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

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

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