At last – allotment not under snow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

October allotment harvest and crop rotation

I’ve managed to dig over the whole of the strawberry bed although this picture shows the halfway point of digging.

The result is a pile of old strawberry plants, with roots as tough and woody as elder, that’s about waist high and over a metre long – seriously that strawberry bed was over-crowded. About a quarter of the bed was grass, which has been impossible to weed out because the strawberries were so closely crowded, so we won’t have that to contend with next year either.

I’ve also got about six strawberry runners potted up to replant in a raised bed, and I’ve ordered another nine plants from a supplier. That will give us two different varieties – ours are rather late so I’ve ordered an earlier cropper so that we can have a longer strawberry season. To be perfectly honest I got fed up with spending so many of the best days of the year picking and freezing strawberries so if I can spread that out a bit it’s better for my mental health!

While I dug the strawberry bed, Himself dug over the area that had held the peas and beans in the summer. This year the broad beans, French beans, peas and petits pois will go into the area where our first early potatoes were planted. The ground in which we had maincrop potatoes (our biggest failure) needs a lot of work to get it truly productive, so we hope to work in lime over the summer and get it ready for next year’s brassicas. And our potatoes will go where the peas and beans were – crop rotatation, not exactly perfect, but pretty good for year 2 on a previously neglected plot, I think.

And we also harvested another trug full of borlotti beans, the last of the beetroot (okay, we missed them and only found them when we were digging over) and a few carrots, as well as some alpine strawberries – still delicious!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-crop-rotation, allotment-rough-digging, allotment-strawberries

Brilliant Borlotti – allotment beans

I’ve just been up to look at my beans.

It’s not impressive at first sight, I agree, but this is my Borlotti bean pyramid and those are lots of beautiful borlotti beans drying in the pod, on the plant. I didn’t think we’d get away with it in the UK, and maybe next year we won’t but a good 9/10s of the pods are dry and the beans inside are too.

They are gorgeous! There’s something very special, very Jack and the Beanstalk about growing your own beans for drying (as opposed to growing them and failing to harvest them so they end up being dried beans by accident) and Borlotti’s rehydrate so beautifully to make a big, meaty, juicy bean that’s ideal in robust Italian cooking (particularly good with lamb, I think). It’s all gone so wonderfully well that I find it hard to believe this is the first year we’ve grown drying beans. And borlottis are as wholesome and pretty as a speckled hen's egg.

But to be on the safe side, I harvested all the dry pods and just left the ones that are still a bit soft on the plant – if it rains I could lose the whole crop and whenever the weather forecasters say ‘sunny weekend’ I think of Michael Fish saying ‘there is no hurricane’ and I go and bring in the washing – or in this case, the beans!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-drying-beans, allotment-harvest

Allotment doings

October is usually a funny old month on allotments – many more organised allotment holders have cleared out their summer crops and dug in their manure or compost. The rest of us (the majority) still have pillars and wigwams of seedy beans, fading sunflowers, bolting lettuces and other end-of-season crops hanging around looking like the tall plain girl who never got asked to dance at the school disco.

I notice that one of my neighbours has already got his shallots in. There’s a saying about shallots – ‘plant on the shortest day and harvest on the longest’ which basically means any time after 23 September, the autumn equinox when the day and night are the same length, is good for shallot planting. If your soil gets a lot of frosts early in the year then the sooner you get them in the ground, the more they will establish themselves before they get frozen to the spot.

It’s also AGM month for our allotment site. Have I done a good enough job as secretary? Will I be voted on or off? It’s a nerve-wracking question, because if I get voted off then I lose my allotment, because I am only caretaking it for the allotment association I serve. Suddenly I feel like Gordon Brown, facing an election and wondering whether there will be anything left for me on the other side of the ballot box …

Labels: allotment-agm, allotment-beans, allotment-october, allotment-shallots

Seed Saving on Allotments

This is the first year we’re trying to save our own seed. And I’ll be honest – so far, we’ve been totally rubbish at it!

What we were going to save:

Peas
Broad beans
Runner beans
French beans
Borlotti beans
Rocket
Tomatoes

What we’ve actually managed to harvest seed from so far:

Runner beans
Rocket
Tomatoes

The runner beans are gorgeous as they dry and the rocket went to seed so fast that we only got two meals from it, so there was no problem harvesting seed from that crop! The tomato seed has already been tucked away in envelopes for next year – we are very happy with our greenhouse tomato crop which is still harvesting well.

The broad beans were a total seed-harvest fail. On 235 we planned to harvest, but the pods we were leaving got picked (that’s the risk of co-working) and on 201 the crop, which wasn’t overwintered, was destroyed by blackfly, so there was barely enough of a crop to eat a meal from, let alone leave to set pods for harvesting.

French beans – we’ve left some pods to get big – we’ll see if we are actually organised enough to do the harvesting bit in a week or so.

Borlotti beans – we’re leaving these to dry on the vine, so some will just be used for food and others for sowing next year … that’s the theory anyway!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-crops, allotment-harvest, allotment-seed-saving, allotment-tomatoes

Allotment haul 12 September

The allotment was looking okay today, I am reliably told by Himself, not having managed to get there myself!

It wasn’t for want of trying. My first attempt was headed off by the need to drop my files and associated stuff for the committee meeting into the committee room. There I go waylaid in the nicest possible way by an allotment-holder who wanted to talk about butterflies.

Then it was time for the ten o’clock tour and as we only had one person booked, I’d already decided to go round, and then another allotment volunteer decided to go with us, and finally an allotment-holder who’d been browsing our excellently stocked shop joined in too.

We were supposed to have four tours, each lasting an hour and a half, but two thirds of the way round the site, we were accosted by our Site Rep who pointed out that the next group were waiting to start! The next group consisted of two people, and he kindly headed off with them, while we wrapped up our truncated trip which meant we didn't reach the part of the site that contains our plot - actually I was rather glad because as you can see, some plots definitely put 201 to shame! The third tour had nobody booked, which was good, as we had a committee meeting to prepare for our AGM in October, and the fourth was due at 14:30 and consisted of three people and a dog.

So in total we had six actual visitors, although I think each tour gathered up a number of people along the way who wanted to explore the site (or perhaps they just wanted a break from their own plots!) in company with others.

I don’t know how the caterers did – I never actually got to taste or drink anything, but they had tables and chairs and cake which I was miserable to miss out on. All in all it was an experience, although a very mixed one, and if we get involved again next year, we’ll want to handle more of the publicity ourselves and perhaps not to have online booking systems.

Rather worryingly, somebody told somebody (you know how these things go) who told the catering lady, who told a section rep, that lots of people think the tours are tomorrow …

On a more horticultural footing, Himself picked a trug of beans, four cucumbers, a large handful of alpine strawberries and an errant leek. So dinner tonight will be lentil, leek and lamb casserole, followed by alpine strawberries, vanilla ice-cream and strawberry coulis from this summer’s frozen harvest.

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-cucumbers, allotment-leeks, allotment-tours

Allotment Learning Curve – what we won’t do next year

When everything is so busy, and the thistles are growing faster than almost anything else on the plot, even though we thought we’d pulled every last one of them up in November, and when, if you stand still, the bindweed actually grabs your ankles and tries to climb up your leg, it can be difficult to stop and take stock.

But we did.

We sat down and looked at what we’d grown and decided what we need more of, and less of, in 2010.

• First, asparagus peas. Like The Cottage Smallholder we have decided that these are a swizz! The companies that market these as a vegetable should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act (or whatever) as I don’t think even a hungry goat would enjoy them. They are fabulously pretty, and we’ve decided to use up the many seeds we have left as a ground cover crop for any bare soil we have next year – they should work like any other legume and if we cut the tops off to compost, their ground covering behaviour which keeps down weeds, plus the pretty flowers (and the roots left in the soil to convey nitrogen) mean we won’t have entirely wasted our money on them. But we will never, ever eat them again. Vile.

• Second, we won’t grow outdoor tomatoes. Ours have developed blossom end rot through uneven watering – not because we watered unevenly but because deluges of rain, followed by a couple of sweltering days, then more rain made it impossible to give them a regular watering regime. Also, blight is on the next allotment but one to ours, so I reckon they will have it by the end of the week – greenhouse tomatoes only for us next year.

• Third, more peas please! We have some kilos of peas in the freezer, but we could easily have doubled our planting – we do love our peas and there’s never a day when I look at peas and think that I can’t bother with them!

• Fourth, spuds. I think we need more varieties with later croppers to take us through the year. This suggests we need to do more research on the keeping properties of various maincrop potato varieties – we have been very happy with our potatoes this year, apart from the ones grown in tyres which were rubbishy.

And by that point, the bindweed had reached our knees and we had to start moving again or become a permanent fixture on the plot. But the picture is our French bean harvest for the day – excellent! And if you think that’s an odd shadow looming over them, it’s Rebus, the Cairn Terrier, who is very fond of raw French beans and will ‘guard’ the trug all day for a single bean as his reward.

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-peas, allotment-potatoes, allotment-tomatoes, allotment-weeds

Allotment harvest: mainly red

I’ve hardly been able to get to the plot this week, owing to swine flu and me still struggling to get over my surgery (gosh, don’t we sound like a house of crocks and invalids) but I did manage to shoot up for an hour yesterday to:

-- water the monster cucumbers (variety Bushy – temperament: productive)
-- and to pick some beans (variety Scarlet Emperor – temperament: productive)
-- as well as pulling a row of the heritage beetroot we grew from Seedy Sunday seed (variety Ukraine – temperament: expansive).






Our sweetcorn is within a couple of days of being harvestable, apparently. Once the silks begin to brown and fold, then you peel back some covering and pierce a corn kernel with your fingernail: watery is not ripe, creamy is ripe, like raw dough is overripe (hope we don’t get to that point).






Our red chicory has gone very red indeed, it’s a gorgeous shade although, to be blunt, we are getting a little bit sick of eating it.



On the whole though, we’re very happy with our summer harvest, after slightly less than a year of allotment-holding.

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-beetroot, allotment-chicory, allotment-sweetcorn

Allotment Garlic Goings On

Our garlic did well this year, and between the ones planted in the garden in case they didn’t like the allotment, and the allotment ones that seemed very happy, we had quite a harvest. Given that we don’t eat that much garlic, I thought I’d plait it and hang it up in the kitchen where at least it would look pretty.

Have you ever tried plaiting garlic? The ‘ingredients’ alone are pretty daunting: scissors, an old toothbrush, a couple of bath towels and a knife as well as a dozen or more garlic bulbs.

Well, I tried. And failed. And so our garlic is hiding in a mesh basket in the shed, where it is cool and dry and the mess I made of it can’t be seen. After all, nobody will know what it looked like when they eat it, will they?

The reason I was plaiting garlic instead of doing something more useful and nurturing like picking beans or raspberries, is that we have an outbreak of swine flu in the house and while I know I should be at the plot: watering cucumbers, feeding tomatoes and generally tidying up, it would seem hard-hearted beyond belief to head off to nurture vegetables when Himself needs nurturing at home. And before you ask, no it’s not Man-Flu, it’s the genuine, full-blown swinish article and he has it badly, poor chap.

So here's the last photo I managed to take before we became a plague house ... our marigolds!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-garlic, allotment-marigolds

Allotment pests and prettiness

This is not plot 201. This is the allotment of somebody with a developed aesthetic sense and a rightful focus on beauty as well as productivity.

201 has an arch too. Or rather, it has two blue metal shop fittings that are supposed to be the uprights of an arch, when we bury them either side of the path and sling some plastic trellis over the top to make the ‘arch’ bit. For the past eight months or so, they have been moved around the site, from place to place, with people constantly falling over, or into, them and then cursing and kicking them and moving them somewhere else.

The net result of our ‘feed the masses’ ethic is eleven cucumbers in the fridge and no arch. I think we’ve got our priorities a little bit wrong somewhere, but there never seems to be time to stop and work on non-food-crop related things now.

To start with, we have whitefly on everything, but mainly on the brassicas that aren’t in the brassica cage. And while whitefly are said to be more a nuisance than a pest, we still have to wash them off all our seedling plants every few days. The distinction between ‘nuisance’ and ‘pest’ seems to be that nuisances annoy and make work harder, while pests simply destroy and make work fruitless (or cropless, if you prefer). The tomatoes seem to insist on being tied up every ten minutes, the beans don’t seem to be flowering as fast or as much as himself would wish (and the runner beans are attacked by blackfly) and the celeriac can’t get enough water. With all that going on, who has time to stop and consider a rustic arch?

But I didn’t get an allotment just to have kilos of crops that have to be blanched or dried or pickled or given away. I got an allotment to have scope to express myself in plants as well as in words – but on the current evidence I have about as much ‘green’ creativity as the average bus timetable. I think my autumn focus needs to be on beauty …

Labels: allotment-arch, allotment-beans, allotment-brassicas, allotment-celeriac, allotment-cucumber

New allotment tasks: finding room for beans and herbs

What you’re looking at was supposed to be my permanent herb and botanicals garden. On the right hand side, as you look at the picture, is what will one day be a ‘hedge’ of globe artichokes and on the left are the raised beds. In between is an area marked out with stones and with chipping paths in which I was going to grow herbs and plants for making toiletries etc.

Note the word ‘was’. As you can see, the most notable feature of the three beds, at present, is a bean wigwam. They are borlotti beans and while I love them dearly, they are definitely neither a herb nor a plant used for making toiletries. What they are, is extra. Extra beans, because we got a 100% germination from the seeds. And you can’t throw them away can you?

I thought we could give them away, but Himself sniffed at this, pointing out that we’ve already given away kale, tomatoes, rhubarb, alpine strawberries and chicory. Himself has a bit of a thing for beans, I think. A Jack and the Beanstalk complex perhaps? Anyway, he saw that the central herb bed, which is meant to become a home to lavender and borage and possibly lovage (very good for both the digestion and the complexion apparently, as well as making a lovely liqueur) and into it went the beans! There are more beans (Cherokee Trail of Tears) next to the sweetcorn too, but more of them anon.

So, for this summer at least, I’ve lost my central herb bed. The triangle nearest the path at least has some nasturtiums, marigolds and wallflowers in it, while the one closes to the fence has Love-Lies-Bleeding, dill and sage, so he can’t plonk vegetables into either of those (or at least I don’t think he can) but I can see that we’re going to spend the next few weekends arguing about finding places to put all our overstocks: I want more space for leeks, he wants more space for cabbages, and so on … It could get nasty in the allotment blogger household!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-herbs, allotment-summer-crops

Allotment Potato Beds, Raised Beds and February Tasks

Well, I’ve discovered a problem I never expected – when you have two days of good weather in a row, in a February that has followed one of the worst winters you can remember, you go a bit daft.

We spent ALL Friday and ALL today at the allotment, and I have to go back tomorrow too – although only for plot inspections with Site Representatives, not for actual allotment work.

The thing is, I’m cream-crackered! On Friday, before we went to the allotment, I planted out the Babbington’s Leeks in the greenhouse. Once we got to the plot we dug the potato bed over again, Himself raked the bean and pea bed, and I dug compost and some sand into the two raised beds which seem to be pure clay. We planted potatoes in tyres on 235 and 201, on the basis that while it may not be organic, it’s at least environmentally friendly to use up some old tyres in this fashion – and it’s supposed to get you your earliest new potatoes up to three weeks earlier than other methods because as long as you keep one empty tyre above the height of the haulm, there won’t be any frost damage to the plant.

Today, while Himself planted carrots in one raised bed, having built a nifty fleece-covered lid for it too, I planted the Jerusalem artichokes that Janet very kindly gave us yesterday. We hadn’t planned anywhere for them, so it was a swift decision to stick them along the fence by the thornless blackberry. Then we marked out the herb and simples garden (sounds posh, but actually it’s the size of two broom cupboards!) because Ray had given the Association some lovely wallflower plants for any plotholder who wanted them, and I’d taken a nice big clump, before remembering that they needed to go in yet another area of completely untouched plot.

Janet took two of our rhubarb transplants and June had a couple too. Ray also say he’d like some so we agreed to drop four pots off to him on our way home as his plot is on our way to the gate. I found myself potting up loads more rhubarb as a result, and Himself got busy putting up the frame for the climbing French beans, Cherokee Trail of Tears, that Fran gave us as a seed swap. The frame is actually a bit of shop fitting that was being thrown out, and as we're 'waste not, want not' we said we'd take it. We've used another one horizontally to make a frame for our blackberry to climb up/along and there's a third version, which is actually two much skinnier sections, with rungs rather than a grid, that we're planning to turn into an ornamental archway at one entrance to the plot - note that word 'planning' because it's one of those things that sounds great but as it actually requires two fences to be re-built so that the arch actually has some purpose. I suppose we could just stick it up anyway, but it would look pretty silly. So instead it lurks in the shed and I fall over it and curse all the time. Anyway, you can just see the carrot bed, with its fleece lid, in the foreground of the blue bed with the frame in it.

And Himself had already dug up a huge clump of snowdrops from home that needed transplanting into the plot, so I did those, then dug over the first of the herb beds, the equilateral bed we’re calling it, and then Anita and John from next door asked if we wanted some old-fashioned purple iris that they had going spare, and of course we did, and they had to be planted out while himself hoed around the raspberries and …

I came home and fell asleep on the sofa! If this good weather carries on, I shan't be able to cope. Mind you, I can't afford any more time off work either, so perhaps that will stop us working ourselves to shadows. Although we've still got to plant sweet peas, marigolds, tomatoes, leeks ...

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-carrots, allotment-flowers, allotment-horticultural-fleece, allotment-leeks, allotment-potatoes-in-tyres, allotment-raised beds, allotment-seeds

Seedy Sunday - allotment bargains!

Well, Seedy Sunday was a surprise – I don’t know how many people turned up, several hundred for sure, and a big increase on the previous year that we went, when there were perhaps fifty or so people in the hall – is this a sign of the recession in action, I wonder?

Anyway, we did extremely well, managing to swap for a lot of seeds and only actually buying a packet of Scarlet Emperor runner beans. We swapped to get:

• Ukranian beetroot (used to be available through Suttons Seeds, but now a heritage seed only – produces very good big roots, excellent for grating)
• Waverex peas – very sweet and very productive, as long as we don’t get too hot a spring
• Ragged Jack (also called Russian Red) kale – which is an oak leaf type kale where the leaves have a red tinge and the stems are quite purple – said to be very mild in taste
• Dwarf Green Curled kale – which is the one with the furled dark green leaves which loves difficult or windswept gardens and poor wet soils
• Palla Rossa chicory – that’s the deep red to purple, cricket ball shaped one that you see in shops – apparently it’s very winter hardy and we love it baked with parma ham and strong cheese!

So in other words, we got five packets of seeds for £1.50 which was the cost of entry, and I think that’s a bargain! We also went mad though, and bought slices of cake and cups of tea, which we enjoyed while listening to a female choir, so it wasn’t such a frugal trip as it might have been. But next year I shall take dozens of swaps; I noted what people were looking for this year and reckon I can save lots of popular seed, so I shall really splurge in 2010!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-chicory, allotment-kale, allotment-peas, allotment-seed-swaps, allotment-seedy-sunday

Three sisters planting for allotments

A friend of mine is trying out this system of planting, made famous by several Native American tribes and thinks I should too. The basic principle underlying the process is simple and elegant – if it works. What you do is plant the three sisters: sweetcorn, squash and beans all in the same hole. The theory is that the corn makes a support for the (runner) beans, the squash (courgette or cucumber) helps to suppress weeds by providing a ground cover something like a living mulch and the beans are a nitrogen fixer, improving the soil for both the other crops. The beans should finish first, and when the corn is ready to harvest the squashes can be allowed to run rampant, as they do.

Hmmm … I can see how it might work somewhere closer to the equator, but here? I think that the wetter, cooler climate of the UK will cause the following:

1. The beans will get very leafy and shade the squashes
2. The corn will mature more slowly than the beans, meaning that the cobs also get shaded by the bean leaves and thus won’t ripen
3. The squashes will be slow to ripen but will otherwise do fine (they are pretty indestructible)

It seems to me that this might not be a system that translates very well to the British allotment, not least because one usually has enough space to grow whatever one wants, and although I can find quite a number of people online who’ve said they are going to grow the Three Sisters way, I can’t find any reports on the results and that makes me wonder how well it works.

Has anybody out there tried it? Want to share the outcomes?

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-corn, allotment-squash, three-sisters-planting