Heavy winters make for a hectic allotment spring

I’m so very panicked and depressed when I look at this photograph from a year ago – the peas were almost ready to hit the ground running, the rhubarb was bursting from its pots, we had wallflowers ready to be planted, trays and trays of leeks that were already a couple of inches tall …

And so far, this year, we have absolutely nothing in the cold frame at all. Even the greenhouse isn’t quite entirely full yet (90% full maybe – which is okay, perhaps, although it feels like some kind of moral failure) and all we have in the ground is some shallots.

This weekend I must get some garlic planted, as well as rest of the manure into the soil for the potatoes which are now showing lovely dark shoots. I just hope that the weather cooperates!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-crops, allotment-seedlings

Allotment new potatoes and running repairs in the rain

Today we got everything the wrong way round. We arrived at the plot with a short list of necessary chores, the most important of which was getting the new lid on the cold frame. But we got seduced by the glories of sweetcorn. We have never grown sweetcorn before and it was not the best germinator in the greenhouse so we never really expected to see this on our plot. It’s amazing. Sweetcorn. Wow! If it tastes half as good as it looks I shall be one happy allotment holder – fresh corn on the cob is one of my greatest pleasures, as are barbecued cobs with a black pepper and butter dressing.
Anyway, back to what we were supposed to be doing. Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago, when we had the lids propped open to allow our nascent cucumbers some air circulation, a rogue breeze (of about gale force seven!) smashed the heavy glass-glazed lids down onto the frames, causing massive damage. So Himself has spent the last couple of weeks reglazing the panelled lids, moaning on a regular basis about the fact that they were made (by the original plot-holders, not by us) from soft wood so they have warped and twisted in the heat and rain, and today we took the second one up to replace on the frame.

But as I say, the sweetcorn seduced us, so then we had a good look at everything, and then we had a chat with June who was walking past, and they we decided to dig a couple of potato plants and then …

This happened. The reason that the church in the distance looks blurry is the heavy, heavy rain. The reason the sky looks so leaden is the heavy thunderclouds that were hammering and, well, thundering, overhead. I couldn’t manage to get a picture of the lightning, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
And you can see the second lid to the cold frame, leaning against the raspberry supports, can’t you? So you will understand that we had to stand, with icy rain sliding down the back of our necks (me) or hitting us right in the eyes (Himself), with thunder deafening us and lightning making us jump out of our skins, until each of the six fiddly little screws was fastened on the fiddly little hinges and the lid could be lowered into place. On the plus side we didn’t have to water the cucumbers, the rain did it for us. On the minus side we did have to empty out our shoes before getting in the van. Yes, it rained that much … summer, isn’t it fun?

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-cucumbers, allotment-potatoes, allotment-sweetcorn

Allotment gluts and failed experiments

We had high hopes of our early potatoes grown in tyres, but the piles of tyres rose much higher than the results! To be blunt, the potatoes planted in tyres were a waste of time. They produced only three or four medium-sized potatoes each and in one tyre those potatoes that were produced were warty: I don’t know whether this was the effect of some chemical from the tyres or just coincidental, but we threw them away.

The same variety of seed potato grown in the open ground and harvested two weeks later had between seven and 12 potatoes each, and the same potatoes left a full month after we harvested the tyre-grown ones were producing around a dozen large tubers each. So the idea that we might get a smaller but earlier harvest in tyres didn’t work for us, although I know it has worked for others. Anyway, we are now swimming in potatoes although that’s not exactly a hardship – we have plenty of friends willing to take delicious new potatoes off our hands if we get fed up with them!
We also have a cucumber glut, and having tried six different salads, two soups and using them as a face pack, I’m running out of ideas what to try next.

We had a bit of a disaster last weekend too. The high winds on Friday caught us out entirely – we’d opened the cold frame to water the said cucumbers, but because it was so very hot, we neglected to apply common sense to the situation and left the frame propped fully open to allow the air to circulate. About ten minutes later, as I was watering the nearby raspberries, the wind lifted both lids off their supports and sent them crashing down. Net result: five of the eight glass panes broken and one wooden supporting bar actually fractured by the effect of the fall.

Our cold frame is big and heavy and isn’t what we would have built for ourselves, but it was on the plot when we arrived. So we work with it. Himself cut glass for one side of the frame during the week and reglazed one lid. The other is still covered by a sheet of corrugated plastic held down with bricks. The cucumbers don’t seem to mind at all, but next year I’m rather hoping we can use plastic rather than glass, as if I’d been stood two foot closer, I’d have been showered with dangerous fragments – and you do have to open and close cold frames regularly if you’re going to actually grow things in them, so we’re always at risk of the lids slipping out of our hands.

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-cucumber, allotment-new-potatoes

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

Raspberry Bed - the final allotment version

Because I got nagged by email, I have somewhat reluctantly agreed to post a picture of the raspberry bed. It doesn’t look like anything much at this time of year, and certainly I don’t look like anything much, planting raspberries in my pixie hat and old allotment coat! You can see the raspberry canes that Tony dug out of the middle of the strawberry bed - and that I then cut the old wood from and pruned to planting height - laying across the planting string. We offset the plants from one side of the string to the other, to make weeding and harvesting slightly easier and to give each plant the maximum amount of air ventilation and sunlight – if you plant them in straight rows, the front one shields the next from the sun and the second one shields the third, so by halfway down the row, the plants are getting very little sun indeed.

As I say, it looks like nothing much now, but wait until I show you another picture in late Spring, when the canes will be shooting up and the leaf buds will have opened to show the lovely fresh green of new leaves.

We’re still doing lots of structural work – you can see that the cold frame is completely half finished! In other words, the front end of the frame has been reglazed and is ready to be used, but the back end hasn’t had its glass covers put back on yet because we’re waiting for the wooden frame to dry out – it was utterly sodden with rainwater and we don’t want to dry it too fast or it will warp and not fit the base. Initially Tony used webbing on the front end of the frame: it allowed the glass cover to fall back away from the frame without actually hitting the ground on the other side and breaking the glass – that lasted two nights! On the third morning we went up and found that mice had eaten straight through it. Now we have a wooden prop that fits into a narrow groove cut into the front edge of the lid – it means we can’t open it past the vertical, but it also means the mice can’t catch us out by chewing through it. We’re hoping that the regular presence of Rebus the Cairn Terrier will discourage the rodents from visiting us quite so often.

And if possible, I shall report on 235's onion experiment in my next post. I wanted to report today, but the rain and wind were so strong I actually couldn't see the onion bed well enough to check how many seeds had germinated. Oh the joys of a winter allotment!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-winter-onions

Great big cold frames …

… and what they cost to renovate.

We inherited this when we ‘moved in’ to 201. And, next to our ‘Swiss Chalet’ shed, it’s been our favourite new toy. A cold frame – lovely!


We’re still not entirely sure what we’re going to do with it because we’ve never had one before. But we knew what we had to do to it, if you take my meaning.

It had to be painted, well repainted. The lids had to be rehung but before that, they had to be repaired and the glass had to be cleaned. There should have been a central strut supporting the cold frame but there wasn’t so it had bowed both back to front, side to side and (annoyingly) both ends to middle. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye but when you tried to level it to the soil, you couldn’t, nothing was quite square, or true or flat.

By this time, I was starting to think our new toy was a blithering nuisance. So on Sunday, while I weeded the strawberry bed, Tony spent: the whole day, a tin of paint, several metres of weed-suppressing membrane and a couple of bags of gravel, creating this.



Much better. Now we only have to finish the lids and we’ll have a cold frame to be proud of.

But we’ve still got no idea what to do with it …

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-renovation, allotment-strawberry-bed