Allotment pests

I was reading The Cottage Smallholder yesterday and noted that Fiona has to net her fruit not just to keep the birds (and her dogs) from eating the ripe fruit, but because the birds (but not the dogs) eat the unripe fruit too!

We certainly have problems at our allotments, but this isn’t one of them and I’ve devoted most of today, while I’ve been pottering around, to working out why. And I think I’ve found the answer. It’s seagulls!

Yes, while they can be a real pest, I suspect that the seagull behaviour over our allotments keeps the fruit-hunting birds away; they certainly like to land in the mornings and poke around in turned soil, but if they see smaller birds congregating on the site they tend to fly down and scare them off so that they can try and grab whatever the little birds were finding. Of course they aren’t equipped to peck fruit from bushes though. Finally, a use for the pestilential things! One person on our allotments actually has a pet seagull that he feeds with cat food on a fork – rather him than me: they have vicious beaks and always look to me like homicidal maniacs who are trying to remember where they left their axes.

We also have a rat problem, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Rats will, I’m told, dig up my root crops and eat my peas and beans, but putting down poison is a no-brainer (a) because I know it builds resistance in the intended victims and (b) there are too many dogs, cats and children on the site for bait to be safe. So, short of taking the dog up with me whenever possible, I’m not sure what to do. So far the only thing the rat has done is tunnel under the compost bin and eat some of the scraps we put in there, but I wonder what it will do next …

Labels: allotment-birds, allotment-fruit, allotment-pests

What’s up Doc?

Well, May Day supper is going to be lamb pitas with … early lettuce and spring onions and some skinny and red hot radishes. As Don, one of our allotment chums, grew some potatoes under-cover in a combination old tyre and plastic cloche type arrangement, we also have the first salad spuds of the year, from him! It’s a real joy when you eat the first meal of the year where all the veg came from your plot (okay, and from the plots of your generous friends) and even the mint that’s going into the lamb dish was harvested today by my own hand. The radishes could have done with another week, maybe, but they are searingly hot and make your mouth know it’s alive, that’s for sure!

And of course the work is coming faster than the crops now. Today it’s been hoe hoe hoe. May is the month for hoeing. Getting the heads off weeds now when they are tiny, means they don’t get their roots down which can make them harder to get rid of. And of course that means sharpening the hoe every ten minutes – I don’t know how people work with blunt hoes, Sweeney Todd could use mine to shave customers, because it makes the work of weed decapitation about 80% easier. And the other thing I’ve been doing, because the other half won’t, is thinning out the first lettuce and carrots – he’s too soft hearted to do it and then we end up with weedy plants, I’m ruthless and give the survivors the space to flourish!

Labels: allotment-lettuce, allotment-potatoes, allotment-radishes, allotment-tasks-may

Allotment year one - pacing yourself

I'm reading a book called The Half Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz, which is published by the RHS, and while it's full of good ideas, there's one that I feel faintly nervous about them promulgating so widely. It's the suggestion that in the first year, or first few years, you should leave 2/3rds of your new plot fallow while you get on with cultivating the final third.

Hmmm...

Nice idea but ... as Ms Leendertz goes on to point out, this can cause consternation in your neighbours who don't want weed seeds and creeping perennials spreading from your unworked section to their hard-cultivated plot, and can actually break the terms of your rent, because there are quite a few allotment sites that require you to keep more that 33% in cultivation at any one time!

Having said that, it is important with a new plot, whether allotment or vegetable patch in the garden, to pace yourself. You WILL get gluts, even if that seems unimaginable now, and you WON'T have allowed for how much time it takes to harvest, process and store glut vegetables. You WILL find some weed, pest or problem that takes up much more time than you planned - for us it's the perennial weeds, for a neighbour it's a constant battle with a fox that digs up her seedlings (on purpose, she says).

So fallow doesn't have to be fallow. Potatoes, for example, can be planted until June, they break up the soil (so you've got lovely soil to plant in next year) and keep weeds down (because their leaf cover and deep roots don't give perennials a chance to get a good grip), and even if you get only a small harvest from late plantings, it looks like you're keeping the plot in cultivation.

Labels: allotment-cultivation, fallow-allotment, new-allotment

What’s coming up on the allotment?

Garlic – yes, even the stuff that went in this spring is showing beautifully. It’s something of an annoyance to me that Maurice grows better garlic than I ever have, although not because of Maurice – he’s very generous about sharing his produce and his garlic is just wonderful: strong but sweet, full of flavour and not fibrous. The reason I get so annoyed is that I grew up on the Isle of Wight, the home of UK garlic production, and a place that actually has a Garlic Queen every year (go figure!) and so surely I ought to be able to grow it really well? My garlic is okay but I think Maurice’s soil is better than mine, or something.

One problem is that, as you can see in the picture, garlic casts no shade and so it gets swallowed up very fast by weeds because it doesn’t shade its own roots to keep them clear of lower weed growth. The RHS recommends growing it through opaque mulching film but Maurice doesn’t, so neither do I.

On the plus side, it doesn’t need watering and only suffers from virtually not problems. A lot of people don’t realise you can cut the green leaves to use in a salad (or on top of a hearty omelette, very tasty!) but really you get the joy when the leaves turn yellow and you lift the bulbs, carefully, with a hand fork, before laying them out to dry in an airy place, ensuring no bulb touches another. Once they begin to make that rustling sound you can move them to a ventilated container or plait the stems and hang the plait in an airy but not too warm place.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-garlic, allotment-harvest

Littered plots

Hmmm. There’s a huge amount of this going on – and if you take over a new plot, I can bet that it’s about a 50/50 chance that you’ll find your new ‘green’ space has become a municipal dump.

The culprits may be:

1. fly-tippers who get onto allotment sites when gates are left open and dump car boot loads of rubbish on untenanted plots or along paths

2. the dear old general public, who wander along public rights of way, dropping (accidentally) rubbish or depositing (deliberately) old fridges and mattresses

3. your fellow allotmenteers – especially where bonfires are not allowed, some folk develop the habit of using unused plots as rubbish dumps.


What can you do?

• Check the allotment rules and bye-laws – the council may have to clear the rubbish for you
• Talk to your allotment association – many organise skips a couple of times a year so that plot holders can get rid of this kind of rubbish
• Call the council if you suspect flytippers – they can launch prosecutions if they identify the culprits


And if all else fails

Buy a crate of beer and a couple of disposable barbecues along with some sausages and salads and invite your mates up to the plot to help you shift the rubbish with a Barbie and beer reward … but only when all the litter is gone!

Labels: allotment-rubbish, new-allotment

Allotment problems – dealing with the plot

And the plot may thicken, or flood, or have a lovely topsoil of hardcore and old asbestos tiles or be a kind of allotment thoroughfare over which everybody drives or walks, or it could turn out that the previous plotholder has grown a wonderful crop of onion rot, potato blight and carrot fly for many years!

It’s not easy to turn down a plot, especially if you’ve been on a waiting list for years and years, but what can you do if your heart sinks when you see the patch that’s up for offer? You might think there’s nothing to be done, but actually there’s quite a lot and over the next couple of weeks I’m going to devote some time to exploring how you can improve your plot offer, or negotiate it into something a little more like a vegetable des res.

This week – flooding plots!

These come in two types – the kind where the whole site floods and the kind where only your allotment and those nearby flood. If it’s the former, check the byelaws – allotment land is supposed to be ‘fit for purpose’ and if it floods every year your allotment association may be able to mount a complaint that leads to new land being assigned – that’s a long term process though.

If it’s only your plot and that of a few neighbours:

Get together to lay ground drainage and dig ponds – short lengths of pipe can be dug into the ground wherever there’s a slope so that they run the water off downhill and at the lowest point of the plot (hint, it’s where the most water gathers!) a pond will take most of the water off your land fast. A nice deep pond can be used for hand-watering in summer and if nothing else, you can enjoy growing waterlilies.

Lift solid paving – it’s amazing how much rain runoff happens because people have laid concrete, tarmac or paving slabs. Normally water takes 4 – 6 hours to soak the soil to subsoil level, at which point it is saturated and will start to flood – so that’s 4 – 6 hours of rain before flooding. But runoff happens within three or four minutes of rain falling on a non-porous surface, so if you calculate the area of paving slabs or solid paths you have, that much of your plot will start to flood after about five minutes – scary isn’t it? Of course that water will still soak into the soil, but it’s got up some speed by then and will tend to coast over the soil surface, eroding your topsoil and running as fast as it can towards the lowest point, where raindrops tend to hit and stick, and require a lot of water to fall fast to become runoff.

Raise your beds – even a few inches is enough in plots that are just a bit marshy, but up to a foot is necessary in really boggy areas. More than that is probably not going to be cost effective for you, although you might want to go to two feet, if you can afford the wood, the soil to fill them, and know that you’re going to stay on your plot for years to come.

Plant water-hungry plants – many crops are water hungry in summer, not so many in winter, when rain tends to be heaviest, so try to make your corner plants and hedges ones that will take up a lot of water: any bog plants will thrive, willows and elders take up a lot of water from the soil but remember that if your plot actually floods, it may not be safe to eat your produce, depending on where the floodwater has come from …

Labels: allotment-flooding, allotment-plots, allotment-problems

Allotment spuds and tomatoes

Why mention potatoes and tomatoes in the same sentence? Because they are related! Yes, both are part of the nightshade (solanaceae) family, although you’d never know it to look at their fruits – the potato flower does give some hint of the relationship though.

Not only is it still fine to plant maincrop potatoes (traditionally the cut-off date has been considered to be the middle of April) but if your soil hasn’t warmed up, you may actually get a better crop from putting them in a bit later, as cold soil will check the development of early crops. If you did get them in the ground early and if you planted early potato varieties, don’t forget that you still need to protect the emerging plants from any frosts that might still be on the horizon, as potatoes can be severely damaged by a late frost. The easiest way to do this will small potato plants is to draw a little soil from the edges of the bed over the whole plant it will shove its way through in a few days without any difficulty – larger plants will need a cloche or horticultural fleece cover for the frost-threatening nights, but don’t leave it on in the day. Leave 15 inches between each potato for these later crops, using a generous amount of well rotted garden compost to cover the entire length of the trench before raking the soil back over.

You should also wow tomato seeds about now because they need a little heat to germinate, you can keep them in a heated greenhouse, or on a windowsill or in a bottom heated propagator. Water the compost well, scatter the fine seed over the top and cover thinly with vermiculite or sand. When two sets of 'true' leaves appear, pot them on. Plant them slightly deeper than before so that the baby leaves (scientifically termed the cotyledens) are just sitting on the surface. Keep them on a warm windowsill and turn them every day.

Potato courtesy of baronsquirrel

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-tomatoes