Planting potatoes and brassicas

And here it is – the brassica cage in its new location!

We’ve been given some wonder-stuff, a special secret recipe concocted by one of our allotment stalwarts, which we sprinkle on the ground and rake in about a fortnight before planting our brassicas, so we’re looking forward to bumper crops this year. We also saw the first cabbage whites of the season as we were moving the cage, so it’s not a moment too soon to get the cage to its new home. And we managed it without a single curse or argument.

We’ve also started work on a compost bin Dalek, according to Andy’s instructions, so I shall be posting the first photos of that in a few day’s time, but before any of that …

Our maincrop potatoes have been planted! We managed to get them all in the ground over the weekend, with a layer of comfrey under them to give them a good start, and so we’re very pleased with ourselves about that – although I bet you our comfrey roots and we end up digging that out of the allotment for years too – we definitely didn’t wilt it enough before putting it in the bottom of the trenches.

Labels: allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-compost-bin, allotment-potatoes

Plotting and planning on the plot

Hurrah! 201 has new bunting!

And what are we celebrating? Nothing, yet, although the tops of the first earlies have just peeked through the soil so we certainly hope to be celebrating potatoes soon. What we intend to celebrate is the moving of the brassica cage, seen at the bottom left of this photo. Hopefully, when I next post, it will magically appear at top left! We need to move it for crop rotation purposes, so that we don't end up with club root in our brassicas.

However, for that magic to happen, not a little blood, sweat and tears has to happen first. We have to dig it out where it’s bedded in, and then one of us stands one side of the fence, one the other, and we ‘walk’ it up the allotment to its new home. Why do we have to walk it over the fence, which is obviously a complicating factor?

Um, because my wonderful new triumphal arch means we can’t carry it up the path … and we've got crops on both sides of the path that can't be walked on so we can't take it either side of the arch either.

Sigh.

Bit of a planning failure there, eh?

Labels: allotment -crops, allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-first-earlies, allotment-paths

Allotment structures: the brassica cage

Now a lot of people will tell you that brassicas are more trouble than they’re worth, but don’t you believe them! It’s glorious to have fresh, tasty winter vegetables when the weather is harsh and the shops are full of overpriced, tasteless, boring veggies.

There are a few problems – getting the soil right and the long growing season to name but two, but the worst, for us, is pests. The Cabbage White butterfly is called that because it loves cabbages, although it has no objection to other brassicas as far as I can see. And it’s not the butterfly that’s the issue, but the caterpillars, which hatch from small eggs laid on the undersides of leaves and which hatch with a ravenous desire to eat your brassicas down to the stump.

You can check the leaves and pick off the eggs, but we’ve never found this effective, and this year, due to me suddenly having major surgery, I’m really glad that we put in the effort (okay, Himself put in the effort) to build a brassica cage. The cage will keep off the pigeons as well as the butterflies, so it’s an all year round device. And it means that we don't have to do the time-consuming 'inspect and remove' thing with the eggs.

And here it is, in its first phase. Himself made the panels at home and lined them with 7 millimetre netting before taking them down to the allotment and assembling it there.













Second phase is a bit like putting together a three dimensional jigsaw that weighs a lot more than we’d expected. There was some cursing and counter-cursing at this point.












Finished article: which is substantial and easy to get around in. We could have got one of those cages made of aluminium poles and netting, but it’s a windy site and over the past year we saw quite a few of those lying on their sides after some of Sussex’s more demanding gales, so we went for something a bit more castle-like! It is portable, to avoid the risks inherent in not rotating crops, but strong enough to withstand weather.














And here it is with Ragged Jack kale in it. On the other side of the plank path we've put dwarf green kale and the other winter crop we’ll put in it will be purple-sprouting broccoli, which has been prone to butterfly infestation on our site, and next year we hope to be organised enough to put cabbages and cauliflowers inside too.

Labels: allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-brassicas, allotment-butterflies