Allotment Garlic Goings On

Our garlic did well this year, and between the ones planted in the garden in case they didn’t like the allotment, and the allotment ones that seemed very happy, we had quite a harvest. Given that we don’t eat that much garlic, I thought I’d plait it and hang it up in the kitchen where at least it would look pretty.

Have you ever tried plaiting garlic? The ‘ingredients’ alone are pretty daunting: scissors, an old toothbrush, a couple of bath towels and a knife as well as a dozen or more garlic bulbs.

Well, I tried. And failed. And so our garlic is hiding in a mesh basket in the shed, where it is cool and dry and the mess I made of it can’t be seen. After all, nobody will know what it looked like when they eat it, will they?

The reason I was plaiting garlic instead of doing something more useful and nurturing like picking beans or raspberries, is that we have an outbreak of swine flu in the house and while I know I should be at the plot: watering cucumbers, feeding tomatoes and generally tidying up, it would seem hard-hearted beyond belief to head off to nurture vegetables when Himself needs nurturing at home. And before you ask, no it’s not Man-Flu, it’s the genuine, full-blown swinish article and he has it badly, poor chap.

So here's the last photo I managed to take before we became a plague house ... our marigolds!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-garlic, allotment-marigolds

Allotments'r'Us says the most unlikely person

Yes, London Mayor Boris Johnson, famous for putting his foot in it, seems to think that putting his foot in a nice big heap of freshly-turned earth is the right thing to do. We won’t argue with that!

So what’s his big idea? (I can’t believe I just wrote ‘big idea’ and meant Boris, but there you go, one can be wrong in one’s early judgements.) Let me tell you, he wants to encourage backyard gardening even on flat roofs. It’s called Capital Growth and the excellent Rosie Boycott is overseeing the first phase which intends to 2,012 patches of land by 2012 for Londoners to grow food. All kinds of organisations: councils, schools, hospitals, housing estates and utility companies are supposed to pinpoint idle lands which could be converted into vegetable gardens, including mini-plots on canal and reservoirs sides and unused railway yards.

Lovely idea – I hope it happens, because with credit crunches, food miles and soaring energy costs, everybody deserves the chance to reduce their food bill and increase their quality time spent exercising in the fresh air.

Meantime, can anybody identify this beastie? We found it crawling across our enormous cold frame on plot 201 – November seems rather late for caterpillars to me, but perhaps it’s a particularly hardy brute? I carried up to the overgrown end of the plot and let it go – hardened gardeners can express their disgust now – I know I should have squashed it, but I just couldn’t! It’s the first bit of wildlife we’ve found on 201 and that made me feel like Scott finding a sauna at the North Pole!

And on Duncan's plot, the garlic, onion sets and onion seed are all showing beautifully. No difference yet in the germination or growth rates between the direct sow and the paper and paste sow onions, but we'll see how it continues ...

Labels: allotment-caterpillar, allotment-garlic, allotment-onion-seeds, allotment-onion-sets

Allotment sheds …

Or, if you prefer, what goes up had better not come down! Because on Saturday, when the weather was glorious and the team was foregathered in one place (‘the team’ is what we rather grandiosely call it when the three of us are on the plot at the same time) it was the right time to put up Duncan’s shed.

The shed has been a bit of a saga – there were several attempted deliveries that didn’t work out, and then a second shed arrived after the first one, for no discernable reason at all, and then the shed had to be painted with some form of preservative, and as Duncan doesn’t have anywhere to store and paint a shed, and we do, it had to come to our house, then it had to go back to the plot, then we had to buy paving … you get the picture – it’s been one of those projects that seemed to go on forever without actually progressing.

And then, suddenly, it did. It’s a very small shed, and there are two quite large men in ‘the team’ so my role was limited to making tea and doing a bit of digging over what will become the bed for the over-wintering broad beans, while they did all the levelling and hammering, and cursing and tearing up of instructions (they were actually completely the wrong instructions, for an entirely different shed, so it’s not as drastic as it sounds) and then suddenly, there was a avocado and lavender coloured shed where no shed had been before ….

And the first of the garlic has poked its head above the soil where, it seems to me, I only planted it only hours ago. No sign of the seed onions or the onion sets yet, but I am living in hope of them appearing any minute.

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-garlic, allotment-onions, allotment-shed

And into the ground the onions go …

We certainly picked a hot day to plant out the onions – and while we won’t know the outcome of the germination for a couple of weeks, I can already say that it’s certainly worthwhile doing the business with paper and paste if you’re a little bit cack-handed (clumsy, in polite speak) as I am. It wouldn’t be the easiest procedure on a windy day, but we had a fine, calm one. And the ‘simple’ method, of digging a trench and dropping an onion seed into it every six inches, sounds great but when you try to drop just one, tiny, black, onion seed at regular intervals, you end up doing a lot of cursing, in my experience.


We also grabbed the chance to plant out our garlic: we’re growing two varieties this year, Mediterranean Wight and Solent Wight, just to see how a softneck and a hardneck garlic compare.

We’re also busy harvesting all the squashes – we lost all the pumpkins Duncan planted, not quite sure why, but we think the planting through a growing membrane allowed water to build up under them as condensation which then rotted the side that was on the ground/membrane. Next year we shall lift them all onto mesh trays to try and give them an air gap. The hard squashes have done much better though, and as the neck that joins the fruit to the plant has begun to narrow, showing that the parent plant is becoming dormant and no longer feeding nutrients to the fruit, it’s time to get them off the site and somewhere warm and dry for a couple of days to toughen the skins, before putting them in a cool airy place to keep until they are wanted.

And, like everybody else, we’re still weeding. Weeds are the first things to appear in spring, and the last to disappear in winter … depressing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-garlic, allotment-october, allotment-squash, allotment-winter-onions

Allotment plans for winter

What happens when you have great ideas and very little information? You guess. Duncan mentioned that he wants to grown onions and garlic over the winter. Sounds good to me! But …

Have you ever tried to find out the real nitty-gritty on overwintering onions? No, I didn’t think so. Because nitty-gritty there is not much of!

Here’s what I’ve found out:

• You can plant onion seed in the autumn for overwintering
• There is a risk of bolting
• You need to protect it with fleece through the winter
• There’s a Blue Peter style way of sowing onion seed with strips of newspaper and glue that looks like so much fun it should be legislated against
• Garlic needs cold to germinate (really? I planted mine late in May and it’s germinated just fine – perhaps I’m lucky?)

The Royal Horticultural Society came up trumps with facts, but not with details – to whit: Onions are biennial, grown from seed they produce foliage in their first season, overwinter as a bulb, and then flower and die the following year. It is the cold winter temperatures that initiate flowering, and problems can occur when fluctuating temperatures trick the plant into thinking that it has experienced a winter chill when this is not the case. Onions only become receptive to winter chilling once they are a certain size. Consequently careful manipulation of sowing and planting dates lessens bolting. For example, by sowing seeds of overwintering onions in August resulting plants are large enough to survive winter cold, but small enough to be insensitive to chilling.

Ah ha – but …

• Which varieties?
• Will simple fleece cloches work as protection?
• How close can the rows be?
• Do they need winter watering?

Well, I think we’re going to find out – I’m ordering the seeds this week … watch this space (or rather, peer under this cloche) for future developments!

Labels: allotment-garlic, allotment-overwintering-onions, allotment-winter-crops

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

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