October allotment tasks

According to the sage old allotment holders around me, we can probably continue harvesting carrots until around mid-October, although the slight frost that glazed the surface of the car this morning is a grim warning that winter is close – the point is that you need to lift carrots before there is a ground frost because it ‘pinches’ them, making them both soft and very sweet as some of the starches turn into sugars (which is the opposite of what happens to peas if you don’t harvest them, when the sugars turn to starch – life is strange) and because carrots keep for a month or more if laid in a box of slightly moist sand and kept in a cool dark place, harvesting early can mean having good firm carrots well into November, and nobody likes a limp carrot, do they? Ditto radishes.

On the other hand, tomatoes can continue to ripen on a windowsill if you pick them before the first frost and lay them in good sun. But if you let the frost get to them, and they wilt, disease will apparently invade the plant (like a shipload of Daleks) and may begin to build up, not just in the plant but in the surrounding soil too. Much as I love tomatoes I’m starting to think of them as the hypochondriacs of the allotment world, forever fainting or falling over or getting mysterious conditions that blight them forever.

And our onion bed is ready, after Tony's painstaking hand-weeding, our spring cabbage and some rhubarb kale are in the ground and broad beans are just waiting to hit the dirt, as they say!

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-chard, allotment-onions, allotment-radishes

Value-added crops

There’s a debate that is held over allotment fences and in sheds, usually amiable but sometimes rather heated – it’s about what it’s ‘worth’ growing. Is it worth growing potatoes? Is it worth growing carrots? Is it worth growing onions?

The argument on the one hand is that these staple crops can be so cheap to buy that once you factor in all your costs, it may be more expensive to grow them. Those costs aren’t just the seed you buy and the allotment rental, but also the hours you put into cultivating the crop, any fertilizer or pesticide you have to buy to keep your crop safe from predators and pests, any tools or supplies you need to purchase to tend and harvest your crop, the cost of transport, the cost of cleaning your crop and the cost of storing it.

On the other hand, the argument that most of us would make is that flavour and provenance are all important. Not only does home-grown food taste so much better, the grower has confidence that no unpleasant pesticides or herbicides have been applied and that the crop hasn’t been in cold storage for months, or washed in chlorine solution, or treated with a retardant to stop it ripening …

And home-grown carrots are lovely, because you can lift them when the are small and sweet and dense with flavour, and they are as sweet as a fruit. No need to cook them, just wash and eat!

What’s your favourite value-added crop?

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes

Allotment bad weather

We haven’t had any bad weather since we got our plot, but with tonight’s storm warnings in the South we are planning to get up there early in the evening and work out what we can do to protect our plants.

It was perhaps a bad idea to put two rows of lettuce seed and two rows of carrot seed into a bed on Sunday! But as we haven’t seen how germination operates in our soil, we thought we’d conduct a kind of ‘test run’ so that we have some idea whether seedlings damp off, get wind damage, how well the soil holds water etc. As I say, our timing may have been less than perfect.

Of course the rain, if we get any, will be welcome, because we’re watering just about every night now and with the hot sea breezes, most water seems to evaporate almost before it hits the ground, even at dusk, but storms are a different matter because they wash the soil away from a plants roots and strong winds with heavy rain can break leaves or even stems on smaller plants. So we’ll be bodging up rain protection systems (I’m pondering banging together some wood to make a kind of upside down V-shaped cloche just for the storm warning period) and hoping that not too much stuff gets washed away ….

Labels: allotment-bad weather, allotment-carrots, allotment-lettuce