October allotment harvest and crop rotation

I’ve managed to dig over the whole of the strawberry bed although this picture shows the halfway point of digging.

The result is a pile of old strawberry plants, with roots as tough and woody as elder, that’s about waist high and over a metre long – seriously that strawberry bed was over-crowded. About a quarter of the bed was grass, which has been impossible to weed out because the strawberries were so closely crowded, so we won’t have that to contend with next year either.

I’ve also got about six strawberry runners potted up to replant in a raised bed, and I’ve ordered another nine plants from a supplier. That will give us two different varieties – ours are rather late so I’ve ordered an earlier cropper so that we can have a longer strawberry season. To be perfectly honest I got fed up with spending so many of the best days of the year picking and freezing strawberries so if I can spread that out a bit it’s better for my mental health!

While I dug the strawberry bed, Himself dug over the area that had held the peas and beans in the summer. This year the broad beans, French beans, peas and petits pois will go into the area where our first early potatoes were planted. The ground in which we had maincrop potatoes (our biggest failure) needs a lot of work to get it truly productive, so we hope to work in lime over the summer and get it ready for next year’s brassicas. And our potatoes will go where the peas and beans were – crop rotatation, not exactly perfect, but pretty good for year 2 on a previously neglected plot, I think.

And we also harvested another trug full of borlotti beans, the last of the beetroot (okay, we missed them and only found them when we were digging over) and a few carrots, as well as some alpine strawberries – still delicious!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-crop-rotation, allotment-rough-digging, allotment-strawberries

Taking on a new allotment

If you’re lucky enough to be offered an allotment (and most people I know are still waiting … still waiting ….) it will come in one of three forms:

Brand new – these are rare, but increasingly local authorities are recognising the value of creating new allotment sites – here you’ll have to contend with whatever was on the land before, builder’s rubble, industrial waste or grass.

Fallow – a lot of plots haven’t been worked very much (or at all!) in recent years, either because the allotment holder hasn’t been up to it, or because (as is often the case) they’ve agreed to pay their rent by direct debit and while the money’s been going out regularly, the plot-holder hasn’t! It’s amazing how often an allotment holder will just ‘forget’ about their plot and not visit it for years. On fallow land you’re going to have a problem with perennial weeds that will have got a good hold, and you may find that neighbours have been using bits of your plot as annexes to their own, which can cause friction if they’ve taken over ‘your’ raspberry canes or compost bin …

Well-worked – if you’re lucky, you’ll get a plot that has been lovingly looked after by its previous allotment holder. There can still be issues to deal with though. Perhaps the previous plot holder wasn’t organic and you are. Perhaps he or she had strong preferences permanent plants like gooseberries or asparagus which you detest and complain when you dig up their prized crops (yes, your former plot holder is usually around somewhere, watching critically from the allotment of their crony and criticising your every move). Above all, you need to know if they’ve been using a crop rotation system and to fit in with it.

The standard system is potatoes into heavily manured soil, legumes (podded plants) into the same bed a year later, brassicas (cabbage family plants) into the same bed the year after that. Then you either let the bed lie fallow, or plant a green manure, or go back to potatoes again! If you break the system you will probably find that the soil is too exhausted to grow potatoes, or doesn’t have enough nitrogen (given by legumes) for brassicas.

Labels: allotment-crop-rotation, fallow-allotment, new-allotment