing in despair?

While all I can do is watch the mini-rivers running down the allotment paths, I’ve been trying to plan ahead and one thing that caught my eye was the QR Compost Making method.

QR stands for Quick Return and apparently it’s been a successful way of speeding up compost production since the 1930s. There’s a whole book dedicated to QR here and I think I’m going to give it a go. The herbs in question are nettle, dandelion, chamomile, yarrow, valerian and oak bark. Honey is also included in the formula because it is a powerful activator apparently – and the claim is that a nutrient rich compost can be produced using normal garden waste in a matter of weeks, without turning (and I do hate turning compost) and without needing to add manure. It also talks about a 'closed loop' system which means that the minimum of materials enter or leave the garden and the lowest possible range of resources (including the muscle work of the allotment holder) are expended. Also there’s a foreword from Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association and a donation will be made to the Soil Association for each copy sold.

Labels: allotment-compost, quick-return-compost