April allotment watering and germinating

Yes, we’re watering already! I can’t believe, given how wet it was in March, how dry it’s been in April.

At home, in the greenhouse, we have peppers (courtesy of Len who germinated the seed and gave us the seedlings) and tomatoes.

Things that have come good in the past couple of days on the allotment:

• the shallots have decided to sprout, after I’d given up on them entirely
• the first earlies are popping out of their earthy mounds like mad things (or possibly like zombie vegetables resurrecting themselves, a scary image I really wish I hadn’t thought of, but it’s too late now, it’s in my head!)
• radishes – ready to harvest already!
• Parsnips – germinating in their own good time, but appearing (very slowly) on either side of the radishes.

What’s not so great …

• the beetroot seedlings, which are looking a bit spindly to be honest
• the carrots – doing nothing at all, we really struggle to get carrot seed to germinate on 201.

And our purple-sprouting broccoli has started to flower – a bit sad, as it makes the plant bitter and tough and inedible, but it looks pretty!

Labels: allotment peppers, allotment-crops, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-purple-sprouting-broccoli, allotment-tomatoes

Germination and soil temperature

This is 201 today. Looks okay, doesn’t it? Himself’s bean frame looks very perky, I think.

I’ve just popped up to the plot in my lunch break and been deeply disappointed. I wasn’t expecting any parsnip seed to have germinated, nor any carrots or beetroot (well, maybe I was a bit hopeful on the carrot and beetroot front) but I was genuinely pretty confident that the radishes would be on their way. They are not. All these seeds are going into raised beds, which have been covered by glass for a week or ten days before planting, to get the soil warmed up a bit. And maybe six days is too soon for even radish, but I shall be really peeved if the first of them isn’t up by the end of the weekend!

By and large, it’s said to be better to sow a little bit late than a little bit early because if the soil temperature is too low for the seeds you’re sowing it will rot before it germinates.

For the first time I can remember, I’ve had seeds rot in the greenhouse, and it seems I am not alone, Gill at My Tiny Plot has had exactly the same problem. So fingers crossed that my outdoor sowings will work better than my greenhouse ones.

Labels: allotment-germination, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seeds

March allotment greenhouse

Here are the Big Red tomato seedlings, which I have, since this photo was taken, transplanted into individual three and a half inch pots. There were fourteen seeds in the packet and ten of them germinated, which I think is a pretty good rate of return – I shall keep three seedlings for myself, and once the others are four inches tall I’ll take them down to the allotment shop to be sold to raise funds.

The leeks are springing out of their compost, but I still think I’m not going to have enough of them – I probably need to start another tray of seeds. The Nantes carrots are showing pretty well now, and I’ve got some more nasturtium seeds on the go. The peas have almost all germinated – about thirty have appeared between 8am and midday!

I need to be starting other tomatoes, and deciding if I’m going to grow peppers from seed or wait until I can get plants from either another allotment holder or a nursery – we’ve not grown them from seed ourselves before, not having had a greenhouse. And the cucumbers should go in next week too … it’s all getting rather hectic!

And last night the frost was this heavy … I feel quite depressed when I think about it.

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings, march-allotment

Greenhouse growing in February

It’s all about germination right now. Looking back on last year, when we planted 50 pots of peas (that 150 pea seeds) and nearly all of them were in strong growth by the last week of February, I’m a bit shocked to realise that this year we’ve planted the same number of pots, but with only two seeds each, and several weeks later, so that today we only have a dozen pea seedlings, rather than the hundred plus that we had this time last year. And I’m trying not to panic about it, because actually, it got really difficult last spring to get all the pea seedlings in the ground in good order – the weather turned wet and nasty and so we ended up having mammoth planting sessions that were back-breaking and even then a few peas began to falter in their pots and had their growth checked. We said we’d start later this year and so we have … but it feels all wrong not to have vast acres (okay, vast square feet) of growth going on under glass!

The first of the leek seedlings have appeared – I always forget how miniscule they are for the first few days of life. We didn’t plant enough leeks last year, so I’m hoping that this year we can really get enough in the ground to carry us right through the winter.

Last year’s saved nasturtium seed has rotted off – very strange. I’ve never had that happen before.

Three tiny Nantes carrot seedlings have poked their heads through the compost in their container. They’ll be grown in the greenhouse in the ten inch deep pot they’ve been sown into, to give us very early fingerling carrots.

The picture has been drawn in the window of a neighbour's shed - can't work out if it's graffiti or bored half-term grandchildren getting creative!

Labels: allotment -leeks allotment-seeds, allotment-greenhouse

Growing sweet potatoes in England

Margaret emailed allotmentblogger@gmail.com to ask what I knew about growing sweet potatoes. The answer is virtually nothing! But I do know a man who grows them, so I wandered along to talk to Andy, whose allotment work is supervised by a seagull called Henry who shares Andy’s lunch and will eat from a fork (I kid you not!)

Apparently the key thing here is to get some organic sweet potatoes if you’re using supermarket stock – because most of the other ones they sell have been treated in some way to stop them sprouting. It’s not that easy to get seed tubers of sweet potatoes in the UK, but Andy doesn’t even bother, he just grows supermarket tubers.

He lays them lengthways, half-covered only, in damp sand over a heated base tray to promote sprouting in early March and this causes ‘slips’ to grow and when they are four or five inches long he breaks them off and pots them into 1 litre pots. Other people grow the slips by setting the lower half (generally more pointy) of the tuber in a jar of water on a windowsill apparently.

Then in late May or early June, once all risk of frost has passed, he sets them out into a sunny trench. Where they go insane! It takes at least 110 days for them to mature and because they are Ipomeas (morning glories) they spread out like jungle plants and tend to take over nearby areas. Keep them warm, keep them watered but don’t worry about pests, it appears they don’t really have any – a bit of wire worm in late tubers is about all he’s seen, he says.

Dig them up as late in September as the good weather permits, then put them in a greenhouse for a week to let the skins cure and the tubers sweeten and Bob’s your uncle, apparently!

Now this is all based on growing in the South East of England, and shouldn't be taken as a guide to anywhere else, but if you treat sweet potatoes as a semi-tropical plant, I think you'll do okay

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-sweet-potatoes

Allotment tasks: Earthing-Up and Hardening-Off

I hope I’m not the only person who hates earthing up potatoes? It’s one of those things that I suspect may separate the allotment diehard from the allotment wimp. Possibly there are people out there (and not all of them blokes in flat caps and wellingtons) saying ‘A a good day’s earthing-up is my idea of Heaven’ and really meaning it.

I really do hate earthing up potatoes. It’s back breaking work (particularly if your soil is 99.9% clay, as our is at present) and although it looks lovely to see the neat rows of potatoes, with their piled heaps of earth, the process of getting there involves hours of heavy labour with a rake and such complex situations as not treading on the next row to be earthed-up as you work. And even if that makes me an allotment wimp, I shall be a wimp till the end of my days.

Hardening off plants is another kind of endurance test, but it’s a bit more like the old days, before people had tumble dryers and automatic washing machines and your Granny (or your Mum, depending how old you are) used to keep an eye on the weather once the washing was on the line, because rain would destroy a whole day’s hard labour over the washtub and mangle.

Hardening-off is the process of getting tender, usually indoor or greenhouse raised plants ready for the rigours of a British Spring. I don’t mind it so much as earthing up spuds, but I do get fed up with running out to check:

1. The dogs haven’t cocked their legs on the tray of borlotti beans that is on the ground because it’s too tall for the outdoor staging
2. That the slight crashing sound wasn’t a frog leaping from the pond into the same beans
3. That the wind isn’t so strong it’s threatening to snap the stems of the sunflowers that are out for the first time today (it’s not too strong – and a certain amount of wind is good for making seedlings grow shorter and develop stronger stems, that’s why commercial flower growers have fans over their seedling trays)
4. That the rain is only light (wrong, it’s torrential – all nine trays of tomatoes, beans [four kinds], herbs, hardy trees and violas have to be taken indoors)

Then, half an hour later, the rain stops and you start all over again …

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-hardening-off-plants, allotment-potatoes

Allotment greenhouse in early spring

Or, to put it another way, why you can’t turn round without knocking over a tray of seeds. We’ve never had a greenhouse before, nor an allotment at this time of year, so we may be overdoing things a bit. Here’s the list:

Celeriac – in the dining room, because they look so fragile and the dining room isn’t very warm anyway.
Peas – 50 seedlings currently evenly divided between the (unheated) greenhouse at home and the cold frame at the plot. They are meteor and living up to their name, if they don’t get in the ground soon they will be an impenetrable jungle of pea tendrils
Nasturtiums – don’t ask why Himself planted two trays of nasturtium seedlings and put them in the greenhouse. He got carried away …
Broad beans – two lines were overwintered on 235, but the mice have got to quite a few of them, so we’ve started off another packet of seeds in pots in the greenhouse, and this time (assuming they germinate) we’ll nip off the seed embryos before we plant them out
Leeks – one tray in the greenhouse
Tree seedlings – one tray in the greenhouse
Alpine white strawberries – one tray of seedlings doing well, in the greenhouse
Sweet peas – a tray and a half, two seeds per pot, in the greenhouse
Rhubarb – sixteen transplants in the cold frame at 201
Currants – eighteen cuttings in the cold frame at 201: I took this picture of our own transplants on 29 January - on Monday they had grown so much I couldn't get all three into the picture - rhubarb is very strange stuff!
Globe artichoke – one, in a pot, doing badly, in the cold frame at 201

And that’s before we plant out the four varieties of potatoes or the onion sets …

The words bitten off and more than we can chew rather come to mind!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings

Seeds, Apples, Peas, Frosts

I ordered the seeds, exploding cucumbers, celtuce, asparagus peas and all. Even some lemon chilli seeds. And we don’t eat chillis so what I’m going to do with them I don’t know. Still, it’s all in a good cause, because if we don’t keep these older, odder, rarer species in cultivation, they won’t be there when we want them.

This picture shows the last apple on a neighbouring allotment’s tree. It’s Maurice’s allotment actually and whenever I pass it, I remember the old nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear, but a silver apple and a golden pear’. Doesn’t it look lovely, if a little lonely …?

Experimental peas – 14 have germinated, but it’s just too cold to hang around and count which were pre-soaked and which weren’t, so I’m going to give it another week, buy which time any that are going to come up, should be up, and then work out if there was any advantage to pre-soaking.

On the plus side, the heavy frosts are breaking up our newly-dug soil beautifully. On the minus side, they stop us doing any more work because it’s just too damn cold to dig!

Labels: allotment-apples, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-peas, allotment-seeds

Allotment tasks for April

Assuming that you’ve already shovelled away the snow from your paths, that is! Given the unpredictability of the weather, this is possible the time to focus on the work that can be done indoors by giving the bulk of your attention to plants that can be sown now to germinate either in the greenhouse or on a windowsill at home. For me, this means pots of:

Aubergine
Celery
Outdoor Cucumbers
Tomatoes

And we tend to start off our tomatoes in a little bottom-heated propagator as we grow both the cherry tomatoes and the really big beef tomatoes which are so wonderful as a stuffed vegetable – and those latter get a better start with bottom heat which means we get bigger fruits come harvest time.

Neighbours of ours are daring to sow French beans under cloches outdoors, but I still think they’ve jumped the gun. You can’t sow French beans without some kind of weather protection until all threat of frost is passed, (early or late May, depending on where you live) but they won’t cope well with extremely low temperatures even under a cloche or polytunnel so I think that by waiting a week or two, we’ll get just as good a harvest as they will.


Allotment greenhouse courtesy of Beachcomber1954

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings