Allotment haul 7 September 2009

The weather is definitely Indian summery – torrid wouldn’t be strong a word for it – although it will break very soon. As we have seedling swede and freshly-sown mooli, I am having to head up to the plot every second day to water.
I’ve also spent an entire Sunday doing the most disgusting thing in the world: squashing caterpillars. It is really gross – but if you want to be organic (or as organic as you can be) in your gardening habits, the only way to deal with cabbage whites is to pull on your gloves hunt down every crawler and squeeze them swiftly and firmly so that they expire instantly.

And because I am a wimp, I always let things get too bad before I intervene. I try to find all the eggs and squash them instead of the poor bugs, but one always misses a few (or a lot, when it’s that time of year when so much needs to be picked and weeded and mowed and pruned) and those few seem to multiply until you are left with lacy brassicas.

We cut some sunflowers, leaving plenty for the birds to harvest, and pulled the first celeriac (just tennis ball sized) and the first parsnip, to test their growth. Both were very good roasted in tinfoil with Chioggia beetroot, fresh rosemary and a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar. Which more or less made up for the brassica destruction and the caterpillar destruction that followed. It’s a ruthless business, this allotment lark.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-celeriac, allotment-parsnips, allotment-sunflowers

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

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

Allotment Celeriac

I do love celeriac. And as it’s being sold for very silly money in our local supermarket I’m very glad to have got my 24 little seedlings into their bed this weekend.

Thanks to Soilman’s good advice, I started my seeds off early and got about a 70% germination rate, and then cosseted them in a very counter-intuitive way by keeping them cool and not particularly brightly lit because they tend to bolt, he says, and I am taking his word for it.

Last year we were given half a dozen celery/celeriac seedlings which grow rather well plonked into the end of a row in a bit of membrane. This year we’ve dedicated an entire raised bed to them, but I’m going for the same system of growing through membrane for three reasons:

1. it serves as a great weed suppressant
2. celeriac like moist conditions and membrane helps guarantee that
3. it’s easy to mulch them over the top as they start to bulb up, which softens the skin and sweetens the bulb somewhat.

So, on an insanely busy allotment day I got on with planting the celeriac out, while Himself put in all the beans (I’ll describe the lovely bean homes next time) and once I’d raked the bed, laid out the plastic, cut the cross holes with my trusty Swiss Army knife, transplanted the celeriac seedlings, watered them, and put out the slug pellets (yes I know, I know, but if you inherit an allotment that hasn’t been worked for nearly two years, you find you have a slug Armageddon to deal with) I was feeling as if I’d done a day’s work.

But I hadn’t. While Himself was single-handedly responsible for planting out the runner beans, the Cherokee Trail of Tears Climbing French beans and the Borlotti beans, between use we also planted out 68 petits pois, the marigolds, the sunflowers, the love-lies-bleeding and the dill.

And we dug over the leek bed – I did the rough dig while Himself went home to collect all the things we’d forgotten and Himself did the second dig while I sat and drank a cup of tea. And I got sunburnt, which surprised me, until I worked out that I’d been on the plot from 11 am until 7 pm … and no sunscreen would last that long!

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-raised-beds

Celeriac, cold frames and peas

I’m very worried about our celeriac seedlings – they are, not to be too polite about it – scrawny. Soilman said on his blog that these were difficult creatures to grow, but really I think all ours are going to give up the ghost. The only thing to do is try and give them enough light (without too much heat) and see if they pull through, but I shall be starting off another tray of seeds this weekend, to see if we can’t get a later germinating bunch to still produce tubers by harvest time.

On the other hand, the peas are great – they’ve got to go in the ground this weekend because the second crop we set to germinate last week are already appearing. We can put peas on both 235 and 201 so we stand a good chance of getting a big harvest and as we and Dunk all like peas, I don’t think there will be complaints about overstocking! They freeze well too.

The cold frame on 201 looked ridiculously big when we took over the plot in October last year, this week it’s half full and starting to look worringly small …

You can see rhubarb potted up to share with other allotment holders, wallflowers, those sturdy peas I mentioned earlier, blackcurrant and redcurrant cuttings taking root, the asparagus seedlings I came back with last week and a globe artichoke that seems to be deceased but might still surprise us by putting out some growth. A good haul, I think.

And today's task, after committee meeting, will have to be planting out our first early potatoes - watch this space!

Labels: allotment-artichoke, allotment-asparagus, allotment-celeriac, allotment-cold-frame, allotment-currants, allotment-peas

Alpine Strawberries, Raised Beds and Ruminations

I was expecting to admit defeat on the strawberry germination front. Despite excellent advice and carefully packaged seeds from Patrick and Steph there had been a long period of absolutely nothing happening. But today there are four absolutely tiny seedlings in the white alpine strawberry seed tray! They are minute in a completely different way to the celeriac, which is tall and spindly, the strawberries are tiny but soil-hugging, looking like tiny green pinpricks on the surface of the John Innes #2. I’m very excited, especially as I have more seeds yet to plant, and hope that there will be enough seedlings to be able to raise some for other allotment holders. And we potted up about nine rhubarb at the weekend, so we’re definitely stockpiling goodies to be sold/donated/given away, which is part of our brief in working this plot for the Allotment Society.

Anyway, because the strawberries are just too intsy to photograph, here’s a picture of our first raised beds being installed. The wood was sourced by me from Freecycle, the beds were designed and constructed by Himself from old decking, and I painted them. He hammered them into the ground. I dug the soil over. In other words, it’s been a real collaborative effort. The idea is to have nine of them, all in different colours, but we haven’t agreed on which nine crops they will house yet: definitely celeriac, climbing French beans, summer salads and chicory but the rest are up for grabs, as it were.

What I’ve been ruminating about is the excitement of germination. I’ve been out to the greenhouse three times to look at the strawberries, and I know Himself will go and have a look as soon as he gets home. But having mentioned this to an otherwise good friend today, I was disturbed to find her reaction to be lukewarm. She’s not ‘into’ planting things, she told me. I can’t understand that at all. I’ve tried, but it’s like saying you’re not into breathing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-chicory, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-strawberries

Chitting potatoes and rescuing frozen crops

Our potatoes are chitting beautifully, which is good, as there is precious little else going on. Actually that’s not true. I just went to the cold bedroom where we are storing the potatoes that are chitting and just paused on the way to look at the propagator that holds the celeriac seeds and we have two seedlings! Whoop whoop! Okay they are actually too small to photograph – which means they are miniscule indeed – and their filament thin shape suggests to me, as a novice celeriac grower, that they are going to be prone to damping off, but we have them! And five minutes ago, when I started writing this blog, it was going to be about impatience and how, despite knowing that I couldn’t expect to see any celeriac seedlings, I’ve been checking them three times a day since I planted them a week ago.

Anyway, back to the spuds. What you want to see in terms of chitting is dark sprouts. Dark sprouts are lovely healthy growth elements, drawing on the stored reserves of the tuber from which they appear. Pale sprouts are weaker, created by a lack of something (usually light) or a surfeit of something (usually warmth). On that basis I am thrilled by the lovely purple and green hues of these sprouts, as they bode well for good cropping in the ground.

We keep our potatoes in a cold bedroom near but not under a north facing window so they get good indirect light but no heat. Sadly, many of our allotment neighbours have got used to keeping their chitting potatoes in their allotment sheds and the fierce frosts of the past couple of weeks has meant that their spuds have frozen – and if an exposed potato gets frost blight, that’s pretty well the end of it. If this has happened to you, turn your potatoes and see if you can find any areas that haven’t been frost damage (which shows as black wet slime, very nasty). If you have undamaged areas, cut the damage away, put the good bit on kitchen towel and allow it to keep growing, spritzing it with cold water from a sprayer every third or fourth day, because it will need extra moisture to replace that lost through the cut surfaces. It won’t be as good as a whole spud, but as you can cut good potatoes up to make more when it comes to planting, it’s worth salvaging what you can now.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-chitting-potatoes, allotment-seeds

More Celeriac

As a couple of people have commented on the celeriac issue, let me explain why I’m so addicted to this particular vegetable.

It’s like celery but better – I enjoy the taste of celery but hate the strings, and also, I’m not too keen on anything that is quite such hard work on the old jaw! Celeriac has the same delicate flavour, but because it’s a root vegetable (well actually, I think it’s a bulb) it’s much more versatile – you can grate it and use it raw in coleslaw, boil it and mash it like potato, steam it and turn it into a soufflé – it’s really a vegetable with a thousand uses.

It’s good to store – while it doesn’t cope particularly well in the ground once the first frosts arrive, it does seem to cope well in storage in a cool dry place. I tend to peel, chunk and blanch mine and open freeze it before packing it into big freezer bags. Then I can take out as much as I want for a given recipe. I might use it to make soup, or as a roasted vegetable with carrots, potatoes, swede and onion, or mix it fifty-fifty with potato to make a mashed topping for pies.

There are downsides to celeriac - The first is that dodgy germination rate – from what I can gather, anything from a third to a half of seeds might not come up. The second is that it likes a long time in the ground but doesn’t like hot weather, which makes it a bit of a bugger to grow! Last summer the seedlings Maurice gave us did wonderfully, because the weather was so appalling, so this year I’m almost hoping my celeriac does badly as that should mean we’ve had hot and sunny weather. If it’s dry they need to be watered: they are a bog margin plant by nature, and if it’s overly sunny, you might want to cover them with a bit of fleece. We grew ours through mulch fabric last year, this year I think I shall put them in a raised bed.

And if you can’t get seed locally, try for a seed swap – there are several online swapping agencies that can help you.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-crops, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-seeds

Sowing Celeriac

Soilman says we should be sowing celeriac, and as this was one of last year’s big hits, after Maurice gave us some seedlings, I am following Soilman’s advice by planting our seeds this weekend. It’s yet another crop that I’ve never grown from seed myself and what I’ve managed to find out is this:

Germination is a more than a bit little erratic so I shouldn’t expect all my seeds to come up (I do though, always, and always get disappointed when they don’t, even real sods like parsnip).

They shouldn’t be hardened off outside until it's properly warm because a sudden drop in temperature can force the plant to bolt which stops it becoming bulbous at the root.
When all risk of cold snaps is past, they should be planted out 40 cm apart and kept both watered and mulched as they like a moist environment and not too much sun. Given what a rotten summer we had last year, it’s not surprising that ours did rather well! What I didn’t do was remove the lower leaves to expose the bulbous root, but several experts do advocate this, so I might try removing half and leaving half (on different plants obviously, not half on each plant) to see what difference it makes.

They can be harvested from early autumn but don’t usually cope well with a frost so it’s important to have them really well covered with mulch if you want to leave them in the ground after November.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-crops, allotment-seeds