Allotment harvest and winter fruit

Okay, it’s a bit late, but this is the first chance I’ve had to get round to showing what we took off the plot the day we went to plant strawberries. There are celeriac, parsnips, leek, kale and a summer cabbage (the last of them, and very slug damaged on the outside) which we took home. The celeriac we made into soup and a celeriac and potato mash to go with sausages, the parsnips were also souped, the leek we had in a stir fry with the kale and the cabbage is going into puff pastry to become a lovely pie (better than it sounds, I promise you).

One thing this haul made clear to me is that Britain is not a great place for winter fruit. I really want to get more late season and early season fruits onto the plot so we can have fresh fruit all year round, so I’ve been browsing James McIntyre for ideas. I think gooseberries and craneberries sound great, and at least I can get them into the freezer for use in the fruit-free months.

What do you grow as winter fruit, I wonder?

Labels: allotment-fruit, allotment-harvest

Allotment Seedlings

Planting and growing has begun! We have three trays of Meteor pea seedlings waiting to go in, but they’ll need some kind of cover or they will simply rot in the ground and the greenhouse is burgeoning (isn’t that a great word?) with leeks, both Babbington and annual, broad beans, alpine strawberries and sweet peas.

We’ve put out our first early potatoes – some went into tyre stacks three weeks ago, but the rest of the first earlies went out last weekend. The first early carrot is showing in the raised bed that is covered with horticultural fleece, and the currants are all budding beautifully. At least two of the transplanted raspberries have started to bud too – mind you, that means that at least twelve haven’t budded yet. I gave them some potash, to try and encourage them.

I put potash around the strawberries too and dug out some more free-ranging raspberries – I don’t know why I bother mentioning it, I’m going to be saying ‘I dug out some more raspberries’ for the next five years at least. These were in the spot where I want to plant sweetcorn.

But still I’m panicking about getting seeds started – why does everything have to start off at once? Himself has been busy thinking about runner bean supports and also a brassica cage, because the horrible, awful, nasty pigeons are dead keen on picking purple sprouting, calabrese and even kale, and strewing the remnants on the ground. So a cage to keep them off seems like a good investment.

Labels: allotment broad beans, allotment-fruit, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seedings

Allotment sheds

This is what everything at our allotment looked like, and felt like, today – covered in fat drops of rain that make fruit slip from your fingers as you tried to pick it, dropped on your head and neck at unexpected moments when you were digging, or made the grass slippery underfoot so that as you carried tools and pallets and posts to and fro. Not a great deal of fun, to be honest.

But it had to be done, because next Sunday – come hell or high water (and high water looks considerably more likely!) we are going to put up El Shed! Yes, the partly-painted shed is to be in place by the end of next weekend, and that’s that.

So today we had to get a couple of things done, to whit: clearing out some slimy old lettuce to make room for the overwintering onions (so far we have the onion seeds but not the sets or the two kinds of garlic - hard neck and soft neck) and banging in some pallets along the side of the allotment where the prevailing wind whistles across with Siberian bitterness. Duncan busied himself with digging over the ground where the shed will stand, and I did a soil pH test which confirmed what we already knew – our soil is neutral!

Labels: allotment-fruit, allotment-shed, allotment-winter-onions

Bird scaring

Birds are a nuisance. Lovely, but a nuisance, a bit like toddlers and puppies that haven’t been house-trained. And the birds have suddenly discovered that our allotment, which had been fallow for a couple of years, is full of goodies. So I started looking around for bird-friendly but effective bird prevention devices (we can’t afford a fruit cage this year, and anyway, we’d also need a broccoli cage and a cabbage cage and … etc).

And out of the blue, Santa web arrives! Actually, it’s called Scaraweb, and it’s been donated to us by a kind neighbour who ‘didn’t get on with it’ (her words). I can sort of see why she might not. While it is a lovely Santa’s beard kind of article in the packet, when you tease out the strands and spread it over the plants in question (as shown on the packet illustration) it does look rather as if your vegetable plot has been invaded by a giant spider or maybe a mutant silkworm. Anyway, it’s free and I’m keen to see how it works. I’m expecting snide comments and head-shaking from some other plotholders who aren’t in favour of these modern developments. I’m also nervous about the wind … we do get something close to gale force winds in spring and autumn and I’m rather worried that I’m going to go up to the allotment one morning to find it denuded of silky white webbing, and the allotment fence looking as if a giant Santa has collided with it!

Labels: allotment-birds, allotment-fruit, allotment-fruit-cage, allotment-problems

Allotment pests

I was reading The Cottage Smallholder yesterday and noted that Fiona has to net her fruit not just to keep the birds (and her dogs) from eating the ripe fruit, but because the birds (but not the dogs) eat the unripe fruit too!

We certainly have problems at our allotments, but this isn’t one of them and I’ve devoted most of today, while I’ve been pottering around, to working out why. And I think I’ve found the answer. It’s seagulls!

Yes, while they can be a real pest, I suspect that the seagull behaviour over our allotments keeps the fruit-hunting birds away; they certainly like to land in the mornings and poke around in turned soil, but if they see smaller birds congregating on the site they tend to fly down and scare them off so that they can try and grab whatever the little birds were finding. Of course they aren’t equipped to peck fruit from bushes though. Finally, a use for the pestilential things! One person on our allotments actually has a pet seagull that he feeds with cat food on a fork – rather him than me: they have vicious beaks and always look to me like homicidal maniacs who are trying to remember where they left their axes.

We also have a rat problem, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Rats will, I’m told, dig up my root crops and eat my peas and beans, but putting down poison is a no-brainer (a) because I know it builds resistance in the intended victims and (b) there are too many dogs, cats and children on the site for bait to be safe. So, short of taking the dog up with me whenever possible, I’m not sure what to do. So far the only thing the rat has done is tunnel under the compost bin and eat some of the scraps we put in there, but I wonder what it will do next …

Labels: allotment-birds, allotment-fruit, allotment-pests

Allotment herbs and fruits in February

This is the time of year when we sow parsley. At home we put the seeds in those long biodegradable tubes and grow them in a bottom-heated propagator, but on the allotment, we put them in the greenhouse. They hate being transplanted, so they also go in biodegradable tubes up there, but instead of having bottom heat, the parsley gets sown with boiling water, which encourages it to germinate. Parsley’s said to go to the devil nine times before it comes up, which gives you some idea how slow it is to get going! There are strange compounds called furanocoumarins on the surface of parsley seeds, which actually get into the soil and stop the seeds of other plants germinating – this is a sensible evolutionary approach on the part of the parsley because it means it has a more than usually good chance of outdoing the competition, but these compounds, once they disperse in the soil, actually have an odd habit of affecting the parsley itself – which is why soaking the seeds or watering them with really hot water that destroys the effect of the compounds, can speed the process up.

It’s also the time of year to divide mint. We don’t grow mint at home, but keep it in a trough at the allotment because it’s such an invasive plant. Even a small piece of root is very likely to grow, and once it grows, it will take over a vegetable plot or border, smothering and strangling everything in its path, even bindweed. The allotment trough is lined with zinc, and there’s not much chance even of mint punching its way through that!

Chives can be split and replanted too, at this time in the year, as long as the soil isn’t actually frozen when you lift them.

One of the gardens that backs onto our site has big bud mite on its redcurrants. It’s one of those things that you can’t really describe but recognise as soon as you see it. It simply shows up as weirdly large buds which then don’t produce any fruit in summer. There’s no treatment, either preventative or curative, for the infestation, so we can only hope that it doesn’t spread and that somebody on the allotments knows the people in that house and can suggest they pick off the infested buds.

Labels: allotment-fruit, allotment-herbs, big bud mite

Allotment skills - using stuff up

This is one of the rare bones of contention in our allotment life. I mentioned it in my last post, and it’s the horrible fact of the glut. There’s nothing you can do about a glut – try as you might to avoid one, if you have seven kilos of courgettes to use up, you can bet that there are another seven waiting in the wings, and that your neighbours will be moaning about the tendency of the average courgette to hide under the leaves and turn itself into a thin-skinned marrow, regardless of your desire to never see another marrow or courgette again.

Marrow jam, courgette bake, marrow rum, courgette chutney, stuffed marrow, stuffed courgette, marrow bread, courgette flower fritters (a brilliant idea, stops the plants growing any more courgettes, for one thing!), marrow stew … it just goes on and on and life can become insufferable when tomatoes, or strawberries, or rhubarb or whatever suddenly go into glut production. And that’s why I rely on Grow Organic, Cook Organic to kick-start my kitchen creativity. I found it useful when last year’s rhubarb glut overwhelmed me – the recipe for Rhubarb and Ginger Ice-cream was a revelation because ‘the boy’ who has never knowingly eaten rhubarb, actually consumed gallons of the stuff and brought home his teenage friends to consume it too! Some of the recipes might seem a bit high-falutin’ such as Red Onion and Mushroom Tartlets with Goat’s Cheese, but it’s worth giving them a try because they really are designed to work with home grown fruit and veg.

Labels: allotment-cooking, allotment-fruit, allotment-glut

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

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