Allotment blackberries

We have a thornless blackberry. Let me tell you, if you’re going to transplant blackberry plants, it’s always worth paying extra for a tasty thornless variety, because transplanting thorned blackberries is painful.

Okay, basic lesson in soft fruit here, which I didn’t know until last week, so I hope it will fascinate you as much as it did me. You can tell if a plant is a raspberry or a blackberry by checking if the core stays in the ripe fruit or is left on the plant when the fruit is picked. Berries with the core intact are blackberries and berries that lose the core are raspberries.

I can hear you scoffing already at the woman who can’t tell a raspberry from a blackberry but bear with me. What’s a loganberry then, clever-clogs? Or a tayberry? See … it is a useful thing to know. In fact both berries are classed as blackberry/raspberry crosses: the loganberry keeps its core intact and is therefore classified as a blackberry. Confusingly, the tayberry has a core that sometimes stays with the fruit and sometimes comes free of it, and is classed as a hybrid.

Now, to the issue of pruning and transplanting. When any of the four berries above have flowered and fruited, any cane that bore fruit dies back to the crown. This means, when prune, you are simply working to make space for the primary buds just below the soil line to grow and bear fruit. Everything above those buds is cane that the previous summer and is now two years old but will still try to produce fruit at the expense of the new canes that have grown from soil level.

So quite obviously, transplants need to be cut back hard, to get good growth. In addition, any transplant will suffer stress – think about how stressful it is for you to move, and then think about the plant – same process! So cutting back allows the plant not to put all its strength into old grown so it can concentrate on settling in and producing new growth that will be adjusted to its new conditions and that new growth should appear within 4-6 weeks.

We moved this blackberry a week or so ago, but because we didn’t have its blue screen in place I didn’t cut it hard back, or we wouldn’t have known where it was when it came to siting the screen for it to grow up. Now the screen has been fixed to the fence, I shall prune the blackberry back (taking care not to cut so far that the parent, thorny, plant is live above the graft) and watch it take off in spring).

Labels: allotment-blackberries, allotment-december, allotment-transplanting-fruit

Allotment tasks – December

This is the month to start forcing rhubarb. The simple way to do it is to set a large bucket or dustbin over the hibernating crown to encourage the fresh, pink shoots to form – they do this better in darkness. A good mulch of straw or well rotted manure or compost cast over the crown before covering creates extra warmth to speed up the process further. As we now have a greenhouse (hurrah) and we’ve dug up and transplanted some crowns this year, we took one good root home, left it out in the frost for a couple of nights (this apparently accelerates the new growth. I am not convinced, as all the other advice is to protect crowns from frost but hey, it’s an experiment!) and then potted it up in a large pot with good compost, covered the pot with a black box, and set it in the greenhouse. The box exclude the light while the heat in the greenhouse should drive the forcing process so that we end up with slim, pink rhubarb as early as March!

If the weather is mild and expected to continue so for a couple of days, you can sow broad beans in a sheltered spot. The advantage of this, assuming you can keep the mice away from what they always view as an early Christmas feast, is that aphids find the tops of overwintered broad beans much less attractive than spring sown ones, because the overwintered leaves are much tougher.

this is also the ideal time to lay new paths, as can be seen in the proud example of the new plotholders on plot 254. And if the soil is neither frozen or waterlogged, you can always dig, and dig and dig …

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-december, allotment-forcing-rhubarb, allotment-paths

New Year’s Resolutions

No, I haven’t made any yet. And the reason is simple – our allotment office and shop are closed, while workmen do clever and interesting things inside, such as removing asbestos and restoring cladding and what have you. All very necessary, important and valuable stuff: but also very damaging to the morale.

Without a place to start my allotment visit with a cup of tea and a chat, finding out what other allotment-holders are up to, enjoying a gossip, an exchange of information, maybe even some seed or equipment swaps, I feel a bit lost, to be honest.

I notice as I wander round, being nosy (well, I am allowed, it’s my job – I’m the allotment blogger, after all!) that the closure of the office has had a really profound effect on many allotment holders. Andy’s around a lot, with his pet seagull and the big cat that hangs around him whenever he’s on the site, and Ron seems to get up to his plot most days, but a lot of other regulars who’d be putting in time between Christmas and New Year just aren’t around their allotments nearly as much as they would usually be.

I hadn’t realised how important our gathering place was to us, and now I’m adrift – it’s like trying to play tennis on your own!

Labels: allotment-december, allotment-office

Does your allotment site decorate or not?

It’s an odd one isn’t it? We don’t. Not a single wreath or twinkly light, at least so far, and I walked the site this morning (in the freezing cold) to check. Of course that could be in part because our allotment office has been closed for a couple of weeks and will remain closed until New Year, for essential work removing asbestos from the walls and repairing the roof. Without that hub for our activities I suspect most of us are simply shooting up to our plots, grabbing a few Brussels Sprouts etc, and shooting home again to the warmth. I did speak to Ron, who’d come up to gather some veg, and he agreed that people weren’t hanging around because there was nowhere warm to hang, and nowhere to get a nice hot cuppa!

But driving around the Midlands the other day (as you do) I was amazed at how much tinsel and tree decorating there was on show at allotment locations there. Really some plots looked like little landing strips with their glittery LED lights. It was very jolly. I wonder what makes the cultural difference between decorators and non-decorators – does one person start the trend and everybody else follow on, or is there some kind of council bye-law that allows it in some places and frowns on it in others? Drop us a line if you think you know the answer.

Meanwhile I snapped this picture a few weeks ago: the nice people at BHOGGS had probably hung these peppers in their tree to allow them to ripen without being attacked by mice – but it looks suitably festive, doesn’t it?

Labels: allotment-appearance, allotment-december, allotment-facilities

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