Purple-sprouting broccoli update

So here’s a picture that I really don’t understand. Pigeons eat our broccoli – that I understand. They denude the entire leaves of the plant right down to the ribs, like feathery caterpillars – that I understand. But not eating the glorious purple florets – that I simply do not understand at all!

But there it is – having eaten the leaves, the pigeons appear to have buggered off and left the broccoli itself to us. This is the unprotected broccoli which I genuinely thought would not produce a crop at all – the broccoli in the cage is about five to seven days behind this stuff, and has all its leaves. Anyway, I’m grateful to the pigeons for leaving us this delicious feast.

And I was also wrong about the parsnips – we hadn’t eaten them all, we had two monsters lurking in the raised bed, so we lifted them yesterday and today we’re having them as part of a lamb stew cooked in the slow cooker – what a bonanza! And so, we're harvesting the last of the parsnips in the same week that I'm digging manure into the bed in which I'll be planting this year's parsnip seed - isn't that wonderful?

The ground is frozen though, so I don’t think we’ll get our spuds in until the weekend.

Labels: allotment-broccoli, allotment-crops, allotment-harvest-march, allotment-parsnips

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 bad weather woes

So far it’s either rained torrentially, snowed, or there’s been a heavy frost ever since we picked up our shallots on 14 December. This means that we’ve had no chance to get them into the ground at all, despite having prepared an area of the allotment especially for them, with a nice blend of soil (which tends to clay) and grit.

It’s bitterly frustrating to find ourselves unable to do anything much on the plot. We are harvesting, of course, and today’s haul includes some leeks, a couple of parsnips from the raised bed (once we’d cleared off the remainder of last night’s light snow) two celeriac ditto and a small swede. Then we cut down a couple of Brussels sprouts stems so we could bring them home with the tops intact to cook in a stir fry. And we have had the last of our red Brussels Sprouts – we ate them on Christmas day with roast duck and they were very good: nutty and firm and we had them again last night with celeriac mash and onion gravy and they were equally good – definitely worth growing again next year.

We also had a massive bonfire in the snow, to clear the last of the rubbish, but that’s all we’ve been able to do, so I hope 2010 is going to start with a rapid improvement in the weather for vegetable growers!

Labels: allotment-bonfire, allotment-crops, allotment-snow

Crops in focus: brassicas

Which are what most people are harvesting now. I still have exactly one floret of purple sprouting broccoli, so I hope the rest hurries up a bit. First to clarify a confusion: broccoli is an over-wintered crop but calabrese produces its crop the same year, before the winter. Both are brassicas as are cabbage, kale and cauliflower - and they are all part of the mustard family, oddly enough.

The ideal brassica bed needs both nitrogen and humus so the addition of manure in autumn will accomplish both. Dig over the soil and then add a barrow load of manure per square metre to the land. Leave the manure over the winter to give the worms a chance to take some down into the soil. But because adding the manure will have had the effect of making the soil more acid and because brassicas don’t like acidity, it’s best to test pH to measure the acidity and add the appropriate amount of lime to take the level up to 7.0.

Seeds are usually sown in spring, planted out in early summer to give a crop the following February/March through to May. There are early, mid-season and late varieties if you want a long harvest. Wind rock can damage the plants, especially through the winter, so try to find a sheltered site, earthing up around the stems for several inches keeps the plant stable and you may want to stake the tallest varieties – we certainly do!

You’ll also want to keep them netted, pigeons will go for the young plants especially in winter when other food is scarce. Broccoli is a slow-growing crop and it may benefit from a liquid feed, high in nitrogen, in the spring as the heads begin to form.

All brassicas are at risk of clubroot, caused by a soil borne organism which produces cysts which lurk in the soil until a suitable host is available to infect, starting the cycle again. The cysts can live for 8 or 9 years. Even worse, it is easily spread. The first sign is a wilting of plants, especially in dry weather. The roots have swellings and look knobbly. If you have a clubroot problem - start your brassicas off in modules using sterile compost to which you’ve added a small amount of lime – keep potting on until they reach 5 inch pots. Clubroot thrives best in acid wet soils so ensure your brassica bed is well dug with grit or other material to allow free drainage and take the pH up to 7.5 or even as high as 8.5 by adding lime Before planting, dig a hole at least 30cm deep and wide which you dust with lime to whiten the soil in the hole. Fill the hole with bought in multi-purpose compost and then plant your brassica in this. And burn your brassica plants when you’ve harvested, so you don’t return any clubroot to the soil.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-broccoli, allotment-crops

Allotment crops for November – Jerusalem Artichokes

Well, they aren’t artichokes, and they don’t come from Jerusalem. That’s a corruption of Girasol, apparently, which means they are part of the sunflower family, and if you’ve grown them, the flowers are a bit of a give-away on that subject, looking just like half-starved sunflowers as they do.

So … we have a healthy crop of Jerusalems from the tubers we were given almost exactly a year ago. The photo shows the haul from just one plant and we have eleven. Which means that if we don’t like them, we’ll have to find somebody to give them away to.

They are a great crop for the new allotment-holder, with a few caveats and reservations. They grow tall and fast, providing a bit of a windbreak or blocking off a bit of unsightly plot from public view and they aren’t too fussy about soil conditions. The caveats are that they need staking in most regions as they are easily blown about, and they can be invasive if you don’t get every tuber out of the ground when you dig them up. The reservations? Only one: they are wind-inducing!

From what I’ve read, the wind-creating properties drop the more you eat them, as the body adjusts to them, which means, I suppose gales followed in a few weeks by calm. They are also a bit fiddly to prepare as they are both knobbly and prone to discolour so you have to put them straight into acidulated water as you peel them. Given our harvest, I’m simply cutting off the knobbliest bits and discarding them. We’re having them for dinner tonight so watch this space …

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-jerusalem-artichokes

October allotment tasks

It’s frightening to think that this month is when some parts of the UK will have the first frosts of winter. We shouldn’t, being in the balmy south, but we need to be thinking about fleece protection for some of our crops.

• We’re picking over our potatoes and putting any that are less than a third green in complete darkness – after a month the green will be gone. It’s the result of sun exposure and the green parts contain a poison called an alkaloid which just goes to show that potatoes and Deadly Nightshade are part of the same family. However if they’ve gone back to potato coloured after a month of total light exclusion they will be safe to eat.

• We’re not planting garlic until November, but it’s time to prepare the garlic bed – this year they will be going into a raised bed as we grew far too much last year!

• We also need to move our broad bean supports to their new site so that we can plant the beans next month. We found overwintering broad beans to be much better than spring-planted ones so we’re doubling our sowing in November.

• And we’re picking off any yellow leaves from our brassicas so that they don’t harbour slugs or diseases like botrytis.

What are you going to be doing in October?

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-october-tasks, allotment-preparations

Seed Saving on Allotments

This is the first year we’re trying to save our own seed. And I’ll be honest – so far, we’ve been totally rubbish at it!

What we were going to save:

Peas
Broad beans
Runner beans
French beans
Borlotti beans
Rocket
Tomatoes

What we’ve actually managed to harvest seed from so far:

Runner beans
Rocket
Tomatoes

The runner beans are gorgeous as they dry and the rocket went to seed so fast that we only got two meals from it, so there was no problem harvesting seed from that crop! The tomato seed has already been tucked away in envelopes for next year – we are very happy with our greenhouse tomato crop which is still harvesting well.

The broad beans were a total seed-harvest fail. On 235 we planned to harvest, but the pods we were leaving got picked (that’s the risk of co-working) and on 201 the crop, which wasn’t overwintered, was destroyed by blackfly, so there was barely enough of a crop to eat a meal from, let alone leave to set pods for harvesting.

French beans – we’ve left some pods to get big – we’ll see if we are actually organised enough to do the harvesting bit in a week or so.

Borlotti beans – we’re leaving these to dry on the vine, so some will just be used for food and others for sowing next year … that’s the theory anyway!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-crops, allotment-harvest, allotment-seed-saving, allotment-tomatoes

Best crops this summer?

Soilman's been asking what people’s best crops have been this year. For us it’s definitely (and I’m touching wood as I type this) been the celeriac, which had 100% germination and is bulbing up beautifully. Probably, now I’ve typed this, there will be some previously unknown celeriac blight or pest that will wipe out our crop!

Our worst crop was definitely the asparagus peas – not that they were difficult to grow or anything like that but they just tasted lousy (sorry Duncan, but we weren’t convinced by your arguments in their favour).

Other things that did well this year for us were strawberries and beans. Our peas were good but not exceptional and we definitely need to grow more next year. Our overwintered broad beans were brilliant, but our spring planted ones were attacked by blackfly and did nothing very much. Our first early potatoes were superb: large, tasty, easy to dig, our salad potatoes were good: small, tasty, not so easy to dig, and our maincrop were disappointing, but that wasn’t their fault – we ran out of properly prepared soil and had to plant them in an area of the plot that hadn’t been properly dug or manured and it showed, when we dug them they were small and scabby.

So what’s been your success and failure rate over the summer?

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-failure, allotment-success

Allotment greenhouse in early spring

Or, to put it another way, why you can’t turn round without knocking over a tray of seeds. We’ve never had a greenhouse before, nor an allotment at this time of year, so we may be overdoing things a bit. Here’s the list:

Celeriac – in the dining room, because they look so fragile and the dining room isn’t very warm anyway.
Peas – 50 seedlings currently evenly divided between the (unheated) greenhouse at home and the cold frame at the plot. They are meteor and living up to their name, if they don’t get in the ground soon they will be an impenetrable jungle of pea tendrils
Nasturtiums – don’t ask why Himself planted two trays of nasturtium seedlings and put them in the greenhouse. He got carried away …
Broad beans – two lines were overwintered on 235, but the mice have got to quite a few of them, so we’ve started off another packet of seeds in pots in the greenhouse, and this time (assuming they germinate) we’ll nip off the seed embryos before we plant them out
Leeks – one tray in the greenhouse
Tree seedlings – one tray in the greenhouse
Alpine white strawberries – one tray of seedlings doing well, in the greenhouse
Sweet peas – a tray and a half, two seeds per pot, in the greenhouse
Rhubarb – sixteen transplants in the cold frame at 201
Currants – eighteen cuttings in the cold frame at 201: I took this picture of our own transplants on 29 January - on Monday they had grown so much I couldn't get all three into the picture - rhubarb is very strange stuff!
Globe artichoke – one, in a pot, doing badly, in the cold frame at 201

And that’s before we plant out the four varieties of potatoes or the onion sets …

The words bitten off and more than we can chew rather come to mind!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings

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

Allotment planning

We have:

• One very large cold frame
• One eight foot by six greenhouse (but not actually erected yet, and not actually on the allotment, it’s still in boxes on the floor at home)
• half of one allotment and three quarters of another, that could technically be called ours, although it doesn’t work like that – we are growing collectively so there’s no dividing up plots into ‘your’ bed and ‘my’ bed, we’re all in the same bed (that’s not as dirty as it sounds)
• good but somewhat clay soil: one allotment suffers from bracing winds, the other may possibly suffer from not much sun at one end.


So now you know as much as I know. What would be your priorities for spring if you were me?

We’ve already ordered potatoes to plant on 201 and 235 has a large bed full of overwintering onions and garlic and a small bed with spring cabbage (not doing well) rhubarb chard (sort of okay) and broad beans – we will want more potatoes on 235 so we have to decide what varieties we’re going to plant there, given that the maincrop suffered from slugs but not blight. Everybody got tomato blight last year, so I’m going to try and work out which varieties might be a bit more blight resistant in Sussex, start them off in the greenhouse and move them down to the allotments when they are ready. But what I really want is to grow something interesting, something exciting, something to celebrate our first spring on both plots – ideas?

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-onions, allotment-planning

The celery tasting report

Okay, I’m having to admit a bit a failure here. The celery was a rather a bust. I think I need to do a lot more research into what you need to do to grow good celery!

The thing is, it has a fantastic flavour, but it’s very fibrous – even the blanched version. I suspect our mistake may have been not enough watering to boost the water-holding cells in the plant or possibly too much wind-chill (leaves get tougher when exposed to windy conditions so I think celery stems might too) but the good news is that the root (which in certain varieties is all the plant is grown for, at which point it gets called celeriac) takes absolutely wonderful!

So although the blanched stems are yellower and softer than the unblanched ones, they still haven’t produced the kind of celery you’d happily munch on with a slab of double Gloucester. On the other hand, they do make a great braised celery …

BRAISED CELERY RECIPE

Chop some onions and carrots into a pan and add enough vegetable stock to half-cover the vegetables. Bring to the boil and transfer to a slow cooker. Wash the celery and cut into manageable lengths (assume the person eating it will want to cut each piece in half to get it onto their mouth!) and place the celery on top of the veggies. Baste some of the stock over the celery. Cook on low for between 3 and 5 hours or until the celery is very tender, basting with the stock from time to time. Remove the celery from the pan with a perforated spoon and place in a serving dish. Drain the cooking liquid into a small pan and add 1 teaspoon of cooking wine then boil until it is reduced to a thin glaze and pour over the celery

Labels: allotment-celery, allotment-crops, allotment-failures, allotment-problems, allotment-recipes

Celery stories

As I said many months ago, Maurice was kind enough to give us some celery seedlings when we first got our plot, but he didn’t know if they were self-blanching or not. As a result, after I planted them, I didn’t know if I needed to blanch them or not!

I only lost one of the nine, to slugs, so I was left with eight quite vigorous celery plants and a decision to make. To blanch or not to blanch? I decided to hedge my bets and blanch three. Unblanched celery has a deeper green colour and a stronger flavour than blanched celery, and it's higher in vitamins and minerals, but a lot of people prefer the taste of blanched celery which is softer and sweeter. There are a number of ways to blanch – you can rest boards along each side of the row to block the light: which is easy but can lead to slug infestation and we have far too many slugs to take the risk. Or you can raise up soil or mulch around the plant to block out the sun: I didn’t fancy this, as I was sure it would make the stalks difficult to clean – I remember my mum complaining about having to scrub celery when I was a kiddie - and also there’s a risk of rotting when plants are blanched with soil.

So I went with the easiest option: cutting the tops and bottoms off plastic bottles and cartons and using them as collars. I cover three plants about a week ago and apparently after a week to 10 days the stalks will lighten because the compression of the collar has excluded the sun from all the inner layers, and their flavour will become milder. So I shall go up before the weekend and do a comparison …

Labels: allotment-celery, allotment-crops, allotment-harvest

Allotment tasks – gluts

There’s one thing that I always forget about allotments and vegetable gardening generally: growing the lovely veg is one thing – preserving it is quite another! And why does everything decide to be ripe and ready at once?

After a week away (and a tour of a French allotment site – I’ll be reporting on that in a few days!) I’ve come back to find:

1. French beans like broad beans
2. Broad beans like bullets
3. Lettuce like the Eiffel tower
4. Courgettes like marrows

Not much can be done for any of those: 1,2 and 4 will go in the stockpot to be reduced into vegetable stock for soups and casserole bases, but 3 goes straight onto the compost heap.

I’ve rescued some peas (blanched one minute and frozen) and the smaller and less leathery broad beans (blanched three minutes and frozen) and picked the last of the redcurrants and the first of the blackberries (picked over and frozen) and it’s not much of a surprise, after a day in a steamy kitchen, to find that I’m gazing with warm approval at the only harvested veg that doesn’t require me to fiddle around with pans and trays and freezer bags: these glorious peppery radishes!

Labels: allotment-blanching, allotment-crops, allotment-gluts, allotment-harvest

Growing Tomatoes and Using Gluts

I can’t get enough tomatoes. I grow them at home, and now we’re planting out some generously donated seedlings on the allotment too. There is no such thing as a tomato glut as far as I’m concerned!

These are the ways I deal with ‘too many tomatoes’:

Freezing – using a big pasta pot and water at a rolling boil, I cut a small cross in the non-blossom end of each fruit, drop a dozen into the water and scoop them out as soon as the cuts begin to curl back. I drop in another dozen while I’m shucking the skins from the first lot wearing thick rubber gloves and by the time I’ve done one dozen, the next are ready to come out. Chuck them all in a big bowl and when you’ve removed all the skins, chop them roughly by hand – instant chopped tomatoes! Just bag them and freeze them.

Drying – using washed, ripe and firm tomatoes. Half or quarter plum-type tomatoes and cut cherry tomatoes in half or leave really small ones whole. Slice other types 1/2- to 1/4-inch thick, depending on your preference. A kilo yields only a couple of ounces of dried tomatoes! Oven-drying takes 6 to 12 hours, depending on the moisture content of the fruit. It's important to remove as much moisture as possible without allowing the fruits to dry completely, because the lower the moisture content, the longer the tomatoes can be stored safely. Dried fruits should be leathery and pliable but not either sticky or burnt or desiccated. Preheat the oven to 140° to 145°F and place the tomatoes with their skin side against plastic-mesh screen (if you only have metal, line it with greaseproof or it will taint the tomato taste), or on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper or a flexible baking mat. Prop the oven door open slightly to allow the moist, hot air to escape. Check the tomatoes regularly, and rotate the baking sheet if necessary. Stored in airtight bags they keep until the first of the next year’s fresh tomatoes.

Next time - tomato problems!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-glut, allotment-tomatoes

Potato Heaven

Perhaps you have to be an allotment holder to develop this particular reflex, it’s the one that springs into action when you see the first potato flowers appear above the big green leaves and it’s a kind of manic grinning superiority. It stays on your face as you wander around neighbouring plots, noting that your potatoes are ‘ahead’ and only fades if you come across an allotmenteer who has more floriforous potatoes than you.

The humble spud may seem an unlikely cause of such joyous facial displays, but anybody who has eaten ‘fresh from the ground’ potatoes knows that there is nothing to compare to them – even artichokes and asparagus are hardly more wonderful than the taste of home grown spuds.

And the reason I’m going on about them is that we met somebody yesterday who might want some assistance on their plot – I’m not going to say too much about it, because I might jinx things, but one of the ways I measure the real nature of an allotment holder is their potatoes. Anybody can grow potatoes, there’s no trick to it, but taking pleasure and pride in your spuds is the mark of somebody who doesn’t have pretensions about allotments (which I once heard described by a truly pretentious woman as ‘my little potager’) and who knows the true value of fresh home-grown veg. The person we met yesterday bent over his potato rows and smiled the smile of a happy potato grower, so I hope he’s going to take to us too, as it made me like him at once.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-potatoes

What’s coming up on the allotment?

Garlic – yes, even the stuff that went in this spring is showing beautifully. It’s something of an annoyance to me that Maurice grows better garlic than I ever have, although not because of Maurice – he’s very generous about sharing his produce and his garlic is just wonderful: strong but sweet, full of flavour and not fibrous. The reason I get so annoyed is that I grew up on the Isle of Wight, the home of UK garlic production, and a place that actually has a Garlic Queen every year (go figure!) and so surely I ought to be able to grow it really well? My garlic is okay but I think Maurice’s soil is better than mine, or something.

One problem is that, as you can see in the picture, garlic casts no shade and so it gets swallowed up very fast by weeds because it doesn’t shade its own roots to keep them clear of lower weed growth. The RHS recommends growing it through opaque mulching film but Maurice doesn’t, so neither do I.

On the plus side, it doesn’t need watering and only suffers from virtually not problems. A lot of people don’t realise you can cut the green leaves to use in a salad (or on top of a hearty omelette, very tasty!) but really you get the joy when the leaves turn yellow and you lift the bulbs, carefully, with a hand fork, before laying them out to dry in an airy place, ensuring no bulb touches another. Once they begin to make that rustling sound you can move them to a ventilated container or plait the stems and hang the plait in an airy but not too warm place.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-garlic, allotment-harvest

April allotment tasks

Here’s a general gardening tip that may help if, like us, you’re pondering when – if ever – it may be possible to plant out some of your more tender crops: peg horticultural fleece over the ground a week or so before you intend to plant. Even such a small rise in soil temperature can make a big difference to the success of the seedlings. Usually, in April, there’s a long list of plants to sow or seedlings to plant out, especially if March has been bitter – and now April is shaping up not to showers but snow flurries, covering the soil may even make the difference between plant survival and failure.

If you are planting out carrots, that horticultural fleece can also serve to protect them from carrot fly – if you bury the edges of the fleece after you’ve covered the seeds, the carrot root fly can’t gain access to lay her eggs alongside the seeds. If she does get in, the eggs hatch and then the grubs dig into the carrots and destroy the crop.

What you might be putting in the ground now is:
• Beetroot
• Peas (in mild areas) and broad beans
• Broccoli
• Cruciferous plants like Brussels Sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower
• Leafy crops like kale, chard, kohl rabi, spinach
• Leeks
• Salad crops like rocket, lettuce and radish

Allotments courtesy of muggers

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-in-april, allotment-seedlings

Potager plants for handsome allotments

I was in North Yorks recently and saw some very good looking allotments – a group of four that are being run as potagers (French for kitchen garden), which means that they are planned with as much of an eye to beauty as to productivity. It got me thinking about the way most allotments are laid out – for maximum yield of crops, but not for eye candy. And yet so many of the crops we grow are really pretty. So now I’m thinking again about layouts and plants, to see if there are opportunities to make things look more attractive:

Globe artichokes are lovely tall plants, with fantastic silvery-blue leaves. We tend to use ours as focal points in summer, with lower crops growing around them, and you have to cover them in winter or they suffer from frost death. However, on one of the allotments I visited, they were being grown in a row to form a hedge – stunningly attractive.

All the chards tend to be pretty and relatively compact, with big shiny heavily veined green leaves and stems in every colour from cream through ruby to purple. We’ve always had ours in a single bed, but in North Yorks they were interplanting them with salvias and it looked stunning.

Aubergines are grown for their fruit, but their gorgeous flowers deserve to be highlighted as much as any petunia.

Mixed lettuces come in a range of colours and were being grown along paths as a kind of wavy fringe to an otherwise geometric edge – in between there were nasturtiums (self seeding of course) and perennial marigolds to offer both a splash of colour and some companion planting – as both flowering plants are great for attracting aphids away from other crops.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-design, allotment-potager

Allotment crops – freezer to plate

This is a really wonderful cake (or pudding) which I make for the winter days when we’ve been out on the allotments and we’re frozen and starved when we get home. It’s very easy, very substantial and has the taste of summer. It’s good enough to serve for a dinner party pudding, and robust enough to hand slices to any horny handed son of the soil who normally turns up his nose at ‘fancy’ food – and I find there are quite a few of that type, in allotmentland! It uses blackberries from the freezer, which we harvest off our plot (thornless, sweet and very large) and mix with wild brambles (thorny, small and tart) to get the perfect combination of juicy sweetness and tangy flavour. It's also very easy.

Cake
120g butter or margarine
120g sugar
2 large eggs
120g plain flour
200g blackberries

Rumble (it should be called crumble, but the boy called it rumble when he was a toddler and it’s been rumble in our house ever since)
60g butter or margarine
50g plain flour
100g sugar
50g oats

Preheat oven to 18ºC/gas 4. Grease and bottom line a 500g loaf tin, using greaseproof paper which rises up the narrow sides over the top (this allows you to lift your cake out at the end of cooking without disturbing the topping)

Place the fat in a mixing bowl. Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating in well with each addition. Fold in flour. Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, spreading to the edges. Top with the blackberries. Place the remaining flour in a bowl. Add the remaining fat and rub until the absorbed and the mixture resembles crumbs. Mix in the sugar and oats to end up with a fairly loose dry mixture

Sprinkle this mixture over the blackberries, spreading it out evenly but not pressing it down

Bake for 45-50 minutes until golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before turning out. Great hot or cold, or with yoghurt for breakfast or warmed slightly with a cup of tea when you come in from a day’s heavy digging.

Labels: allotment-blackberries, allotment-cooking, allotment-crops, allotment-freezer

Allotment crops – asparagus?

I’m starting to wonder if we’re grown up enough to grow asparagus. Okay, we’re in our forties, so if we’re not grown up enough now, we never will be, but it’s such a luxurious, complicated crop, isn’t it?

Well the Royal Horticultural Society begs to differ. Their website says:

Asparagus can be raised from seed or young dormant plants - crowns - can be purchased. Sow seeds of an all-male F1 hybrid singly into modules in February and transplant in early June. Most gardeners choose one-year-old crowns, planting in March or April.

Right, so we’re going to buy crowns, I’ve got enough seed trays on my hands as it is. Then what?

Fork over the prepared area and dig a trench 30cm (12in) wide and 20cm (8in) deep. Work in well-rotted manure in the bottom, cover with 5cm (2in) of the excavated soil and make a 10cm-high (4in) ridge down the centre of the trench. Place the crowns on top, spacing them 30-45cm (12-18in) apart (right). Leave 45cm (18in) between rows and stagger the plants. Spread the roots evenly and fill in the trench, leaving the bud tips just visible. Water in and mulch with 5cm (2in) of well-rotted manure.

Okay, we can do that – in fact we have a trench already dug to much these proportions.

Asparagus beds must be kept weed free - best done by hand as the shallow roots are easily damaged by hoeing. Mulching discourages weeds and retains moisture. Apply a general fertiliser in early spring and repeat once harvesting has finished.

Oh dear, I knew hand weeding would appear somewhere – and as the male of the species is six foot two, I know which of us will be deputised to stoop over the asparagus trench as being ‘closer to the ground’.

To avoid top-growth breaking off in wind and damaging the crown, use canes and twine either side of the row for support. Remove any female plants (those bearing orange-red berries) and any seedlings.

Hmm, that sounds a bit more complicated – I can spot the females but I’m never good at pulling up baby plants …

To harvest, cut individual spears with a sharp knife 2.5cm (1in) below the soil when they are no more than 18cm (7in) tall. In warm weather, harvest every two to three days for best quality spears. Do not harvest for the first two years. In the third year, pick from mid-April for six weeks, and in subsequent years for eight weeks.

Ah, so if we do it now, we don’t get to eat it until 2011? Better get cracking then ….

Labels: allotment-asparagus, allotment-crops, allotment-perennials, asparagus-bed

Allotment Gardening – February tasks

What we’re up to right now, is:

Sowing certain plants indoors trays or pots - early beetroot, beans, summer cabbage, globe artichoke, lettuce and broad beans.

Last year we grew heritage broad beans, red ones, which were obviously a precursor of the Windsor variety. To just run through the difference - broad beans come in two main types (there are others, like dwarfing and heritage but with a bit of lateral thought you can usually see where your two foot tall beans or your burgundy coloured beans fit into one or the other type):
• The Long-pod plants have up to nine oblong beans per pod, hence the name! Generally considered the most hardy of the broad beans, these are the only ones it’s really worth sowing in autumn – when they should give you a crop about three weeks earlier that a spring sowing of the same variety.
• The Windsor varieties have only four to six round beans per pod. These are generally said to be tastier than the Long-pods and are less inclined to develop leathery skins. But they aren’t as hardy and should really only be sown in spring.

So we’re splitting the difference and going for dwarf broad beans and heritage beans grown from last year’s saved seed.

Sadly we don’t have room for spinach, although I notice a neighbour is sowing flat after flat, so maybe I’ll have something that he’ll be willing to swap for some of his first spring spinach to go in salads.

We’re also going to try, after last year’s success, sowing outdoors under cloches because while our February sown beetroot did nothing, we had plenty of lettuce and spring onions by doing this last year.

We’ve covered our rhubarb and we’re using up the last of our parsnips – the year’s turning again!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-digging, allotment-seeds, allotment-tasks-february

Spuds, spuds, glorious spuds

You’re supposed to start chitting your potatoes from late January in warmer parts of the country or in February in cooler areas or in other words, about six weeks before you intend to plant them. To chit a potato, find the rounder, blunter end that has a number of ‘eyes’ and stand each potato with it’s blunt end up in trays of sawdust or old egg boxes, giving them plenty of natural light. When the shoots are about half an inch to an inch long, you can plant them out. Early potatoes also take up the least room, so if you are short of space, these are the ones to concentrate on. From about mid-March, around here at least, you should dig a trench four to six inches deep, give it a sprinkle of fertiliser and set the potatoes about a foot apart with about sixteen inches between rows, taking care not to break the shoots on the tubers and make sure they point upwards. Cover them with soil but don’t stamp it down, just firm lightly at this point.

When shoots appear above ground you need to earth up each row by covering it with a ridge of soil so that the shoots are just buried – repeat whenever the shoots appear and you should have excellent potatoes to lift from June right through to September, if you’re lucky!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-potatoes, allotment-preparations, seed potatoes

Glorious mud (and green manure)

Still no allotment office in which to lurk, so I’ve been forced to go out and visit my neighbours (in allotment terms) this week. There’s not much to do unless you’ve got good stable paths, as the mud, mud, glorious mud is everywhere, but the best organised of us (and that does not include me!) are well on the way to next year’s vegetable success. The picture shows Andy’s mustard crop which he’s going to dig in as a green manure in the late spring, before it flowers.

Why bother with green manures?

They're cheap and easy to grow.
They can increase soil fertility.
They improve soil structure and help prevent soil erosion.
Most green manure crops are very attractive to wildlife.
Bare soil encourages weed growth, so green manure bare ground to keep weeds in check.
By taking up nutrients from the soil, green manure crops prevent them from being washed away when it rains.
Some green manure plants are nitrogen fixers.
And, my favourite reason, you can sow them from a little packet, unlike digging in a dozen barrows of manure!

All you need to do is sow and leave, either until you need the land again or until just before seeding, whichever happens first. At that point you hack or strim them down, dig them into the soil and leave them to decompose, releasing plant nutrients back into the soil which are then used by the next crop you grow in that area.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-manure

Allotments and ...

… freezers go together like love and marriage or a horse and carriage, at least in my opinion. I can’t see the point in the former without the latter, although I know a lot of allotment holders don’t have freezers – how do they cope, I wonder?

As an example, I’ve used the Christmas break to repack my big outside freezer, moving the bags of frozen peas and beans indoors so that we can enjoy them through the winter. Is there anything nicer than your own French beans, full of the taste of July, steaming in a little pool of butter on your plate in January? I think not.

I’ve used the space created to make and store some ‘hearty’ soups. These are not the kind of ‘hearty’ soups advocated by TV advertisements, where men have beards and women have all day to spend in the kitchen, and soups have monosodium glutamate and starch to make them tasty and substantial. These are really hearty – full of parsnips, dried broad beans, onion and carrot, tomato puree and sliced green peppers. The only two ingredients that didn’t come off the allotment were the beef stock and the pasta shells that add the final ballast to the pan. Packed into individual containers, these soups generally make their way to the allotment again, in my flask, as I tour round talking to my neighbours, or to my husband’s workplace, where he can sit and sup a bowlful of home-grown freshness at lunchtime, to fortify him for the afternoon to come.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-freezer, allotment-soup

Looking forwards

It’s a dispiriting time of year, I will be honest with you, and without the office, I’m finding myself turning into a ‘fair weather’ allotment visitor! So I decided to sit down today and remind myself why allotments are so important – not so much making resolutions and focusing on what I would lose if I didn’t have that regular contact with growing things:

Allotments are good for the planet – home grown veg saves airmiles, preserves diversity, encourages healthy eating and reminds us to get our five a day (not difficult when the summer veggies are piling up outside the door by the barrowload) so we place less strain on our health and our health service.

Allotments are good for people – fresh air, exercise, growing your own food, companionship etc – all these are available at our allotment site (at least when the shed is open, otherwise the last becomes quite a bit scarcer) and all these contribute to physical and mental wellbeing.

Allotments are fun – we’ve learned to cook with medlars and horseradish, pak choi and cobnuts, since we started allotmenteering, all because our neighbours shared crops or seed or good advice. Our diet is more varied and our appreciation for different crops is enhanced by this share and share alike approach to growing things.

Allotments are good for wildlife – we’ve seen goldfinches, hawks, rabbits, badgers, foxes, Adonis Blue butterflies and skylarks on allotment sites around the country – they serve as a safe place and rich feeding ground for much of our rarest and most threatened natural biodiversity.

And come the summer, when I’m picking ripe peaches from Andy’s tree, I shall wonder why I ever thought it was too much trouble to pull my boots on and head for the allotment …

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-resolutions

December allotment tasks

If like us, you’re struggling with allotment motivation in this bad weather, it’s worth thinking about all the good things that next year will bring you if you put in the effort now. This is what our neighbours have on their allotment ‘to do’ lists:

Winter pruning apple and pear trees to remove diseased wood and improve the shape – especially to try and get trees down to a reasonable height, because one of the major problems with allotment trees is that if the previous plot holder didn’t stay on top of pruning, you inherit something you can only harvest with a thirty foot ladder! It really should be a sacred trust to keep trees in trim, because it’s so hard to get them back down to picking size once they get out of hand.

Digging in manure where the brassica bed will be next year, and turning the compost in bins or heaps, to let in a bit of air which will speed up the decomposition process through the winter months when the normally active bacteria become dormant in the cold.

General weeding – especially along paths and around fruit bushes and trees, and general maintenance like checking roofs for leaks, gutters for blockages and compost bins for seeping or rotten areas if they are wooden.

Lots of plot holders are using this damp and miserable weather to highlight the areas of their plot that are holding water, and as soon as the rain stops and the frosts begin they will dig in sand and compost to help with drainage – the frosts will help break up the soil and add air to it, which encourages water to drain and gives added fertility.

Labels: allotment-compost, allotment-crops, allotment-december, allotment-fruit, allotment-tasks

Allotment styles

I don’t know this particular allotment holder, but I like their style! The combination of excellent autumn ground-clearing and careful working around the little patch of wildflowers which will set seed-heads for the birds over the winter is an absolute winner. It’s a picture that tells you everything you need to know about the best of allotment life – a mixture of efficiency and environmental care that explains why allotments are my obsession.

Speaking of which, this is the time of year when hard-core allotment holders do what I can only call an informal audit – they sort of tour the site, pointing out to each other which plots are more than 66% waste ground or which haven’t been worked in the previous twelve months – because the process of removing allotment holders is a long and complex one, the serious allotmenteer knows that nothing much will happen this year, or even next year, but even so, this annual process goes on, and the old guard simply keep count, seeing whether fruit has been harvested, or ground turned. They might even tidy up a neighbouring plot themselves, to stop perennial weeds seeding into their own soil. Otherwise they just … watch.

It can be a bit intimidating at first, that feeling that there are eyes on you back as you hunch over fork or spade, but when you look up you can’t see anybody in sight, but it wears off very fast. And soon a camaraderie is established. This year I even found myself wandering round my local site with a couple of the veterans, pointing out a tree whose damsons were piling up under the tree and rotting, and a pond where duckweed had begun to creep OUT of the pond and into the paving, and I realised, slowly, I was one of them. I was a member of an old guard.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-secrets

Amazing, isn’t it? I couldn’t do it in a million years myself!

In fact, pumpkin carving in our house is done by my other half – all I do is use the flesh to make meals, and recipes will have to wait for next time. Here, as the day approaches, are a few tips and hints on pumpkin carving, assuming you want to make the more traditional grinning head:

1. Use specialist pumpkin carving tools (available in kitchen shops or on the net) or linoleum cutters rather than ordinary knives

2. Draw an outline in washable marker so you can change it if you’re not happy with it, or even (apparently) prick the outline with a pin … (I think life’s too short, personally)

3. Assuming you’re making Cut through the stem end of the pumpkin with a sharp knife or pumpkin-carving tool. Use a back-and-forth slicing motion to cut through the thick, tough skin and cut at an angle so that the lid will remain in place even when the inner flesh shrinks

4. Remove the stem end, which becomes the cap, making sure you scrape off any seeds or pulp

5. Use a large spoon to scoop out the seeds and pulp from inside the pumpkin

6. Push the cut-outs gently from the inside of the pumpkin to remove them

7. Put a candle inside the pumpkin to create an eerie glow.

Tips:

Coat the cut edges with vaseline to keep your pumpkin fresh longer
Avoid leaving burning candles unattended and if you have pets or small children, consider using a glowstick to provide the light instead – much safer all round!


Pumpkin photograph by ValentinaPowers, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-pumpkins

We need more frost!

Or at least I do! The snails, and particularly the slugs, who sailed through last winter’s wet but not particularly cold weather, are out in force this October. My winter chard is suffering, not least because I was away for the weekend and once all the first wave of gastropods had eaten my organic slug pellets, the second wave crawled in and ate the chard, the swines!

Did you know snails can have hundreds to thousands of teeth! Most mollusc groups, including snails, have a set of teeth that is shaped like a wavy ribbon called a radula. There can be hundreds of rows of teeth and several different tooth types in one snail or very few rows with a single tooth in each. As the teeth get worn they are continuously replaced by developing teeth, much in the same way that a shark's teeth are. These teeth can be used for scraping food such as algae or tugging away small amounts of leaf material.

I’m not a very ruthless pest killer, sadly – I wish I was brave enough to go out and cut slugs in half with a pair of scissors like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, but I’m not. I can’t do beer traps either, as the whole thing is disgusting the next morning when you have to empty it.

There is a bit of a plus side, which is that if you can get your chard to a reasonable size, the snails tend to give up – they don’t like the thickness of the leaves, but given that my chard is still baby chard, they are simply destroying the plants. A damn good frost would sort them out without me having to do anything about it, so I’m hoping for clear nights and low temperatures, otherwise I shall have to get ruthless.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment_pests, winter-allotment

October tasks

If you’re making compost, you can look at your comfrey and see if it’s ready to become an organic accelerator. A rich compost is vital to for soil health and plant growth and comfrey both accelerate decomposition of green waste into compost and provides beneficial nutrients to the overall mix

Leeks need to be weeded now, and if you’re lazy that means hoeing, while if you’re a committed leek lover, it’s down on the hands and knees. The risk of hoeing, of course, is that you swipe the top off a leek or two as you go. – I suppose it all depends which is more important to you – time or leeks! Weeding is a general process now, as every cleared area is likely to sprout a bunch of miserable weeds.

October’s a funny time of year on the allotments – half the plots have begun to clear, which leaves them looking empty and rather boring, the other half are still stuffed (and sometimes overstuffed) with crops, flowers and various gubbins. Above is an example of the stuffed allotment, and doesn’t it look great!

While you’re out there, why not think about planting something permanent – my suggestion would be a pyracantha for the lovely autumn colours of the berries which will feed the birds through the winter: if you want to be a bird feeder choose the red berried variety, if you want to keep the berries and starve the birds, choose the yellow berried one, as they only eat those in desperation. Another advantage of the pyracantha (aka firethorn) is the wicked thorns, straight and sharp, that deter vandals and harvest despoiling thieves.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-tasks, allotment-weeding

The end of the season ...

Tiny little peppers like these, that turn up at the end of the season when the parent plant is about to head into death or dormancy, don’t seem to be good for a lot – in fact I see gardeners and allotment holders tear up pepper plants at this time of year and throw them away, baby peppers and all, and it’s such a waste! My favourite recipe for using up miniature peppers is this hearty Italian soup.


500 g minced beef
1 clove fresh garlic
2 tins of chopped tomatoes
2 large or a good handful of little green peppers, chopped
1 large chopped red onion
A good handful of green beans, cut into short lengths
1 really good stock beef stock cube in 600 ml water or home-made stock
200 g cooked rice (preferably wholegrain)
Freshly ground pepper, fresh basil leaves if you’ve got them, dried mixed Mediterranean herbs if not, a bay leaf and whatever other fresh herbs particularly appeal to you …

Brown the beef in a frying pan with the (minced) garlic and onion. Now simply add the remaining ingredients, except the rice. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for around minutes, or until peppers and onions are tender - you might feel you need to add some more water towards the end of the cooking time. Add rice. Heat thoroughly and serve.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-recipes

When did you last see your winter cabbages?

Sown outdoors in a seed bed from late April to mid May, these look like the difference between famine and feast to the winter allotment gardener, and what a fine crop my allotment neighbour has (I’d love to pretend they are mine, but everybody knows they’re not!)

Pick an areas where the adult plants will be unshaded or in some sun, and where the ground is rich and moisture retentive but not freshly manured. Cabbages require well-consolidated soil, so leave several months between digging and planting and always, always, always avoid planting in an area where the previous crop was of the brassica family.

Sow seeds very thinly in drills half an inch deep with rows five to six inches apart. As they grow, thin seedling to about three inches apart, keeping the strongest.

Once they have five or six leaves, in July, transplant them to the final growing position, setting them slightly deeper than they were in the seed bed in rows about twelve inches apart and with about the same distance between plants.

Problems

Protect the seedlings from sparrows!
Hoe carefully until the crop is large enough to suppress weeds so you don’t loosen the root system
During winter firm down any plants loosened by wind or frost
You may need to cover plants overnight if they remain in the ground after November

Time from sowing to harvest is anything from twenty to thirty-five weeks.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-tasks

September plots – what’s going on?

Well, if you had the kind of night we had last night, frost is going on! Autumn has come in with a vengeance, hasn’t it?

Assuming you’ve got your winter greens into the ground already (we’ve got ruby chard coming up nicely, although it had to be covered with bubble wrap last night) then you can still be thinking about sowing winter lettuces such as Arctic King and winter hardy spring onions (also called winter hardy salad onions) and, of course, thinking about broadcasting a green manure to enrich your soil and prevent weed growth over the winter. Come early spring, you simply dig in your green manure and let it rot into the ground for a couple of weeks before spring vegetable sowing.

Some people are setting out spring cabbage plants now and even garlic in suitably sheltered areas.

It’s hardly worth feeding most of the veg now, as everything will be heading for dormancy, although liquid feeds are still important for tomatoes, peppers, chilis and cucumbers. Squashes and pumpkins will be slowing their growth now – they respond to frost (even if it doesn’t touch them) by becoming dormant, so watch the stems and as they start to slim down (meaning the plant is no longer feeding the fruit) cut through and move your squashes and pumpkins to a cool airy and above all dry place to store.

Compost bins can be emptied out now, spreading the stuff that’s ready onto your plot and piling the partially rotted stuff back into the bin.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-tasks, autumn-allotment

Having grown your cauliflower - what do you do with it?

Cauliflower cheese of course, and cauliflower as a side vegetable, but if you’re running out of ideas by now, and having a bit of a cauli glut, here’s a recipe I can highly recommend. Cauliflower soup.

Okay, it doesn’t thrill on first reading and – to be perfectly honest – most cauliflower soup recipes smell like something dreamt up by the worst school dinner lady ever, and taste quite revolting. This one though, is a real winter warmer; it’s filling and luxurious and while it can smell pretty horrible while cooking, the answer to this is to grab a handful of parsley and throw it in a little pan of water, bringing it to a fast boil for three or four minutes after the soup has finished cooking – just as parsley purifies the breath, so it purifies the air …

Ingredients

50g butter
Bay leaf
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 large cauliflower
900ml water or low salt vegetable stock
50g mature Cheddar or Wensleydale cheese grated
50ml double cream

Rosemary oil for decoration

1 - Heat the butter in a large pan. Add the bay leaf onion and garlic and leave to cook on a medium heat until translucent.
2 - Whilst they are cooking, chop the cauliflower as finely as possible – I slice it with a knife and then use a curved herb blade - then add it to the onions and pour in the water or stock Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for about thirty minutes.
3 - When the cauliflower is tender, stir the mixture, then taste the soup and sprinkle in your cheese, giving it a few moments to combine before tasting and adjusting the seasoning if necessary.
4 - Now pour the soup and the cream into a liquidiser and process it until it is velvety smooth – a food processor will leave it grainy so if a food processor is all you have, just process and then put the soup through a large sieve to remove all the bits – it’s not quite as good but nearly. Reheat gently if required and serve with a splash of rosemary oil in the middle (if you don’t infuse your own herb oils you can buy them in posh cookshops!)

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-recipes

Winter cauliflower

Not a lot of people know this, but there are actually two sorts of cauli – Winter cauliflowers used to be called ‘heading broccoli’ which explains the difference, they weren’t developed from summer cauliflower but from hardy sprouting broccoli. There are many crosses between the two which give curds (or heads) like summer broccoli but will survive a moderate British winter. The way to tell the difference by eye (and it takes practice) is that they hybrids and winter cauli will probably rise to more of a point, while the true or summer cauliflower is a perfect hemisphere or half-ball shape.

To grow winter cauliflower you need to either protect them or live in a mild climate in the UK. There are advantages to growing them in winter, notably that the don’t get the caterpillar and slug infestations that happens with the summer varieties unless you’re very lucky. The bad news is that cauliflower can be bloody difficult beasts – they will only form heads in a deep rich soil, they need regular feeding and definitely watering and if they get a frost that slows their growth then they may not set heads at all.

Sow seeds in drills, six inches apart, and if there is any risk of a frost, protect by covering them.

When the seedlings have five or six leaves you can transplant them to their permanent homes, giving them a good watering the night before so they lift easily. Set them thirty inches apart and protect them from autumn birds which are more of a pest than you’d believe on seedling cauliflower (at least they are round here!). Use canes and string or a bit of mesh to foil their evil ways.

Cover the plants if there is a frost risk. When you have harvested a curd, lift the stem and dispose of it, do not compost because brassica diseases do not get destroyed in composting.

Labels: allotment-crops, winter-allotment, winter-cauliflower

Negotiating with your neighbours

My own allotment site was in our local newspaper last week. An article that detailed how the waiting list for allotments has been closed, because there are too many people on it already, but many plots (nearby tenants say) that are supposedly in cultivation are actually abandoned and unkempt. The argument is twofold:

1 – people who want allotments can’t get them because others who aren’t using them have blocked their access

2 – untidy and weed covered allotments make work harder for neighbouring plot holders who have to remove seeded weeds that blow or creep over the boundaries.

There is another side to this though; it’s not always easy to find allotment time – for example I haven’t actually got down to my site for nearly a week, which is daft at this time of year, but work and other commitments have just got in the way! Extra work or losing your job, illness, pregnancy, the dog having puppies or whatever … almost anything can derail the plans of even the most determined allotmenteer – especially if that allotment holder is relying on public transport, because even a twisted ankle can really put a spanner in the ‘travelling to the allotment’ works. So, if an allotment holder continues to pay the rent, the local council will tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and quite often, after a few months of difficulty, the allotment holder will be able to return to their plot, and to the healthy exercise, satisfaction and nutritional rewards of growing their own.

So when a plot looks like this, and the neighbours get annoyed, there’s a complicated negotiation to be gone through between the allotment holder, the allotment officer, and the local council, to try and get things on the optimum course … and sometimes it takes longer than anybody expected (a bit like gardening really!)

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-eviction, allotment-news

Weird and wonderful crops

I think our mutant rabbit (Donny Darko if you’re under thirty, Dylan from the Magic Roundabout if you’re over thirty!) is about as weird an allotment crop as I’ve ever seen. He was very tasty too, but perhaps you have a better mutant to share with us? Send them in, I’ll feature anything really peculiar on the blog …

Why do these things happen? Well ….

Twisty, woody, or multi-branching carrots occur because carrots are a root crop and must penetrate deeply into the soil. This means the type and texture of the soil will influences their shape. Heavy, crusted, or overheated soil effectively prevents them from germinating, and rocks and clumps or clods of dirt will cause developing carrot roots to split and distort into a forked shape as they grow around these obstacles. To avoid these problems, prepare the seedbed for carrots well before sowing seed. Dig it up thoroughly, turning it over and breaking up lumps into small pieces. Cover the newly sown seeds with sand or fine soil that will not crust over when dry and keep the surface moist. Provide shade for seeds planted in mid-summer so that the soil does not heat up.

Tomatoes that are misshapen, with scars and holes in the blossom end are caused by cold weather during blossoming and perhaps also by overly high levels of nitrogen. To manage this, avoid setting out plants too early in the season. The Americans call this catfacing – but I haven’t managed to track down any research on rabbit-facing yet!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-secrets, misshapen vegetables, weird crops

Lovely leafy beets

There’s not a huge amount of stuff you can be getting into the ground at this time of year, which is why it’s such a pleasure to contemplate one’s leafy beets!

They thrive in most soils, although the more nice rich compost/manure you can give them, the more lush those leafy leaves will be; they handle either sun or partial shade and the really really lovely thing about them is that successional sowing from now until the end of August will give you a crop that can be picked through the winter and spring.

Leafy beets include Spinach Beet, Seakale Beet and Swiss Chard, and my especial favourite, Rhubarb Beet, aka Rhubarb Chard – so named for its red mid-ribs and stems and burgundy purple leaves.

Growing leafy beets

Sow about an inch deep in drills protecting your sowing from birds and cats with mesh or cotton on sticks. Thin to about eight inches between plants and do not transplant, beets and chards are not fond of root disturbance – you can use the thinnings as a salad crop, and they are really good with oak-leaf lettuce and rocket, I find.

Harvest the leaves when they are large enough, starting with the outers and without lifting the beet from the ground – try not to cut the leave but break them off as near the rootstock as possible, taking a few from each plant rather than denuding one plant entirely. You’ll get several pickings from each plant.

Cook the mid ribs like asparagus and serve with melted butter – very good with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese. You can tear the leaves and use like any other green leaf crop by boiling or steaming briefly. The greatest thing about the Rhubarb Beet or Chard is that if a couple of plants bolt off and flower it doesn’t matter at all – simply pick the flowering shoots before the buds open and cook like sprouting broccoli – gorgeous!

Labels: allotment-crops, rhubarb-chard, summer-sowing, swiss_chard

Growing up gorgeous – artichokes again!

Loads of comments suddenly appeared on the last globe artichoke article, so I thought I’d pick up the threads before I move onto one of the great joys of this time of year, the leaf beets.

So, Barrie wants a photo of the globe artichoke when it’s been put to bed for the winter and I will certainly provide that when the time comes, and Merenda wonders why she can’t harvest globe artichokes in their first year from seed or offset, and I’ve explained all that in detail as a response to her comment, so you’ll have to go and hunt it down in the archives if you’ve been wondering why your globe artichokes seem to be carved out of balsa wood!

But back to the plot, in both senses of the word. Just about now, we’re getting organised for a rare treat that we’ll enjoy in a few weeks – artichoke stems. Here’s how to get a second crop from your plants.

1 – when the flower buds cease to appear, cut down the foliage of the plants, taking off about two foot from the top of the plant and quite a few leaves. Between now and the end of the month you should start to see some new shoots appearing at ground level.

2 -When they are about a foot to eighteen inches tall, bundle them together (we normally have four clumps around the base of a plant) and surround them with brown paper, corrugated cardboard or drainpipe – the first two you have to tie loosely around the stems with string, the last one you slide over the top of the clump.

3 – After five weeks or so, take off the blanching material and you should find you have some pale, rather bendy stems. Cut them and cook them like celery; we braise ours with finely chopped onion, some celery seed and good vegetable stock with a dash of sherry added.

If you’ve had woody artichokes this year, you can still get a decent blanched shoot crop by following these instructions … but keep a couple of those offshoots out of the blanching, pot them up in November and use them for next year’s plants and DON’T FORGET to pinch out every flowering bud or you’ll have rock-hard artichokes again.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-recipes, allotment-secrets, globe-artichoke

Marrows

Oh sigh. Sigh and moan. Not only is it raining (again) but for some incomprehensible reason, blogger won’t let me upload the photograph I wanted to share with you today. So instead – in the blog equivalent of the music that TV stations used to play when the signal went off the air – marrows.

Whatever the weather does, there are marrows in summertime. Sometimes they are real marrows, and sometimes they are courgettes that got away from their owner and turned into a lurking monster. In either case, they’re not my favourite vegetable. I try, I really try, but I just can’t get enthused about marrows. I do have one recipe, two versions, that makes the marrow into a good meal, and I am about to share it with you.

The meaty version

Pre-heat the oven to 200C, 400F, Gas Mark 6.

Wash the marrow and wipe dry. Cut into eight slices, and scoop out the seeds from the centres of each slice to leave a ring and sprinkle with salt – leave for half an hour to draw out the bitterness. Wash and pat dry and then place in a large greased baking tin.

Fry some mince, a chopped onion and a grated carrot until the meat browns and the vegetables soften. Drain off excess fat and stir in a tablespoon of flour, a good squirt of Worcestershire sauce, garlic and your favourite herbs - simmer for 15 minutes. Fill the marrow rings with the mince mixture, place a tomato slice on top of each and cook, uncovered, for about half an hour.


The veggie version

Pre-heat the oven to 200C, 400F, Gas Mark 6.

Wash the marrow and wipe dry. Cut into eight slices, and scoop out the seeds from the centres of each slice to leave a ring and sprinkle with salt – leave for half an hour to draw out the bitterness. Wash and pat dry and then place in a large greased baking tin.

Cook some small green lentils in vegetarian stock until they are tender, drain and place in a bowl. Add a chopped fried onion, or several spring onions that have been thinly sliced, two slices of bread turned into crumbs, and lots of nice fresh chopped herbs. You can add some strong grated cheese for vegetarians, or chopped nuts for vegans and a squirt of soy sauce for both. Cook, covered with a loose layer of foil, for half an hour.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-recipes, marrows

Gluts and recipes

It’s that time of year (if you’re lucky) when the allotment is producing more foodstuffs than you can eat, and you start to get sick of certain things – too much lettuce, an overdose of courgettes etc. This is a rather elegant recipe which uses up little bits and pieces of those glut crops, but doesn’t taste as if it’s a catch-all: in fact, it tastes like you spent half the day in the kitchen cooking it! It is actually a very simple dish though – it works well with fish like tuna or salmon where it really turns up the posh quotient to suggest that you’ve recently taken a cordon bleu course …

Summer glut supreme

The sauce

4 cloves
8 peppercorns
8 coriander seeds
100 ml single cream
2 inch cinnamon stick
Coriander chopped
Mint chopped
Basil chopped
1 pepper seeded and chopped

The vegetables

1 onion thinly sliced
1 1/4 pounds patty pan squash cut in pieces about 1/2 inch big – or one overgrown courgette or half-grown marrow
Small can corn – or two ears of corn that have been shelled from the cob
1 large tomato peeled, seeded, chopped in 1/2in pieces (can be a semi-green one!)
1 tablespoon oil
coriander leaves for garnish

THE SAUCE: Bruise the hard spices with a pestle and add them to the cream with the cinnamon, herbs and half the chopped pepper. Slowly bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and let steep for an hour.

THE VEGETABLES: Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the onion. Fry briskly for a minute or so; add squash, corn, remaining pepper. Continue to sauté over fairly high heat for about 5 minutes. Pour the steeped cream directly into the pan through a strainer. Add the tomato and simmer for several minutes. Simmer until the sauce has reduced and thickened a little and the squash is tender. Season to taste with salt and serve garnished with coriander.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-recipes

What’s happening on the allotments this week ...

Today was the BHOGG open day. BHOGG is Brighton and Hove Organic Gardening Group and they were showing off their excellent achievements between midday and five. Sadly, I had to be somewhere else by twelve, so I sneaked along at ten for a preview and, as you can see from the photograph, they’d laid out tables and chairs and the visitors’ book, all ready for the hordes that I hope turned up. I’m going to get a full report from Helen, later in the week, on how it went.

I also managed to sneak along to Andy, and pick up the beautiful striped geranium that I paid for weeks ago, but failed to collect from the Hurstpierpoint Allotments open day. So now the gorgeous thing is finally mine. Andy tells me that I can take a photograph of him (he’s been resisting the idea for quite some time) but only if it’s one of him feeding his seagull, Henry, from a fork. Hmmm. A couple of years ago I wrote a story, based on fact, about a man who eats a seagull’s egg and gets attacked my the mother bird. Then, last month, eating doughnuts on Brighton pier, I was dive-bombed by one of the damned birds and it scratched my face quite badly – the friend I was with noted with some admiration that I didn’t let go of the doughnut though! So my encounters with seagulls have been generally of the negative persuasion, so I shall be preparing carefully for my encounter with Henry who is, let me tell you, a large bird!

In other news, Ron gave me a superb bunch of sweet peas from his allotment and described in detail the methods he uses to raise such wonderful blooms, so look out for that in the weeks ahead, and Andrew’s tobacco is nearly ready to harvest.

Where did I have to be at twelve that could possibly be more important than an allotment open day? I’m glad you asked. My other half is a wizard with wood and cement and paint and glue, and I’ve asked him to make me a very special container for my geraniums: the stripy wonder already mentioned, and the lovely variegated scented one called Madame Salleron which I did buy at Hurstpierpoint. One nursery in the USA says, ‘We like to be honest - this plant does not flower!! We keep it in our collection because it is always in demand for bedding, particularly edging a border. It grows very bushy and is quite beautiful as a plant - the only one in our whole collection of over 1,000 varieties that doesn’t flower!’ – well I’ve got news for them … mine is! So as he had to go to the Bird of Prey centre today and build a door, I went along to hold bits of wood and nails and try to be useful, so that he could come home early and work on the geranium container.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-personality, BHOGG-open-day

How's your allotment growing?

Usually, in July, we are busier watering the plants than anything else, but this year it’s been the reverse, we are busy trying to keep the plants out of the water as much as possible!

This is a time to keep on top the weeds – it’s easier to attack them with a hoe when they are tiny seedlings than to have to dig them up or pull them out as fully grown plants. Remember that hoeing bare soil is still a good idea because it will kill off any tiny seedlings that your eyes haven’t spotted.

Despite the awful weather, your vegetable harvest should be in full swing now and most people are picking or harvesting the following:

Broad Beans – if yours haven’t got rust yet, you’re a lucky allotmenteer. If they have, harvest the entire crop now and destroy the plants, don’t compost them because your heap almost certainly won’t get hot enough to destroy the rust spores, especially in this damp weather.
French Beans
Runner Beans
Cabbage
Carrots
Cauliflower
Celery
Courgettes – harvest now, or wait a few weeks and let them turn into soft-skinned marrows to be stuffed
Cucumbers
Lettuce
Onions – the onions are struggling this year, its almost impossible for them to dry properly and you may have to lift early and put them on wire mesh indoors to finish off properly.
Spring Onions
Peas – harvest peas every day, it takes less than 24 hours for the sugar in peas to convert to cellulose, changing from sweetness to a kind of flouriness that is not nearly so tasty.
Early Potatoes - When you harvest your potatoes take care to remove all the tubers because any left behind will sprout next year and become a weed and may also act as a repository for disease and potato blight spores. It's often worth forking over a few days after harvesting potatoes because more seem to miraculously appear. When you have harvested your potatoes you might like to consider sowing a green manure crop - mustard is fast growing and is supposed to confuse the potato eel worm into breeding at the wrong time. However, mustard is actually a brassica so don't use it if you suffer from club root.
Radish
Spinach
Tomatoes – if you buy bananas, put the skins under your tomato plants, the ethylene that is given off by mature bananas helps ripen the fruit.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-tips

Does allotmenteering make you a better person?

In my case, the answer is no. Sadly, not.

This week’s sins are pretty substantial I’m afraid. To begin with, look at that picture – couldn’t it feature on the cover of Country Life? Those are Louise’s stained glass cane-toppers, which I’ve mentioned before. And the sins of greed and covetousness are the result of me getting my hands on them for long enough to take a photograph. Now I really want that kind of pretty thing for my sweet pea canes!

I’d only just started talking to Louise about her allotment, which she’s had for three years, and her garlic harvest, which she lifted early this year because the last two years she’s encountered onion blight, when my phone rang. One of my nearest and dearest had managed to get himself stranded in the wilds of Sussex, where he’d been volunteering, so I had to abandon the interview and head off to find him. That added impatience to covetousness and greed, and then when I couldn’t actually find him (my sense of direction is feeble at best) I did a bit of taking the Lord’s name in vain too! And what made it even more annoying was that Louise and I had just begun a fascinating conversation about some glass sculptures she’d had in the Chelsea Flower Show – which is a pretty big deal, as we all know – and how she wants to develop her glass sculptures by accepting commissions from gardeners. It feels like a real cliff-hanger not to have finished our talk, and now I’ll have to wait until we find ourselves up at the allotments together again.

So that’s four sins, resulting from one single allotment visit. Add to that the frustration that I’m feeling because I still don’t have the beautiful striped geranium that I’ve been after for weeks (so that’s double covetousness and double greed, actually) because Andy and I keep passing like ships in the night. Each time I get to the allotment he’s just leaving, or I’m just leaving (in a rush usually) as he arrives, so we haven’t coordinated the collection of my desired plant yet.

And to round out the sin collection, my broad beans have developed rust as a result of all the rainy weather we’ve had recently, so I’m envious of all those folk who still have smooth green bean pods now mine are speckled and scabbed with red/brown spots. So, let’s add it all up: two lots of greed, two lots of covetousness, one impatience, one bad language, one frustration and one envy. Eight allotment related sins.

I’ve got to admit that at present, allotments seem to be bad for my moral health!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-personality, allotment-secrets

Allotment Secrets – Green Manuring

Green manuring is the big, but largely unknown, ace in the hole for the serious allotment gardener. Growing vegetables is an intensive business after all, and every vestige the goodness that goes into your lovely crops has to come from sun, water and … soil. So what you take out of the soil has to be replaced and the easiest way to do this is to use a green manure on parts of your plot that are not in current cultivation.

So, for example, let’s assume you had a lovely crop of winter veg and didn’t fill that area with summer plants – what you should do, to guarantee a rich and fertile soil, is sow a green manure and then dig it into the ground before it flowers so that it doesn’t become a weed and so that all the goodness of the crop goes into the earth. This does two things; it provides a small amount of nutrient that subsequent plants will be able to extract from the soil, but – more importantly – it increases the humus content of the soil which means that it can absorb plant foods more easily and has an improved structure which is easier to work and more retentive of water. Suitable green manures are mustard seed, annual lupins, rape, winter spinach or vetch, or many companies now sell a blend of green manure that you simply sprinkle on the soil and then dig in. These crops will all need a nitrogenous fertilizer (I use ammonium sulphate granules) at about 2 ounces a square yard sprinkled on the soil as you dig the crop in – this allows the bacteria in the soil to do their work of breaking down the crop. If, however, you plant a nitrogenous fixing green manure such as peas, beans or clover, the fertilizer isn’t necessary.

Now the thing you’ve got to bear in mind is that if you don’t get to your green manure in good time, it will flower and seed all over the place which will make you VERY unpopular with other allotment holders, so don’t plant a crop unless you’re absolutely sure you’ll be on hand to cut it down and dig it in.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-secrets, green-manure

Growing up Gorgeous, the Globe Artichoke

What are you going to grow? Why not the gorgeous Globe Artichoke?

Proper name: Cynara scolymus

Description: this useful plant is a perennial but bear in mind it’s not full frost hardy across the UK. Usually it is grown for the flower-buds which are deliciously edible, but canny gardeners know that you can blanch the leaf shoots too, which gives a second crop that can be cooked like celery.

Soil and site: Globe artichokes need a good fertile soil that is well drained but not so porous it dries out too quickly (here's a tip, just put some soil in a flat tray with drainage holes, saturate it and leave it to dry. If it forms a crust, it’s probably too porous). Because the plants stay in place for up to four years, make sure you manure the ground in advance to give all the nutrients they need over their lifetime. This is a big bushy plant, taking up an area of around three to four feet across and five tall. So you must make sure that not only does it have ample space in itself, but it doesn’t shade out or encroach on other crops. It tends to prefer sunshine to shade.

Cultivation: Plant offsets in April, making sure they have plenty of space, or grow from seed in March in a heated greenhouse, moving outside in May. Keep well watered and give a sprinkle of nitrogen based fertilizer in spring. Much with compost or some other organic matter in summer and support taller growing varieties with stakes. Do not allow the plants to flower in their first year – prevent this by pinching out all the flower buds! When the plants mature in year two, restrict the number of main buds (called king heads) to five or six. Cut these king heads when they are about for inches across, snipping through the stem about six inches below the bud, this means smaller buds will develop giving you second crop. Once the flower has expanded though, the head is inedible. In autumn, cut down the foliage - and on exposed sites, earth up the crowns and cover them lightly with bark or newspaper, ensuring there is enough air circulation for them not to rot. Remove in early spring.

Next time I’ll talk about how to get that second crop from the stems and the – fortunately - rare problems experienced by this wonderful crop.

Labels: allotment-crops, globe-artichoke, growing-vegetables