Quick and dirty allotment gardening

Actually, that’s misleading. There’s a lot of dirty but not much quick I’m afraid. The past week has meant every spare minute we’ve been digging. Digging. Digging.

And it’s really tough digging too, as plot 201 hasn’t been worked for at least a year, probably two. Compared to Duncan’s plot, where the soil has been turned and rotovated at least twice it’s like digging through rock when it’s dry and clay when it’s wet, but it will be worth it when we put our early potatoes in.

What do you think of our scarecrow? He’s called The Green Man and I rather like the idea of an abstract bird scarer – whether the birds will actually be scared by a cartoon man is another matter ….

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-potatoes, allotment-scarecrow

Never trust an allotment

If you turn your back on an allotment for ten minutes, this is what happens – weeds! It’s actually a little bit more than ten minutes, but not more than a week, since we were up weeding and digging, but I have to be honest, there’s been so much else to do, that we’ve sort of ‘ignored’ the bed down the bottom of the allotment that hasn’t been used this year. ‘It’s lying fallow,’ we told ourselves.

Well not any more it’s not! It was obvious when we got up there on Sunday that is was a potent source of vile annual and perennial weeds and just about ready to cast its ripe cargo of seeds in all directions, which wouldn’t make us popular with the neighbours. I also knew that letters had been sent out in the past couple of weeks to allotment holders who weren’t ‘keeping their plots in cultivation’ and while there was no threat of us being told we weren’t a busy and productive plot, I felt a sudden and terrible guilt that we weren’t pulling our weight after Duncan was good enough to take us on as co-workers. So we went and we dug!

I was reminded, while I dug, that in France, allotment holders in some areas are allowed to ‘rent’ a young person doing community service for a certain number of hours heavy digging. Wish we could do that here!

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-fallow, allotment-weeds

Allotment life

Tomorrow I have to do one of those things that goes with my ‘real’ job – standing up in front of a couple of dozen people taking a creative writing class. So last night, as well as preparing my various papers and information, I did that thing that ladies have to do, which used to be called ‘grooming’ (a term that now applies only to dogs). And it came as a bit of a shock.

I have five broken fingernails, mainly from planting things in our somewhat stony plot, or pulling out weeds. On my left leg there are four wheelbarrow bruises, from resting it against my thigh while I tip it up (bad habit, must learn not to do it) and on my right ankle a lovely range of bramble scratches. My face and arms are burnt brown by the sun, even though I wear a good sunblock, and yet the rest of me is lily white (where it isn’t bruises or scratches). Put it this way – I wouldn’t want to shake my rough, scratched hand and can’t imagine anybody else would either.

Yes, I should wear gloves, but gloves don’t let you feel the condition of the soil and are useless when you’re teasing out tiny seedling roots into a planting hole. Yes, I shouldn’t use myself as a fulcrum for the wheelbarrow and yes, thicker trousers would probably have dealt with the brambles. But I’m an allotment holder, that’s what I do, and no matter how often I tell myself I’m going to be careful, when I’m on the plot I immediately plunge into the dirtiest jobs with insane abandon.

So my poor students will be taught by somebody who looks like a daughter of the soil and I hope they don’t mind, because I know I won’t change …

… and anyway, on my way to class I just have to nip up to the plot and dig up some potatoes!

Labels: allotment-appearance, allotment-digging, allotment-planting

New allotment – the ground we work with

My allotment federation has the following advice: Allotments that have not been worked for many years or have had nothing put back in to the soil would benefit from an annual application of manure or mushroom compost. If supplies are limited, concentrate it where you intend to grow potatoes or members of the cabbage family. If you practise crop rotation you will gradually improve the whole area. Start a compost bin immediately and recycle as much organic matter as possible.

Well, our soil is really not that bad. Wonderful Duncan dug a whole lorry load of manure into the first half of the plot and it’s produced fantastic potatoes and onions, and the courgettes are thriving, so that’s good. The second half of the plot though, is still ‘unimproved’. We’re rough digging a couple of rows every time we go up and mainly trying to take out as much couch grass as possible (it is definitely our best crop so far!) – I’m spreading the removed perennial weeds out on a slab of carpet to dry, as several books say that once it’s totally desiccated you can just stamp it to smithereens and put it in the compost. Stamping on couch grass could become my favourite hobby!

It seems to have good water holding capacity and it definitely clods up when wet so there’s a lot of clay in there, but its not chalky, which was a big worry as many allotments in our area are. All in all I think we’ve been very lucky. The test will be when we establish an asparagus bed … maybe next year!

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-improving-soil, allotment-manure, allotment-soil

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

Allotment chills

Do wind chill factors affect plants, does anybody know? I have a feeling they must do, but I can’t find any information in any of my books on the subject, only lots of stuff about ambient or air temperature.

In any case, it feels like it’s freezing on the allotments, although the temperature gauge says 7 degrees, so that’s why I’m wondering about wind chill. Things are coming up, like rhubarb (is it possible to stop rhubarb coming up, I wonder?) and garlic, but whether the latter carries on coming up is anybody’s guess. The harvest last year seems to have been variable in the extreme, with the eastern side of the UK having a better garlic crop than the western side, apparently. Because it keeps raining, and the mud is somewhat clinging, there’s no real point digging over the ground, although there’s no reason not to weed, and many of my neighbours who did weed and then put down weed suppressors in January, have been back to hold them down with BIGGER rocks and BIGGER stakes this week, because there’s quite a lot of weed-suppressing material (newspapers, old carpets and bits of fruit box) that has blown into the surrounding fences in the gales we keep having.

I’ve been thinking about successional sowing, which we were utterly useless at last year and whether there’s a simple system to be better at it this year – any suggestions? We had loads of simple crops like lettuces and carrots that it should be possible to sow and harvest in succession, but we seem to forget, or our new sowings catch up with our old ones, and we end up with a glut – carrots are okay, there’s no limit to the amount of carrot one can freeze or turn into carrot soup or carrot cake, but what on earth do you do with a glut of lettuce?

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-garlic, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-weeding

Allotment in winter - bleak midwinter

And it certainly is! We had frost like snow this morning on our site, stuff you could crunch underfoot, frozen locks and general dismay, and still no office to lurk in …

Still there are (or were) signs of new life. For those lucky enough to have fruit trees on their plots the buds are (or were) fattening. The brackets, of course, relate to the sad fact that anything that was burgeoning before this cold snap is likely to be blighted by it. Have you ever noticed, by the way, how poetic the language of gardening is? Buds burgeon and blossoms are blighted or nipped by frost – it’s all very lyrical. Anyway, as of this morning, looking at the more protected southern aspect plots, I think the buds in some places, like on this fig, have survived.

The unpredictable weather is annoying everyone – there are broad beans sprouting under glass and sweet peas springing into life under newspaper (as Ron advised last year) and yet the changeability of our weather conditions is making it impossible to plan more than a couple of days ahead – will it be okay to put plants outdoors in the cold frame in late February, as people did last year? Who knows?

What is clear is that at least the chilly snap has done its job in breaking up the soil and if the rain (which fell in buckets earlier in the week) can just hold off for a few days more, folk might actually be able to get out there and dig over the soil for the spring – if it ever comes.

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-fruit, allotment-trees