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

Allotment: perennial crops

We can’t take any credit for this, it was planted long before we arrived but we’re going to have the pleasure of harvesting it, that’s for sure! If we’d been around in the autumn, I would have taken greater care of our rhubarb crown, although it seems to have coped pretty well without me.

What I would have done is cut it back a little and mulched the crown with about four inches of compost to feed the roots and also protect the first growth from any frost in the months ahead. With only one crown I would also have forced it which makes the stems more tender (less of those fibrous strings) and sweeter, as well as bringing it on a bit earlier in the season. With several crowns I’d force half and leave the others, so as to space out the crop a bit.

To force rhubarb I usually use a big old bucket, often one with some holes about its person. Those holes need to be patched with a bit of tape and folded newspaper. Just chuck the container on top of the crown as soon as the first crinkled new leaves appear and it will provide both a micro-climate (removing the wind-chill as well as protecting from frost) and remove light which blanches the stems, making them more tender. This brings on the rhubarb so its ready to harvest between three and six weeks before unforced rhubarb. It does also make the stems a bit narrower in diameter than unforced rhubarb which is why I like to grow both. When the crown starts to lift the bucket I take it off and harvest the stems, leaving that crown to recover in the sun and feed itself for the following year when I’ll leave that one unforced and force all the ones that were un-bucketed in the previous year.

Labels: allotment-forcing-rhubarb, allotment-rhubarb