Allotment Blog

January Allotment Tasks

2009-01-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

While a lot of people seem to think there’s nothing to be done on the allotment over the winter, they couldn’t be more wrong!

To start with, from 235 at least, there’s harvesting: our weekend lunch included the last of the fennel and the first of the purple sprouting broccoli. Wonderful food, as fresh as possible and when you look at supermarket prices for broccoli right now, we’re eating pure luxury.

And on 201, there’s always clearing up – and burning stuff!

I love burning stuff, and now we have a proper garden incinerator, we also have a way to generate lovely wood ash so that we can sprinkle it around seedling plants to keep the slugs off. You can buy incinerators, or convert an old metal dustbin by knocking holes in the lower sides with a cold chisel to allow oxygen flow which gives a faster burn. We’ve been getting rid of perennial weeds, hedge trimmings, and lots of brambles that were creeping into our plot from over the fence.

Seeds, Apples, Peas, Frosts

2009-01-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

I ordered the seeds, exploding cucumbers, celtuce, asparagus peas and all. Even some lemon chilli seeds. And we don’t eat chillis so what I’m going to do with them I don’t know. Still, it’s all in a good cause, because if we don’t keep these older, odder, rarer species in cultivation, they won’t be there when we want them.

This picture shows the last apple on a neighbouring allotment’s tree. It’s Maurice’s allotment actually and whenever I pass it, I remember the old nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear, but a silver apple and a golden pear’. Doesn’t it look lovely, if a little lonely …?

Experimental peas – 14 have germinated, but it’s just too cold to hang around and count which were pre-soaked and which weren’t, so I’m going to give it another week, buy which time any that are going to come up, should be up, and then work out if there was any advantage to pre-soaking.

On the plus side, the heavy frosts are breaking up our newly-dug soil beautifully. On the minus side, they stop us doing any more work because it’s just too damn cold to dig!

Seed Catalogues

2008-12-28T12:25:00.001-08:00

Oh hell, every penny I get given at Christmas tends to go on seeds. It’s an addiction, I know but there doesn’t seem to be a Seed Buyers Anonymous that I can call on for help. In fact, just about everybody I know has the same weakness.

The only thing that stops me is not being really sure what I’m doing (and that doesn’t always stop me, I won’t bore you with the years I’ve spent trying to germinate Romneya Coulterii but it involves wood smoke, ash, stratification … and so far, no Romneya!) so this year I’m trying to limit myself. Not easy when himself gets in on the act.

What he wants to buy is exploding cucumbers, celettuce and rainbow quinoa. Now quinoa I’m happy to grow (except he doesn’t eat it, so why does he want to grow it?) but exploding cucumbers? And a plant that looks like a lettuce on top of a celery stalk but apparently tastes like neither?

Why?

Because they are a challenge and a novelty. And no matter how often we sit down and talk about productivity, staple food crops and filling the freezer for winter, we always end up with one or two of these novelties that usually go nowhere but soak up hours of effort. Last year it was the peanut plant which produced exactly nothing for all our labours.

I do rather fancy purple Brussels sprouts, although apparently they are not as productive as their green cousins. And I have a sneaking desire for yellow leeks too, so perhaps we should limit ourselves to one flight of fancy each … but then we’ll go to February’s seed swap and come back with armfuls of weird things that caught our eyes. Honestly, we’re hopeless!

And a Happy New Year

2008-12-26T07:28:00.001-08:00

... with shedloads of everything an allotment holder could wish for!

Pea seeds – to soak or not to soak …

2008-12-22T07:52:00.000-08:00

Do you or don’t you soak your pea seeds before germination? Old wives’ tales say that you should (it speeds up and increases germination) or that you shouldn’t (it breaks through the embryonic seed case and allows disease in) or that you should soak them in paraffin (to prevent mice eating the seeds).

So we decided on a bit of an experiment – and one packet of smooth peas (hardy growers but not as sweet as the later wrinkled peas), a whole bunch of toilet roll inners and some compost later … a test!

Fifty-one seeds were soaked overnight in cold water. Fifty-one weren’t. Each seed was planted in a toilet roll inner and put in an unheated greenhouse. The soaked seeds had a blue wavy line drawn around their toilet roll inner for instant identification. That was nine days ago.

Today – two pea seedlings!

But both, rather worryingly, have appeared in the unsoaked tray. Perhaps there will be a better germination rate from the soaked seeds by the end of the experiment, but right now, it looks to me as if soaking pea seeds might be a waste of time. In the spirit of allotment innovation, I’ll keep you posted as the germination progresses (hopefully) and we’ll see what the final outcome is when we get to plant the seedlings out.

Quick and dirty allotment gardening

2008-12-19T02:32:00.000-08:00

Actually, that’s misleading. There’s a lot of dirty but not much quick I’m afraid. The past week has meant every spare minute we’ve been digging. Digging. Digging.

And it’s really tough digging too, as plot 201 hasn’t been worked for at least a year, probably two. Compared to Duncan’s plot, where the soil has been turned and rotovated at least twice it’s like digging through rock when it’s dry and clay when it’s wet, but it will be worth it when we put our early potatoes in.

What do you think of our scarecrow? He’s called The Green Man and I rather like the idea of an abstract bird scarer – whether the birds will actually be scared by a cartoon man is another matter ….

Allotment blackberries

2008-12-16T03:10:00.000-08:00

We have a thornless blackberry. Let me tell you, if you’re going to transplant blackberry plants, it’s always worth paying extra for a tasty thornless variety, because transplanting thorned blackberries is painful.

Okay, basic lesson in soft fruit here, which I didn’t know until last week, so I hope it will fascinate you as much as it did me. You can tell if a plant is a raspberry or a blackberry by checking if the core stays in the ripe fruit or is left on the plant when the fruit is picked. Berries with the core intact are blackberries and berries that lose the core are raspberries.

I can hear you scoffing already at the woman who can’t tell a raspberry from a blackberry but bear with me. What’s a loganberry then, clever-clogs? Or a tayberry? See … it is a useful thing to know. In fact both berries are classed as blackberry/raspberry crosses: the loganberry keeps its core intact and is therefore classified as a blackberry. Confusingly, the tayberry has a core that sometimes stays with the fruit and sometimes comes free of it, and is classed as a hybrid.

Now, to the issue of pruning and transplanting. When any of the four berries above have flowered and fruited, any cane that bore fruit dies back to the crown. This means, when prune, you are simply working to make space for the primary buds just below the soil line to grow and bear fruit. Everything above those buds is cane that the previous summer and is now two years old but will still try to produce fruit at the expense of the new canes that have grown from soil level.

So quite obviously, transplants need to be cut back hard, to get good growth. In addition, any transplant will suffer stress – think about how stressful it is for you to move, and then think about the plant – same process! So cutting back allows the plant not to put all its strength into old grown so it can concentrate on settling in and producing new growth that will be adjusted to its new conditions and that new growth should appear within 4-6 weeks.

We moved this blackberry a week or so ago, but because we didn’t have its blue screen in place I didn’t cut it hard back, or we wouldn’t have known where it was when it came to siting the screen for it to grow up. Now the screen has been fixed to the fence, I shall prune the blackberry back (taking care not to cut so far that the parent, thorny, plant is live above the graft) and watch it take off in spring).

Raspberry Bed - the final allotment version

2008-12-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

Because I got nagged by email, I have somewhat reluctantly agreed to post a picture of the raspberry bed. It doesn’t look like anything much at this time of year, and certainly I don’t look like anything much, planting raspberries in my pixie hat and old allotment coat! You can see the raspberry canes that Tony dug out of the middle of the strawberry bed - and that I then cut the old wood from and pruned to planting height - laying across the planting string. We offset the plants from one side of the string to the other, to make weeding and harvesting slightly easier and to give each plant the maximum amount of air ventilation and sunlight – if you plant them in straight rows, the front one shields the next from the sun and the second one shields the third, so by halfway down the row, the plants are getting very little sun indeed.

As I say, it looks like nothing much now, but wait until I show you another picture in late Spring, when the canes will be shooting up and the leaf buds will have opened to show the lovely fresh green of new leaves.

We’re still doing lots of structural work – you can see that the cold frame is completely half finished! In other words, the front end of the frame has been reglazed and is ready to be used, but the back end hasn’t had its glass covers put back on yet because we’re waiting for the wooden frame to dry out – it was utterly sodden with rainwater and we don’t want to dry it too fast or it will warp and not fit the base. Initially Tony used webbing on the front end of the frame: it allowed the glass cover to fall back away from the frame without actually hitting the ground on the other side and breaking the glass – that lasted two nights! On the third morning we went up and found that mice had eaten straight through it. Now we have a wooden prop that fits into a narrow groove cut into the front edge of the lid – it means we can’t open it past the vertical, but it also means the mice can’t catch us out by chewing through it. We’re hoping that the regular presence of Rebus the Cairn Terrier will discourage the rodents from visiting us quite so often.

And if possible, I shall report on 235's onion experiment in my next post. I wanted to report today, but the rain and wind were so strong I actually couldn't see the onion bed well enough to check how many seeds had germinated. Oh the joys of a winter allotment!

Allotment tasks – December

2008-12-10T02:37:00.000-08:00

This is the month to start forcing rhubarb. The simple way to do it is to set a large bucket or dustbin over the hibernating crown to encourage the fresh, pink shoots to form – they do this better in darkness. A good mulch of straw or well rotted manure or compost cast over the crown before covering creates extra warmth to speed up the process further. As we now have a greenhouse (hurrah) and we’ve dug up and transplanted some crowns this year, we took one good root home, left it out in the frost for a couple of nights (this apparently accelerates the new growth. I am not convinced, as all the other advice is to protect crowns from frost but hey, it’s an experiment!) and then potted it up in a large pot with good compost, covered the pot with a black box, and set it in the greenhouse. The box exclude the light while the heat in the greenhouse should drive the forcing process so that we end up with slim, pink rhubarb as early as March!

If the weather is mild and expected to continue so for a couple of days, you can sow broad beans in a sheltered spot. The advantage of this, assuming you can keep the mice away from what they always view as an early Christmas feast, is that aphids find the tops of overwintered broad beans much less attractive than spring sown ones, because the overwintered leaves are much tougher.

this is also the ideal time to lay new paths, as can be seen in the proud example of the new plotholders on plot 254. And if the soil is neither frozen or waterlogged, you can always dig, and dig and dig …

Parsnips – and how to grow them

2008-12-06T12:02:00.001-08:00

Not my parsnips – Christina’s parsnips – aren’t they fantastic? Christina is a neighbour of ours on 235 and she was kind enough to donate these to the needy co-workers! If you can see the toothmarks on the largest root, it’s not giant rats, it’s Rebus the Cairn Terrier, (pictured up to his oxters in mud, below) who has a bit of a fetish for parsnips and managed to nip a bite off the end of that one as I was carrying it back to be photographed. He’s a good allotment dog, apart from this one foible.

So, why are parsnips considered difficult? Partly because the germination is so erratic. You must make sure your seed is less than 12 months old and even then it’s a bit hit and miss as to how many seedlings you’ll get.

To prepare the soil, dig in some well rotted organic matter in winter, and turn the topsoil over before planting seed. Sow in mid to late spring when the soil is warming and if you can, tread the soil gently (not sixteen stones of hobnailed boots) after planting. I have a scaffold plank that I lay over the row and walk along, but you can obviously only do this on a dry day or you’ll find the soil (plus seeds) is stuck to the underside of the plank when you lift it!

Seedlings should appear between 15 and 20 days and will need thinning when the first true leaves appear, to about four inches apart. If you have module plants or grew them in trays, transplant to the same distance and space the rows about 18 inches apart. I make the rows 2 feet apart and sow quick crops in between them because parsnips are in the ground for sooooo long.

If the weather becomes dry, water weekly and hoe carefully to remove weeds. Now, the best time to harvest is after a week of frosts or near frosts – so in my area that’s sowing in April and harvesting in late November, see what I mean about a long time in the ground (not that we have any in the ground this year, but next year we will!) and that’s why planting catch crops in between stops me losing the will to live while the parsnips mature. Extreme cold allows the starch in the parsnip to become a sugar compound, massively increasing the sweet and nutty flavour of the roots.

Raspberry frames

2008-12-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

For such a delicate fruit the raspberry needs a heavyweight support system to give of its best. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks investigating other people’s raspberry cane arrangements, so that we could decide what to do with ours. There’s everything from concrete stanchions with solid metal poles running laterally across them through to individual rustic wooden fenceposts with wires wrapped around them. Raspberries grow to six feet tall, quite comfortably.

And so we're busy, constructing the right frames for our raspberries, whenever the weather allows. This is real winter work.

In spring you plant new canes, tying their stems to the supports and then feed and mulch.

Pruning is a little complicated because you prune summer fruiting varieties in autumn, cutting canes that bore fruit to ground level and tying in the strongest new stems to the wires, then in the cold of winter you trim the tops of the canes to about six inches above the top wire. But autumn fruiting varieties get pruned in mid-winter, cutting every stem to ground level. In either case, planted north-south they usually get the most evenly distributed sunlight although they don’t require actual heat.

Our raspberries have invaded the strawberry bed on 201, or perhaps the strawberries took over the raspberry bed, it’s difficult to tell – in either case, they’ve got to be straightened out and taught to live apart. Both fruits are prone to be invasive though, so I can see we’ll be digging up random fruiting plants for years to come.

I wonder why we say a ‘raspberry’ to denote a rude noise made with the lips?

Harvesting and storing winter crops

2008-12-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

It’s a bit depressing to say this, but we have no winter crops to speak of. Because we didn’t become co-workers with Duncan until late spring, we’d already missed the window to put in a lot of the crops we’d normally start harvesting now, like Brussels sprouts, parsnips and salsify, on top of that, our Jerusalem artichokes came to nothing – being stored for a week in a plastic bag before they got to us obviously did as little for the roots as I’d feared it would, I think they sweated to death – and finally, we’ve already eaten all our carrots!

Still, all is not lost, I’m nagging himself to think about making a carrot clamp now, for use next year (assuming we get enough excess crop to store). There are two ways we can do this – the first is in wooden boxes containing moist sand or peat substitute in a dark and frost free place: for this method you have to remove the leaves and shake out the loose soil and then lay them neatly in the boxes, not touching, and spread more sand or peat over the top. It has to be moist or the carrots will give up all their moisture to the soil – other crops that should be treated this way are celeriac, Swedes and beetroots.

A clamp is a hole in the ground with added extras! It needs to be a sheltered well-drained site, which could be a problem for us as I’m not convinced we have good enough drainage. The hole should have a good layer of straw at the bottom, the carrots should be laid in a circular pattern, points in, and not touching, and straw should be placed between each layer and mounded well over the top, before covering the whole thing with soil, but allowing a tuft of straw to stick up out of the top to conduct dampness out of the pile.

The good old parsnip can stay in the ground unless the weather turns really cold, at which point you need to cover them well enough to ensure they don’t freeze so thoroughly into the soil that you can’t lift them.

Brussels sprouts – firm treatment required

2008-11-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

Isn’t it lovely to know that there is something that loves heavy clay soil. Having had cause to visit the plot today and having come away about four inches taller than when I arrived, owing to the ‘platform soles’ my boots had developed as a result of walking over the soil (don’t do this if you can humanly avoid it, compacting wet clay soil makes it difficult to grow anything on it, but until we get proper cross paths, I have to walk on the soil sometimes) I am glad to remember that Brussels sprouts love a firm, fertile soil. If you have grown Brussels in the past and they’ve ‘blown’ – that is, become open frilly sprouts instead of nice tight ones, it’s almost certainly because your soil has been too loose. Infertility can also cause blowing, so you need to ensure that you have either dug in lots of manure in the previous autumn, or planted your sprouts where your beans were in the previous year. Then let the soil go to sleep for the whole of the winter, so that it becomes firm.

If you have an acid soil you’re inviting club root, so you will need to lime the surface, using lime at the right quantities and digging it in early in the autumn so the earth can settle again.

As your plants grow, hoe gently around them to remove weeds, but remember not to loosen the soil directly around the roots and not to dig in with the hoe. And to ensure there is no root rock, which loosens the plant in the soil, you will want to support them so that the later, stronger, winter winds don’t blow your crop to the ground. Put in stakes when you plant your seedlings, one for each plant and tie them in securely.

Next year I want to grow purple Brussels sprouts, although I haven't heard anybody say they perform as well as the green ones, I shall just have to have both!

November – no end to allotment tasks!

2008-11-25T11:57:00.000-08:00

I don’t quite understand why, when everybody else seems to be winding down, and Soilman has even gone into hibernation, I seem to be getting busier!

Partly it’s because the days are so short now, that I’m lucky to get half an hour of gloom on the allotment when I’ve finished my ‘real’ work, so everything seems to take forever to get done, and partly it’s because a new allotment, particularly one that’s been neglected, just has so much that needs to be done.

So far we’ve:

1. sort of sorted the shed – more to be done in Spring, but it’s at least watertight now
2. begun to restore the cold frame – or at least, Tony has, while I just make admiring noises
3. cleared about a tenth of the runners, slugs, bindweed and thistles from the strawberry bed – that’s my job, and horrible, fiddly, backbreaking work it is too
4. started to clear the brick path – very satisfying, especially as it means less risk of slipping on something slimy and end up on your a**e!
5. laid some shuttering to make new paths – again, very satisfying, it gives the allotment a sense of structure.

What we haven’t begun on yet is:

1. mending dodgy fence posts
2. laying a new hardstanding
3. cutting back the holly tree
4. moving the compost bins
5. refixing the entire far end fence which is now leaning against the rest of the fence, looking pathetic
6. any planting
7. any digging.

If we had brassicas this year then this is also what I’d be doing:

1. keeping my Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli and kale tidy and weed-free, and staking the outer Brussels against wind damage
2. sowing broad beans is something I’ve already done on Duncan’s allotment, although how many will come up, given that we appear to have mice, is anybody’s guess.

I wonder if things will slow down in December ...?

2008-11-22T03:48:00.000-08:00

Deadon F1 Winter Cabbage

This is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, isn’t it? Not the weeds, of course, just the cabbage which is only a joy until I harvest it in January, if I can wait that long, at which point it will become a fleeting pleasure on the palate and a nice weight in the stomach. I love the colour of this hybrid, because the purple veining, which actually becomes a sort of ‘fringe’ around the outer leaves as the weather chills, gives way to an almost luminous green when you cut into the cabbage.

It’s said to produce 3-5 lb heads in old money (that’s 1 – 2 kilos, I think) but ours won’t get that big for two reasons:

1 we planted them a bit late (everything got planted late this year)

2 – we planted them in situ in a not very well prepared bed because we had little time to get things ready.

Next year they will go into a seed bed first, and then be transplanted once they have five or six leaves – around July. This also gets around Tony’s infamous ‘thinning is cruel’ approach to vegetable growing. Even he can see that when you’ve transplanted enough cabbages, there’s no room for others. They go into their final positions about a foot apart, with a foot between rows and remember to stagger those plantings you can easily hoe between them.

They like a sunny spot with a rich soil that holds reasonable moisture and they will not be happy if you’ve manured it recently.

Around 20 weeks after first sowing, they are ready to harvest and should sit comfortably in any not utterly Arctic soil from November to January, when you should be finishing them up or the leaves will have become too fibrous to be pleasantly edible.

Favourite recipe: Cabbage Pie

Dead easy this one. You need one pack of frozen puff pastry, one large cabbage, an onion, some butter and herbs to suit you.

Chop and fry the onion in some oil until it’s soft. While that’s happening, shred the cabbage, placing it in a colander. Pour a kettle of boiling water over it slowly to wilt it. Roll out the pastry and cut more or less in half, one ‘half’ wants to be about an inch and a half bigger all round than the other. Press down the cabbage to release any trapped water and then mix the onion into it. Season to taste, making sure you use plenty of pepper (we use mixed herbs plus some fennel seeds which we like but not everybody does). Pile cabbage mix into the middle of the smaller piece of pastry, leaving about an inch all round the edge. Put second piece of pastry on top and seal edges, cut a couple of small circles in the top of the pie and bake. When baked, melt about half an ounce of unsalted butter and using a funnel if your hands aren’t steady, pour into each of the top holes. Leave for a couple of minutes and serve.

2008-11-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

Great big cold frames …

… and what they cost to renovate.

We inherited this when we ‘moved in’ to 201. And, next to our ‘Swiss Chalet’ shed, it’s been our favourite new toy. A cold frame – lovely!

We’re still not entirely sure what we’re going to do with it because we’ve never had one before. But we knew what we had to do to it, if you take my meaning.

It had to be painted, well repainted. The lids had to be rehung but before that, they had to be repaired and the glass had to be cleaned. There should have been a central strut supporting the cold frame but there wasn’t so it had bowed both back to front, side to side and (annoyingly) both ends to middle. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye but when you tried to level it to the soil, you couldn’t, nothing was quite square, or true or flat.

By this time, I was starting to think our new toy was a blithering nuisance. So on Sunday, while I weeded the strawberry bed, Tony spent: the whole day, a tin of paint, several metres of weed-suppressing membrane and a couple of bags of gravel, creating this.

Much better. Now we only have to finish the lids and we’ll have a cold frame to be proud of.

But we’ve still got no idea what to do with it …

Allotment planning

2008-11-16T02:16:00.000-08:00

We have:

• One very large cold frame
• One eight foot by six greenhouse (but not actually erected yet, and not actually on the allotment, it’s still in boxes on the floor at home)
• half of one allotment and three quarters of another, that could technically be called ours, although it doesn’t work like that – we are growing collectively so there’s no dividing up plots into ‘your’ bed and ‘my’ bed, we’re all in the same bed (that’s not as dirty as it sounds)
• good but somewhat clay soil: one allotment suffers from bracing winds, the other may possibly suffer from not much sun at one end.

So now you know as much as I know. What would be your priorities for spring if you were me?

We’ve already ordered potatoes to plant on 201 and 235 has a large bed full of overwintering onions and garlic and a small bed with spring cabbage (not doing well) rhubarb chard (sort of okay) and broad beans – we will want more potatoes on 235 so we have to decide what varieties we’re going to plant there, given that the maincrop suffered from slugs but not blight. Everybody got tomato blight last year, so I’m going to try and work out which varieties might be a bit more blight resistant in Sussex, start them off in the greenhouse and move them down to the allotments when they are ready. But what I really want is to grow something interesting, something exciting, something to celebrate our first spring on both plots – ideas?

Allotment Potatoes

2008-11-13T05:18:00.000-08:00

We’ve just put in our potato order:

First earlies – Accent
Second earlies - Kestrel
Maincrop – Pink Fir Apple.

I can’t tell you how good it is to say that! Placing a potato order really proves you’re an allotment holder. Of course there’s a lot of mythology and mysticism that surrounded the growing of the great British staple food, and some pretty confusing terminology too: all those earlies and chitting and blight and what have you. But it’s nowhere near as difficult as it sounds.

First – potatoes have two main problems: blight and slugs. We already know that on Duncan’s plot we have slugs (the evil little black keel slugs) so we shall be giving both plots a lovely dose of nematodes in the hope of killing the slugs before they get to the potatoes.

Second – the early and maincrop terminology is all about how long it takes from planting to harvesting so:

1. First earlies – ten weeks
2. Second earlies – thirteen weeks
3. Maincrop – twenty weeks.

Third – chitting is just the process of getting your potatoes to produce shoots and I’ll go into that when the time is right.

And while maincrops store much better (larger thicker skinned tubers) than the thin-skinned smaller early varieties, is the maincrop types that are likely to get hit by potato blight. Usually the earlies and second earlies have been harvested before it strikes.

Potato blight is properly called Phytophthora infestans and it happens in warm humid weather. The signs of blight are brown freckled leaves or leaves with brown wilted patches. The blight causes the potatoes to die in the ground but even worse because it’s airborne, it can get into your harvested potatoes and rot them too. Worst still, it spreads literally overnight – one day you have a crop, the next day you have a rotting stinking mess.

Fighting blight – don’t water the leaves of your potatoes, only the plants. Earth them up carefully and well so the spores of the blight can’t get in. If you see an early sign of blight, dig up that plant and burn it, but to be honest, if blight is within three or four miles of your crop, there’s little you can do to fight it, except grow earlies only, or blight resistant varieties.

Preventing blight – don’t leave a single potato, no matter how small, in the ground when you harvest – the spores can overwinter in the potato much easier than in the ground, where a frost usually kills them. Rogue (volunteer) potatoes left in the soil can infect the whole of a subsequent year’s crop. And rotate your crops – that way it should be three years before potatoes go back into the ground they occupied before, which gives the spores much less chance to hang on and ‘get them’. And store your harvested potatoes off the plot, if you possibly can.

Allotments'r'Us says the most unlikely person

2008-11-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

Yes, London Mayor Boris Johnson, famous for putting his foot in it, seems to think that putting his foot in a nice big heap of freshly-turned earth is the right thing to do. We won’t argue with that!

So what’s his big idea? (I can’t believe I just wrote ‘big idea’ and meant Boris, but there you go, one can be wrong in one’s early judgements.) Let me tell you, he wants to encourage backyard gardening even on flat roofs. It’s called Capital Growth and the excellent Rosie Boycott is overseeing the first phase which intends to 2,012 patches of land by 2012 for Londoners to grow food. All kinds of organisations: councils, schools, hospitals, housing estates and utility companies are supposed to pinpoint idle lands which could be converted into vegetable gardens, including mini-plots on canal and reservoirs sides and unused railway yards.

Lovely idea – I hope it happens, because with credit crunches, food miles and soaring energy costs, everybody deserves the chance to reduce their food bill and increase their quality time spent exercising in the fresh air.

Meantime, can anybody identify this beastie? We found it crawling across our enormous cold frame on plot 201 – November seems rather late for caterpillars to me, but perhaps it’s a particularly hardy brute? I carried up to the overgrown end of the plot and let it go – hardened gardeners can express their disgust now – I know I should have squashed it, but I just couldn’t! It’s the first bit of wildlife we’ve found on 201 and that made me feel like Scott finding a sauna at the North Pole!

And on Duncan's plot, the garlic, onion sets and onion seed are all showing beautifully. No difference yet in the germination or growth rates between the direct sow and the paper and paste sow onions, but we'll see how it continues ...

Broad Bean Planting

2008-11-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

On two allotments and in one garden, I shall be sowing broad beans this weekend. There are few crops about which I’d say ‘you can’t have enough’ because you can definitely have too much of some: courgettes and spinach, for example, but broad beans, like raspberries, are something I just can’t get enough of, particularly as broad beans freeze so incredibly well.

Autumn-sown broad beans have several advantages: they do not need a rich soil and can be sown on ground that has been manured for a previous crop, as long as it has good drainage, you can sow them directly 5cm deep in double rows in late October which gives them a chance to establish good roots to support the heavy yields you hope they will carry next year! Over the winter the plants should reach 5-10cm tall and then stay this size through to spring – but out of sight they are putting on side roots to allow spring growth. To promote this, you can add an organic fertiliser around the roots in the spring and rake it in lightly, being careful not to damage the roots.

And in spring they’ll take off, producing those distinctive white and black flowers, and a lovely light scent that draws bees from miles away.

What allotment holders do when it rains

2008-11-04T04:07:00.000-08:00

And rains, and rains and rains …

Well, some of us are honing our crime-scene skills like Garden Punks Chris and Katie who’ve been on the trail of a seed thief. Others are counting their seed potatoes or weeding out the couch grass.

We are trying to re-roof 201’s shed. Compared to the tiny shed on Duncan’s plot, 201’s shed is palatial: we’re calling it ‘The Swiss Chalet’ – but it don’t half leak! There are three reasons for this:

1 – the holes rubbed in the roofing felt by the branches of the pear tree means that the rain comes straight through the roof and drips down the rafters

2 – the blocked guttering and stolen water butt that mean a trickle of rain runs down the side of the shed and seeps mordantly into a puddle that then travels up the side of the shed by capillary action

3 – the eejits who nailed a batten to the shed roof, with three nails, meaning there are three routes via which miniscule amounts of water can sink through the roof and drip to the shed floor.

And a wet shed is a miserable thing. So we’ve spent the weekend trying to lay roofing felt in the driving rain, while getting our eyes (and other bits of anatomy) poked by sharp bits of pear tree. Which makes it all the more galling when you see that one of your neighbours is so far ahead of the game that they’ve dug over all their summer beds already … honestly, some people are just too organised for their own good!

Composting in autumn

2008-11-01T05:44:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why so many people have so many compost heaps? Well it’s because they have different ‘maturity’. Young compost is hot and wet, mature compost is brown and friable (breaks up easily, to you and me) and there’s every stage in between, but hopefully not the black, slimy, fetid stage which is called ‘failure’!

And different heaps, made at different times of year, have different properties – the best heaps are made between late summer and late autumn because healthy compost requires around two thirds 'brown’ material such as leaves, shrubs and twigs and one third 'green material' – grass clippings, green leaf clippings, fruit and vegetable peelings and kitchen scraps. Usually you have no problem supplying the green material but it is the brown material that is more difficult to find. However, the situation is reversed in autumn when leaves, shrubs and twigs become plentiful and by creating a compost bin in autumn, you’re stockpiling this carbon-heavy material which will improve your compost composition no end.

If you have a bazillion leaves, say for example you’ve just taken over a plot with a pear tree on it, and the leaves are not diseased, you can create a wire bin or separate leaf pile under a polythene sheet and compost down the leaves there, as they will take longer, up to a year, to break down, but leaf-mould, as we all know, is pure garden gold.

And remember that, as it gets colder the composting process slows down to hibernatory levels so if you want a faster composting rate, you can line your compost bin with cardboard or pile blankets on top to trap the heat generated by the biodegrading process.

The secret treasures of allotment life

2008-10-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, the secrets of plot 201 is what I really mean. Like Sarah at She Who Digs we’ve got a new plot!

Well, not exactly. Once again we’re co-workers, but this time on a plot which hasn’t been worked for at least a year – and it really shows. The weeds were up to my chin when we first saw it, and the path had completely disappeared under grass and who knew what (I know what now, see below!)

201 does have a glorious shed, something like a small Swiss chalet – and of course there’s a downside to that too, because several of the panes of glass in the three windows have been broken and the pear tree that hangs over the roof in a very pretty way has also rubbed some very pretty holes in the roofing felt, meaning that the roof leaks in a very unpretty way which has to be sorted out pronto. But even so, I can imagine long summer evenings in the shed with a glass of something cool and refreshing, or maybe even an hour in a hammock under the pear tree … why not? A girl can dream.

Back to reality. I was expecting nettles, and I got them. I was prepared for thistles and that was good, because we have plenty. I was even ready for bindweed, fortunately, as that seems to be our major crop at present (it was twelve feet up a holly tree and five yards along the fence – is there a Guinness Book of Records entry for the most invasive bindweed?) but what I wasn’t expecting, and had no idea could even happen, was the total invasion of plot 201’s gorgeous brick-built path by … strawberry runners!

Yes, seriously. The middle section of the path is so riddled with tiny strawberry plantlets that it’s a danger to walk on it. When we finally found the strawberry bed they came from, we were amazed, it's more like a strawberry jungle - but an invading one. Who knew strawberries could be such a pest?

I’m reduced to digging them out, one by one, with an old fork. And there’s something really weird about that. Because as I was squatting in the rain, turfing out weeds with a bit of cutlery, I remembered a picture my Mum took of me when I was two-and-a-half, crouching in the garden, digging a hole with a soup-spoon – according to her, it was my constant obsession for months. Some things never change then!

Allotment problems

2008-10-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

It’s not always fun on the allotment. Last night was our AGM and while that was actually a lot of fun, and I ended up being elected to a post of authority (you can just call me Madam Secretary from now on!) there was a significant amount of frustration expressed about some of the nastier aspects of being an allotment holder, so I thought I’d be honest about the trials and tribulations that were expressed at the meeting. In reverse order:

At number 3: The problem of people who won’t lock gates – this is a perennial problem at least as persistent as bindweed, and it leads to strangers wandering around the site and getting lost (and sometimes, getting locked in!) petty theft and vandalism and a general feeling of insecurity about leaving tools and produce on the allotment site.

At number 2 in the annoyance stakes – people who neglect their plots. We can all succumb to a bit of weediness or neglect at times, but this particular problem is related to people who wait until they get a weed notice, then turn up and strim and rotovate the entire plot, then do nothing until they get another weed notice … why do they have an allotment if they don’t do anything with it, is the cry from their neighbouring plot-holders? Why indeed?

Number one in the ‘allotment problem’ category – at least in the minds of those who came to the meeting – were dogs! It seems we have two large black dogs that are allowed to roam free on the site. Nobody present knew if they came from a nearby house or belonged to a plot-holder, but they have been galloping around one section of the site, trampling overwintering onions and causing mayhem. Bad enough, but the idea of coming across two large black dogs in the dark as you leave your plot in the evening is quite scary, and for some of our less mobile members could be really frightening.

We take our dog to the allotment, but always on a lead and when he’s there he’s secured on a running line on our plot so that he can’t annoy anybody. It’s really unpleasant to think that all the hard work people put into growing crops can be destroyed by one thoughtless person and two boisterous dogs – it’s not the dogs’ fault, of course. Just wait until we locate the owner – there will be some very honest expressions of annoyance to be heard!

I wonder what problems other allotment holders experience – anybody care to share their woes?

Allotment sheds …

2008-10-20T06:17:00.000-07:00

Or, if you prefer, what goes up had better not come down! Because on Saturday, when the weather was glorious and the team was foregathered in one place (‘the team’ is what we rather grandiosely call it when the three of us are on the plot at the same time) it was the right time to put up Duncan’s shed.

The shed has been a bit of a saga – there were several attempted deliveries that didn’t work out, and then a second shed arrived after the first one, for no discernable reason at all, and then the shed had to be painted with some form of preservative, and as Duncan doesn’t have anywhere to store and paint a shed, and we do, it had to come to our house, then it had to go back to the plot, then we had to buy paving … you get the picture – it’s been one of those projects that seemed to go on forever without actually progressing.

And then, suddenly, it did. It’s a very small shed, and there are two quite large men in ‘the team’ so my role was limited to making tea and doing a bit of digging over what will become the bed for the over-wintering broad beans, while they did all the levelling and hammering, and cursing and tearing up of instructions (they were actually completely the wrong instructions, for an entirely different shed, so it’s not as drastic as it sounds) and then suddenly, there was a avocado and lavender coloured shed where no shed had been before ….

And the first of the garlic has poked its head above the soil where, it seems to me, I only planted it only hours ago. No sign of the seed onions or the onion sets yet, but I am living in hope of them appearing any minute.