Allotment problems – blown sprouts

Just to prove it never rains but it pours, we’ve got blown sprouts. It seems there could be two causes, either wind rocking or lack of nutrients – and the result is that the sprouts open up like a flower, instead of staying tightly budded.

It seems that if we remove the blown sprouts and feeding with a fertiliser high in nitrogen, it can stop the problem, allowing the sprouts further up the plant to develop properly. I do have a good recipe for blown sprouts, which is a stir-fry with orange and ginger and sesame oil, so that’s okay, but the liquid fertiliser is a bit of a swine. The only way I could work out to do it was to used dried blood (which is organic and high in nitrogen) and then water it in well, because I couldn’t find any organic liquid fertilisers that weren’t equally N-P-K. I hope it works. Dried blood, if you’ve never used it, is about the vilest smelling substance on the face of the planet.

So I sprinkled dried blood around all the brassicas, not just the Brussels Sprouts amd watered it in on Thursday - I shall have to restake the sprouts tomorrow. And there I was, smugly thinking we were almost on top of our allotment task list for the first time this year!

Labels: allotment-blown-sprouts, allotment-brassicas, allotment-brussels sprouts

Allotment improvements and longest days

On 21 June, being the longest day, I thought it was a good idea to take some pictures, especially as we put in a mammoth day on the allotment, although I spent a fair bit of it sitting in chair doing nothing, as I’m having to pace myself.

The plot is looking more organised, apart from the top right corner, which I’ve conveniently not included in this picture and which needs strimming and then will be rotavated – no double digging for that bit of plot, as I’m not allowed to dig for quite a while yet!

The celeriac are doing marvellously.
They did look like this when planted out in early May, but the plastic mulch and copious watering now mean that they gladden the heart of anybody (like me) who enjoys summer crops but is totally fixated on winter ones and on getting enough cold weather veggies established to ensure that she never has to run to the supermarket to buy some hideously overpriced and tasteless rubbish just to have food to put on the table.

And so now they look like this ...

We also planted out our Brussels sprouts, which had a bit of a late start this year. We have five red and the rest are ordinary green (don’t ask what happened to the other red ones, Himself will get upset if you do) and I think we have a row to plant up on 235 too, although I’m not sure if they like Brussels sprouts or if they are the ‘ugh, how disgusting’ type of people. Did you know that it’s genetic? Around a third of the population have a gene that makes cruciferous vegetables taste more bitter than to the rest of us, so if your little darling won’t eat Brussels, it’s probably not his or her fault. Anyway, I don’t want to impose a row of Brussels on them if they don’t like them so I shall wait to find out.

Labels: allotment-brussels sprouts, allotment-celeriac

Winter Wonderlands

It’s such a shame when people don’t keep their allotments going through the winter, for two reasons:

1 - it makes it much more difficult for them to come back in spring and turn the ground etc because a whole winter’s worth of weeds and pests have taken over the ground

2 – they miss out on all the wonderful winter vegetables that they could be enjoying in the months when, in fact, vegetable costs rise and there is less variety in the shops anyway.

Our allotments are full of winter cabbages and kale, Brussels sprouts and, of course, the wonderful winter beets and chards. These have been a real development in recent years. Until quite recently, such crops were only grown to be fed to cattle, which is a complete waste as they are both tasty and nutritious and amazingly easy to grow. And a benefit in my eyes is their beauty – they gleam through the winter months like some kind of exotic growth transplanted from a warmer climate.

Most winter crops have definite advantages: there are far fewer slugs and snails around to attack them, and they are necessarily robust plants, needing very little care once they have established themselves past the seedling stage.

Labels: allotment-beets, allotment-brussels sprouts, allotment-cabbage, allotment-kale, allotment-winter-crops