Allotment Blog

March allotment weather: lions and lambs

2010-03-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

Not many words necessary for these pictures. We managed to wangle an afternoon off together, Himself and I, to get as much manure onto the potato bed as possible. The division of labour was simple – he would dig and I would wheel the barrow from the shop to the plot.

We still haven't resolved the potato argument, although I think we might be equal winners - he managed to get another line planted on 201, so we now have three rows of first earlies, while I managed to snitch eight potatoes and put them in big tubs in the greenhouse, so that we have early-earlies on the go (and only incidentally reducing the amount of first earlies available to be put in the ground, that definitely wasn't my ulterior motive!) and we knew that potatoes and garlic had to be planted, and that the beanpole frame needed to be moved to its new location so that we could work out the rest of our crop rotation, but before all that - manure!

I managed three barrows, along with stopping to talk to neighbours and to take photographs before everything changed.

Yes, that’s hail. And yes, it settled. From brilliant sunshine to winter wonderland in five minutes. Isn’t life wonderful?

First earlies in the ground at last!

2010-03-11T07:05:00.000-08:00

We finally got to plant out our first earlies on Monday, or at least the first batch – we got two rows in the ground, running North to South, where the peas were planted last year. Our crop rotation, given that we’re still bringing areas of the plot into cultivation, is that the potatoes and the peas/beans have essentially swapped places from where they were last year, our brassicas will be going into the area of the plot which was rotovated in November and nearly everything else is going into raised beds.

I’m happy to have made a start on the spuds, although I can tell that Himself and I will fall out over the rest of the planting because I want to make sure we have enough room in the best soil for our maincrops, which were a dismal failure last year through running out of room and having to plant them in relatively unimproved soil that hadn’t been used for several years as far as we can tell.

Himself, on the other hand, has confidence that we’ll get all the potatoes: first earlies, second earlies and maincrops into well prepared soil in good time. As earlies don’t keep as well as maincrops, I’m willing to throw away a row of first earlies that are ready to be planted, in favour of getting a row of maincrops into that spot in a few weeks. He isn’t.

My argument is a good one, I think. It’s that we actually only got 8lb of maincrop potatoes for our 5lb sowing – which is a truly pathetic result by anybody’s measure! His argument is that we’re better organised this year, which is year 2 on plot 201; the soil is in better nick; and we won’t be co-working on another plot so our energies won’t be divided.

I wonder who will win?

Purple-sprouting broccoli update

2010-03-08T03:41:00.000-08:00

So here’s a picture that I really don’t understand. Pigeons eat our broccoli – that I understand. They denude the entire leaves of the plant right down to the ribs, like feathery caterpillars – that I understand. But not eating the glorious purple florets – that I simply do not understand at all!

But there it is – having eaten the leaves, the pigeons appear to have buggered off and left the broccoli itself to us. This is the unprotected broccoli which I genuinely thought would not produce a crop at all – the broccoli in the cage is about five to seven days behind this stuff, and has all its leaves. Anyway, I’m grateful to the pigeons for leaving us this delicious feast.

And I was also wrong about the parsnips – we hadn’t eaten them all, we had two monsters lurking in the raised bed, so we lifted them yesterday and today we’re having them as part of a lamb stew cooked in the slow cooker – what a bonanza! And so, we're harvesting the last of the parsnips in the same week that I'm digging manure into the bed in which I'll be planting this year's parsnip seed - isn't that wonderful?

The ground is frozen though, so I don’t think we’ll get our spuds in until the weekend.

Heavy winters make for a hectic allotment spring

2010-03-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

I’m so very panicked and depressed when I look at this photograph from a year ago – the peas were almost ready to hit the ground running, the rhubarb was bursting from its pots, we had wallflowers ready to be planted, trays and trays of leeks that were already a couple of inches tall …

And so far, this year, we have absolutely nothing in the cold frame at all. Even the greenhouse isn’t quite entirely full yet (90% full maybe – which is okay, perhaps, although it feels like some kind of moral failure) and all we have in the ground is some shallots.

This weekend I must get some garlic planted, as well as rest of the manure into the soil for the potatoes which are now showing lovely dark shoots. I just hope that the weather cooperates!

March allotment greenhouse

2010-03-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Here are the Big Red tomato seedlings, which I have, since this photo was taken, transplanted into individual three and a half inch pots. There were fourteen seeds in the packet and ten of them germinated, which I think is a pretty good rate of return – I shall keep three seedlings for myself, and once the others are four inches tall I’ll take them down to the allotment shop to be sold to raise funds.

The leeks are springing out of their compost, but I still think I’m not going to have enough of them – I probably need to start another tray of seeds. The Nantes carrots are showing pretty well now, and I’ve got some more nasturtium seeds on the go. The peas have almost all germinated – about thirty have appeared between 8am and midday!

I need to be starting other tomatoes, and deciding if I’m going to grow peppers from seed or wait until I can get plants from either another allotment holder or a nursery – we’ve not grown them from seed ourselves before, not having had a greenhouse. And the cucumbers should go in next week too … it’s all getting rather hectic!

And last night the frost was this heavy … I feel quite depressed when I think about it.

Greenhouse growing in February

2010-02-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

It’s all about germination right now. Looking back on last year, when we planted 50 pots of peas (that 150 pea seeds) and nearly all of them were in strong growth by the last week of February, I’m a bit shocked to realise that this year we’ve planted the same number of pots, but with only two seeds each, and several weeks later, so that today we only have a dozen pea seedlings, rather than the hundred plus that we had this time last year. And I’m trying not to panic about it, because actually, it got really difficult last spring to get all the pea seedlings in the ground in good order – the weather turned wet and nasty and so we ended up having mammoth planting sessions that were back-breaking and even then a few peas began to falter in their pots and had their growth checked. We said we’d start later this year and so we have … but it feels all wrong not to have vast acres (okay, vast square feet) of growth going on under glass!

The first of the leek seedlings have appeared – I always forget how miniscule they are for the first few days of life. We didn’t plant enough leeks last year, so I’m hoping that this year we can really get enough in the ground to carry us right through the winter.

Last year’s saved nasturtium seed has rotted off – very strange. I’ve never had that happen before.

Three tiny Nantes carrot seedlings have poked their heads through the compost in their container. They’ll be grown in the greenhouse in the ten inch deep pot they’ve been sown into, to give us very early fingerling carrots.

The picture has been drawn in the window of a neighbour's shed - can't work out if it's graffiti or bored half-term grandchildren getting creative!

Growing sweet potatoes in England

2010-02-21T23:44:00.000-08:00

Margaret emailed allotmentblogger@gmail.com to ask what I knew about growing sweet potatoes. The answer is virtually nothing! But I do know a man who grows them, so I wandered along to talk to Andy, whose allotment work is supervised by a seagull called Henry who shares Andy’s lunch and will eat from a fork (I kid you not!)

Apparently the key thing here is to get some organic sweet potatoes if you’re using supermarket stock – because most of the other ones they sell have been treated in some way to stop them sprouting. It’s not that easy to get seed tubers of sweet potatoes in the UK, but Andy doesn’t even bother, he just grows supermarket tubers.

He lays them lengthways, half-covered only, in damp sand over a heated base tray to promote sprouting in early March and this causes ‘slips’ to grow and when they are four or five inches long he breaks them off and pots them into 1 litre pots. Other people grow the slips by setting the lower half (generally more pointy) of the tuber in a jar of water on a windowsill apparently.

Then in late May or early June, once all risk of frost has passed, he sets them out into a sunny trench. Where they go insane! It takes at least 110 days for them to mature and because they are Ipomeas (morning glories) they spread out like jungle plants and tend to take over nearby areas. Keep them warm, keep them watered but don’t worry about pests, it appears they don’t really have any – a bit of wire worm in late tubers is about all he’s seen, he says.

Dig them up as late in September as the good weather permits, then put them in a greenhouse for a week to let the skins cure and the tubers sweeten and Bob’s your uncle, apparently!

Now this is all based on growing in the South East of England, and shouldn't be taken as a guide to anywhere else, but if you treat sweet potatoes as a semi-tropical plant, I think you'll do okay

First early potatoes and February weather

2010-02-18T03:02:00.000-08:00

I can’t believe that some of our allotment-holders have already put their earliest spuds in, but they have!

I won’t be planting mine until at least mid-March, but this allotment-holder appears to know something I don’t – I fully expected to find some containerised potatoes had been planted on site over the weekend, as I know a lot of our plot-holders are very keen to start off first earlies in tubs and sacks, but I was utterly gobsmacked to find these substantial rows of potatoes already well earthed up.

I shall track down the gardener and find out what variety he or she has planted and what aftercare they use, as my soil stills seems too cold and wet to make a good base for potato planting, but perhaps there’s something to be learnt from this grower? Or perhaps they are just wildly optimistic …

Growing vegetables under cloches

2010-02-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

We don’t use cloches much at the allotment, for two reasons:

1. We start almost everything off in the greenhouse, and only move it outside when the weather is clement
2. We have a nine raised beds – six of them for rotated crops (the others hold early strawberries, late strawberries and asparagus) so we can cover them with fleece if we want to start crops off under cover.

However, we are wondering about whether to put cloches over our earliest potatoes – my parents, down in Torquay have already got their first earlies in the ground under cover, and they were harvesting a month before we were.

At this time of year, lots of gardeners are covering their soil with cloches to warm it up – I’ve never been entirely convinced by this process for two reasons – first I don’t quite see how the soil is warmed (okay, covering it can remove the chill of frost but it can’t actually make it any warmer than the ambient air temperature unless you use black plastic to conduct heat) by covering it, and second, covering soil ignores the action of convection: soil isn’t just made warmer or colder by the sun or frost but also by the movement of water through the soil which freeze in cold temperature and then melts in warmer ones. So if all the soil around the cloche freezes, then surely when it melts again, the meltwater will penetrate quite a way into the soil that hasn’t frozen at all, and drop its temperature?

On the other hand, the value of cloches in protecting tender plants, whether those overwintering or new seedlings, is undoubted – and that’s where we cover our raised beds with one of three media: glass, horticultural fleece or mesh, depending on the plants in question.

I now have ten beef tomato seedlings, so I shall be offering at least seven of them at seedling swaps, and I’ve just covered one of our empty raised beds with fleece and sown the first row of salad seedlings.

Allotment crops in February

2010-02-11T05:11:00.000-08:00

There’s not an awful lot going on around the allotments right now. Some people still have Brussels sprouts and kale, on 201 we have a tiny amount of kale but all our Brussels have been harvested. We have also just finished up our parsnips although there are a couple of celeriac still in the ground, I don’t know if they will be any good or not.

We’ve started off our tomatoes too, or at least our beef tomatoes, in a heated propagator at home. We didn’t grow beef tomatoes last year, and I missed them. Now we have a greenhouse I can feel a bit more confident about getting really big tomatoes to ripen, which they just haven’t the past three years, in the open.

The bad news is, it’s snowed again. Nothing has actually settled, but the ground is frozen, which is rather depressing. However, poking through the solid earth I found that the rhubarb, which is indestructible, is on its way. So we’ll at least have broad beans and rhubarb this year …

Allotment planting February

2010-02-08T04:06:00.000-08:00

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!

Early potatoes and how to grow them

2010-02-04T04:21:00.000-08:00

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 …!

Purple sprouting broccoli in January

2010-02-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Parsnip Curry

2010-01-27T07:08:00.000-08:00

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!

Chitting Early Potatoes

2010-01-23T13:52:00.001-08:00

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 …

At last – allotment not under snow!

2010-01-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Allotment composting

2010-01-16T03:03:00.000-08:00

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.

And yet more snow covers the allotment …

2010-01-13T03:40:00.000-08:00

About two inches of fresh snow fell in the night, so instead of being able to tell you anything about our planting regime, I’ll talk a little about our Wilja potatoes which are sprouting nicely in their brown paper bag – a bit worrying really, as they will have sprouts like triffids by the time we can actually get them in the ground at this rate1

We chose Wilja because it’s a second early with a high yield. It also has a good even shape and after wrestling with Pink Fir Apple last year I really fancy a potato that isn’t quite so knobbly as it was a bit of a pain to dig and clean the Pink Fir to be honest.

Wilja is said to be a good fryer and boiler and also suitable for roasting, and it used to be grown, traditionally, on Romney Marsh which implies it doesn’t mind a bit of standing water and as our second earlies are going into the lowest part of the plot (which is currently under six inches of snow) we might have gambled on exactly the right variety for us this year! It also has good resistance to common scab and drought and is only moderately susceptible to blight. As it’s a second early, we’re happy to try it as the blight generally affects maincrops most.

Still snow – still no work on the plot

2010-01-11T03:52:00.000-08:00

We’ve been to the plot to harvest some parsnips from the raised bed which were only a bit frozen in, and to collect some of the leeks that had been heeled into a sheltered corner of the plot in expectation of the rotten weather, but we really hadn’t expected rottenness of this duration! Some of the purple-sprouting broccoli has flowered nicely, but as it’s also frozen solid, we left it in place, hoping to get up as soon as there is a thaw and harvest the lot.

It feels very strange not to be able to do anything vegetable-growing wise – we wandered around and I managed to take a few atmospheric photographs of the sun going down over the snowy site.

I peered at my broad beans which are poking through the snow and seem to be fine, but who knows? Snowdrops have a special enzyme in their cells that allows them to survive minus temperatures without damage, but I’m not sure that broad beans do and I’m bracing myself to discover that when the snow goes, so do the broad beans. It would be a tragedy if they do, but as snow acts as an insulator, removing it at this point would be more likely to damage the seedlings than help them.

The bed in which we should have been planting our shallots is under six inches of snow, as it turns out to be in an area where a drift has built up. The shallots themselves are in a cupboard under the stairs – who knows when they will eventually get into the soil?

Still no allotment work

2010-01-07T04:12:00.000-08:00

As you can see, 201 is sitting comfortably under another blanket of snow. So while we can’t be doing much, we’re reflecting on what we will be doing when we get the chance. So, starting in reverse order, and as I’ve mentioned before, we had a terrible maincrop potato failure in 2009, mainly because we hadn’t had time to prepare the soil properly.

This year our maincrops are Cara: a white skinned potato that has pink eyes and a creamy coloured flesh. In texture they are ranked as waxy, which means they stay firm when cooked and keep well. They are good for boiling and very good for baking and are said to be slug resistant. They are a later Maincrop which suggests we’ll be harvesting closer to October than September, and like most later cropping varieties they will tend to be larger and therefore more suitable for baking, than earlier croppers.

We’re hoping, if the weather clears soon, to put plenty of manure and compost in our maincrop planting site, to enrich and break up the soil ready for the potatoes to be planted out, once they’re chitted, around early April.

Allotment bad weather woes

2010-01-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

So far it’s either rained torrentially, snowed, or there’s been a heavy frost ever since we picked up our shallots on 14 December. This means that we’ve had no chance to get them into the ground at all, despite having prepared an area of the allotment especially for them, with a nice blend of soil (which tends to clay) and grit.

It’s bitterly frustrating to find ourselves unable to do anything much on the plot. We are harvesting, of course, and today’s haul includes some leeks, a couple of parsnips from the raised bed (once we’d cleared off the remainder of last night’s light snow) two celeriac ditto and a small swede. Then we cut down a couple of Brussels sprouts stems so we could bring them home with the tops intact to cook in a stir fry. And we have had the last of our red Brussels Sprouts – we ate them on Christmas day with roast duck and they were very good: nutty and firm and we had them again last night with celeriac mash and onion gravy and they were equally good – definitely worth growing again next year.

We also had a massive bonfire in the snow, to clear the last of the rubbish, but that’s all we’ve been able to do, so I hope 2010 is going to start with a rapid improvement in the weather for vegetable growers!

Allotments don’t stop in winter

2009-12-21T06:10:00.000-08:00

Forcing its way through snow, this broad bean seems determined to prove it’s winter hardy (I certainly hope so, as there’s not much we can do to help it now) which is more than I was, with water leaking through my boots which had unexpectedly sprung a leak, harvesting Brussels sprouts with frozen fingers, and trying to dig up leeks from a perma-frost of definite Siberian proportions.

Okay, I exaggerate a little. But it was a very long cold snap for Sussex, which has little or no dealings with snow that lays – usually it melts within a couple of hours. One thing it did reveal, for all the things it hid, was that our fox, or foxes, are very much creatures of habit.

We walked quite a bit of the site, making sure there weren’t any burst pipes which were waiting to spew out water as soon as the thaw arrived and one the 60 plots we passed, we found the same story – one set of fox prints, going straight down the main path, veering off to investigate any items of interest (usually compost bins!) and then returning the same way. It was a fascinating insight into the life of the allotments after dark, and the regular patrols that the foxes must make of their territory.

Sunday’s harvest: two parsnips, two leeks (planted in open ground, very hard to dig, compared to those planted in the raised bed which hadn’t frozen below the surface of the snow) Brussels sprouts and a Brussels top from a denuded stem (I shall stir fry the top leaves, they’re delicious and shouldn’t be wasted), one celeriac.

And with that sackful of provisions, I wish you all a happy Christmas and a productive and profoundly germinating New Year!

Allotment work indoors

2009-12-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

One of the things about allotment life that amazes me is how much ‘stuff’ goes on behind the scenes and is known to only a few. I’m not talking about arcane practices with comfrey or potting compost, but the vast amount of hard work done by allotment committees up and down the land.

I had a taste of it myself this week, spending a couple of hours ‘bagging up’ in our allotment shop. We take orders from our allotment-holders for a wide range of potatoes, onions and shallots, and when the orders arrive in HUGE bags and sacks, we then weigh out the orders we’ve received and pack them individually in (environmentally friendly) paper bags. People can then come in and collect their orders from the shop and get on with chitting their potatoes and planting their shallots, confident that they’ve only had to order what they can use, and that we’ve cast our eyes over each 25 kilo sack and rejected any that didn’t come up to the mark.

If you’ve ever had a seed or plant order arrive rotten, or dried up, or damaged, then you know how annoying it can be, not least because a lot of the time the company has sold out of your preferred variety and you have to take a substitute or a refund – neither of which is palatable when you’d hoped to have your first choice of veggies. And with spuds in particular, people have strong preferences and it can be very difficult to find new supplies of chitting potatoes if you’re let down, so you end up with something you don’t like nearly as much, just to get potatoes into the ground for the summer. So we safeguard our allotment-holders by ordering in bulk to get the best quality at the best price.

If you’re an allotment-holder with an allotment shop, spare a thought for the people who try and make sure you’ve got everything you need to make your plot productive: it’s a real labour of love!

PS in case you were wondering, that's Len, not me, I haven't been misleading you about my gender, I promise!

Allotment structures

2009-12-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

It’s too wet to dig, and almost (but not quite) too wet to have a bonfire. So what did we spend Sunday doing? Apart from nursing the bonfire that we’ve been ‘saving’ up rubbish for all year (and by rubbish I mean brambles, old wood, bits of rotten fence etc, not plastics or green waste) we decided to put up the ‘rustic’ arch that has been kicking around the site all year. And I use the term kicking advisedly – I don’t think there’s been a single week where one or the other of us hasn’t tripped over the thing or kicked it on our way around the plot.

It’s a pair of old shop fittings that we rescued from a skip, which we’ve now sunk on either side of the path. The intention is to put some wire netting over the top to form the arch shape – as it took us a year to get the side supports into the ground, maybe, by Christmas 2010, we’ll have the top bit in place too!

And as we stood around, poking bits of old wood into the fire, I pondered a recent discovery, announced in the Linnean Society’s Botanical Journal, which suggests that petunias and potatoes may actually be carnivorous plants.

Yes, that’s right. Petunias and potatoes, it seems, have sticky hairs that trap insects, and they, along with several other commonly grown plants may turn out to be crypto-carnivores, by absorbing through their roots the breakdown products of the animals that they ensnare. We haven’t classified them as carnivores in the past, because unlike the Venus Flytrap, for example, they don’t actively demonstrate their ability to digest their prey. But roots easily absorb nutrients released from decaying animal matter, such as bodies, nearly all plants are capable of carnivorous behaviour by accident, if not by design. Hmm. The humble spud a carnivore … doesn’t seem that likely, but if you told me that pumpkins were man-eaters, I’d believe you, they grow fast enough to catch a slow-moving target!

This week's haul: Brussels Sprouts, kale, parsnips, celeriac, swede and the very first purple sprouting broccoli!

Crops in focus: brassicas

2009-12-08T02:04:00.000-08:00

Which are what most people are harvesting now. I still have exactly one floret of purple sprouting broccoli, so I hope the rest hurries up a bit. First to clarify a confusion: broccoli is an over-wintered crop but calabrese produces its crop the same year, before the winter. Both are brassicas as are cabbage, kale and cauliflower - and they are all part of the mustard family, oddly enough.

The ideal brassica bed needs both nitrogen and humus so the addition of manure in autumn will accomplish both. Dig over the soil and then add a barrow load of manure per square metre to the land. Leave the manure over the winter to give the worms a chance to take some down into the soil. But because adding the manure will have had the effect of making the soil more acid and because brassicas don’t like acidity, it’s best to test pH to measure the acidity and add the appropriate amount of lime to take the level up to 7.0.

Seeds are usually sown in spring, planted out in early summer to give a crop the following February/March through to May. There are early, mid-season and late varieties if you want a long harvest. Wind rock can damage the plants, especially through the winter, so try to find a sheltered site, earthing up around the stems for several inches keeps the plant stable and you may want to stake the tallest varieties – we certainly do!

You’ll also want to keep them netted, pigeons will go for the young plants especially in winter when other food is scarce. Broccoli is a slow-growing crop and it may benefit from a liquid feed, high in nitrogen, in the spring as the heads begin to form.

All brassicas are at risk of clubroot, caused by a soil borne organism which produces cysts which lurk in the soil until a suitable host is available to infect, starting the cycle again. The cysts can live for 8 or 9 years. Even worse, it is easily spread. The first sign is a wilting of plants, especially in dry weather. The roots have swellings and look knobbly. If you have a clubroot problem - start your brassicas off in modules using sterile compost to which you’ve added a small amount of lime – keep potting on until they reach 5 inch pots. Clubroot thrives best in acid wet soils so ensure your brassica bed is well dug with grit or other material to allow free drainage and take the pH up to 7.5 or even as high as 8.5 by adding lime Before planting, dig a hole at least 30cm deep and wide which you dust with lime to whiten the soil in the hole. Fill the hole with bought in multi-purpose compost and then plant your brassica in this. And burn your brassica plants when you’ve harvested, so you don’t return any clubroot to the soil.