October is Sweet Pea month ...

Sowing sweet peas in autumn produces bigger and better plants that will bloom earlier, and go on for longer – and the best sweet peas I’ve seen for decades are grown by our very own Ronald Buckman. At the end of October he starts a process that allows him to have the most beautiful flowers I’ve even seen.

It’s well known, horticulturally that sweet peas started in the cooler months put all their energy into a rigorous root system to sustain them over the winter, resulting in strong, stocky plants when they come to be planted in their final positions in mid spring. Ron improves on this system by having developed his own germination tricks that seem to guarantee huge and perfect blooms. Here are his secrets …


1. Dig a trench one foot deep and wide and fill it with your own compost or farmyard manure – let it ‘mellow’ over the winter and you’ve got the perfect home for your sweet peas come spring

2. Choose the best possible seeds, Ron prefers to go to garden shows where he can see the flowers the seeds will produce, not to rely on catalogue descriptions. Sadly, many specialist sweet pea suppliers have gone out of business, but you can still shop around for good varieties if you put in some effort.

3. Plant seeds in a tray filled with moist peat. Lay the seeds on top and press them down, don’t sprinkle peat over them. Cover with glass and then newspaper. After three days, many will have shoots, and those can be put in modules in compost, one shooting seed to each module.

4. Keep the rest of the tray covered and as the seedlings appear, lift them out into modules, because they are uncertain generators, you can find it takes several weeks for all the seedlings to appear, but this doesn’t seem to affect their flowering time or rate.

5. Pinch the tops when there are two or three true leaves to ensure you get a stocky, flower-filled plant.

6. In spring, plant your sweet peas, each plant to an individual cane, in your trench. Take off all the flowers until they are three feet tall, then at three feet, remove the plant from the cane, lay it along the ground and bring it up the next cane! For show quality sweet peas you need four blossoms on each stem, and that means pinching out all the side tendrils … but just look at those flowers, it’s got to be worth it, to have sweet peas like Ron’s!

Labels: allotment-flowers, allotment-holder-interview, allotment-personality, flower and vegetabel show, sweet peas

What does harvest festival mean to you?

Three people intimately involved in the world of allotments share their views:

First, Crispin Kirkpatrick – allotment officer.

What does Harvest Festival mean to you (in terms of being an allotment holder)?

I'm not an allotment holder..... although I hold a lot of allotments (about 2500).

What's your favourite autumn/winter crop?

Fave winter/autumn crop gotta be apples, sweet chestnuts (my countryside roots coming out) and maybe curly kale. Thinking about it, one could probably live solely off the above for ages. It’s been an odd year for plot holders- never going to get one that's good for everything. There are great plans afoot for allotments … watch this space- can't give any more clues, but could be exciting!

Second, poet and allotment holder Ellen de Vries who says she has a love-hate relationship with her allotment. She's written several poems set there, on the valley side at the edge of Brighton. The poems 'Longitude, Latitude' and 'The problem with imagination' can be found in her recently published collection 'Girl in the air' (Pighog Press) illustrated by Patrice LeGarrec. Visit her website at www.ellendevries.org or get the collection from Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/3dlqbn).

What does Harvest Festival mean to you (in terms of being an allotment holder)?

I'm not especially religious. I don't hang out with religious people, but I don't like to think of myself as aethiest either. Last year I went to church with a friend who wanted to restore his faith in God and it happened to be the harvest festival. My allotment harvest hadn't been too bad, for a first year. A few knobbly turnips, some tiny, partially munched spinach leaves, quite a few stumpy carrots. I was glowing with pride. I did realise however, that our soil probably needed more 'feeding' as everything we harvested was like a miniature version of the vegetable it should have been.

So there we were, in church, and along came the parade, all God's sons and daughters bearing the fruits of the harvest: Tesco baked beans, Pasta from ASDA, Sainsbury's value flour. Upon arrival at the pulpit the priest asked the kids '...and what do we make bread with?' and the kids were stumped.

So it seemed that I'd missed the point. I was wanting to celebrate the joy of germination. In a basic way, I kind of hoped God, or mother nature, or whatever, might see reason to give us another year based on my devout praise and thankfulness for the beauty of growth, and the joy of plucking my little miracles from the soil.

I felt like I'd come to the wrong party. Though I guess we were all still being thankful for abundance, despite it being non-organic highly corporate supermarket produce.

How was your harvest this year?

I don't know if it’s because the communication lines with 'God' have gone down, but this year has been a dreadful year for crops. In April the soil was parched, in June and July the Size 12 slugs (shoe size) munched their way through the lot, and then there was the Blight. I did everything I could, I fed the soil with everything I could think of. Dung, old fruit, toenail clippings, leaf-mould, anything... At harvest time I only got a few semi rotten potatoes, some partially munched strawberries and four blighted tomatoes.

Perhaps allotments aren't high on God's agenda anymore now that church services concentrate on big-chain supermarket farmed produce.

Not sure what to do about the allotment now. Time to start again and hope for the best next year. I'd like to post a quiet little non-ceremonial 'thanks for the bits, God' in his comments box for when he gets round to it. Just in case it could influence the weather next year.


Finally, Andrew Faulkner, Chair of the Allotment Association:

What does Harvest Festival mean to you (in terms of being an allotment holder)?

The Catholic Church doesn’t have a Harvest Festival service but it means the fruits of the season to me. I see myself as working in partnership with God in the garden.

How was your harvest this year?

Excellent – the fruits, especially apples and soft fruits, were fantastic and I’ve had a bumper crop of potatoes.

What is your favourite autumn/winter crop?

The apples from my Bramley and Cox trees. My friend Flo makes me apple pies through the winter, from apples she stores in cool, north-facing room and that’s one the things harvest suggests to me!



Harvest festival photograph from Bert Hay's allotment!

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-personality, autumn-allotment, harvest festival

Allotment Open Days

Helen tells me that Brighton and Hove Organic Garden Group’s allotment open day was a tremendous success with over two hundred people turning up! They were very happy that many of those visitors were younger ones, who took part in a Bug Hunt with Dave Bangs and who were able to use the recently planted "wigloo" – see picture - as shelter from the sun. They raised around £270.00 from sales of plants, tea and cakes and bric a brac, which will be donated to Moulsecoomb Forest Garden and Wildlife Project.

I asked her why they’d had an open day and she replied that the allotment project was set up about two years ago to provide the group with a space to meet, work together and demonstrate organic methods of cultivation. The open day allowed them to invite the wider community to see what they’ve been doing and for the allotment volunteers to put their feet up and enjoy the space with their friends and family. BHOGG was set up about six years ago to promote organic gardening and provide a support network for local growers. Monthly meetings and a quarterly newsletter provide spaces for people to share ideas and information. There’s also a gardening advice "hotline" for members and email for enquiries (details below). The group tries to offer a wide range of activities and to make them accessible to as many people as possible. This is important to try and demystify organic gardening which is really just gardening with nature in mind. An organic gardener strives to look after all the creatures that inhabit their gardens and allotments to deliver a harmonious balance. A major focus is the soil - because a healthy soil will produce healthy plants better equipped to fend off predators or disease - so no chemical fertilisers or weedkillers are allowed as these deplete the soil.

There is plenty of information available for would be organic gardeners today. The Garden Organic website is a good place to start www.gardenorganic.org.uk or go to the local library and find a good organic gardening book.


More about BHOGG: To join BHOGG please go to the website at www.bhogg.org where you can download a joining form. For the gardening advice or enquiries email bhoggroup@yahoo.co.uk

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-open-day, allotment-tips, organic-allotment

Allotment holders up close

This is Ron Buckman, local allotment site representative and Grand Old Man of allotmenteering. Normally, when we use the term Grand Old Man we’re talking about a star of the stage and screen, a theatre impresario or a literary lion, but it fits Ron extremely well. Not only has he had an allotment on our site for over twenty five years, but prior to that he had allotments at two other sites as well – it’s a lifetime of experience and it shows when you see his plot, which is workmanlike, thriving and productive. He’s a Grand Old Man for another reason too – have a guess how old he is?

Ron is also very modest about his achievements, which are not just about being able to produce good crops from his land – as you can see, he’s been recognised for his contribution to the world of allotments generally. He’s a stalwart of the shop, where we buy our various supplies and provisions, he’s a fount of information about what to grow, where, when and how, and he is the repository of local history about our site and its characters and development over many years. Walking round the site with him is an education – he seems to know almost everybody we pass, and he can sum up the history of nearly every plot, tell you its soil conditions and what its been used for in the past, and what has succeeded and failed on it, drawing on his in depth knowledge of the land and its users.

I’ll be describing in detail how Ron grows his unbelievably large and highly-scented sweet peas a bit later in the year, so that we can all have a go at emulating his methods, but in the meantime he has one piece of wisdom for all new allotment holders which is worth bearing in mind. “To keep a plot going,” Ron says, “you need to put in about ten hours a week. A lot of people come here, clear their plot, plant a crop and expect to come back in a couple of weeks and find something growing – they won’t. You need to put in the time at the beginning, and then you get something out at the end.”

It’s a statement that’s true about most things in life, but you don’t often get such a detailed prescription for success, so when it comes to an allotment, ten hours a week is what you need, and Ron should know.

As to how old he is, I still don’t quite believe it myself, especially since I visited his plot and saw how much of it he’d dug over ready for planting, but Ron is actually eighty seven – and if that’s not evidence for how good allotments can be for your health and fitness, I don’t know what is!

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-personality, allotment-tips

Allotment-holders up close

This is the Chair of my local Allotment Association – Andrew Faulkner. He says all he has to do as Chair is head up the AGM and sign the minutes, but I suspect his wry, convivial nature makes him an ideal figurehead for a bunch of highly individual and dedicated allotmenteers. He’s been an allotment holder since 1983, when he didn’t have a garden so thought he’d get an allotment … his mother became interested and helped him work that plot until she was eighty-four!

Since 2006 he’s been sharing a new allotment with Dick, whom I haven’t met yet, because he’s been on holiday, and who spent around 200 to 300 hours rebuilding the greenhouse on the new allotment. It’s a masterpiece of ingenuity – it has a rainwater irrigation system that funnels off the roof to fill both the water butt and the pond, which contains a newt and has been thronged with damselflies every day I’ve visited. Andrew has a surprise for me, and for his co-allotment holder, he’s installed a pretty little waterlily in the pond. He’s faintly apprehensive about it (Dick says waterlilies are invasive) which is why he waited until he was on holiday – and he’s bought a peace offering too, a new bird-feeder for the allotment, which he hopes will offset any waterlily-related problems!

Waterlilies apart, the two men get on brilliantly, although they are only on the allotment together for about an hour every day, and the allotment shows it – there are melons and globe artichokes, a tiny wildlife meadow, salad vegetables, fruit trees, onions, the famous tobacco which Andrew is growing for his pipe and maybe some cigars and a beautifully comfortable and well-insulated shed where we drank squash while I interviewed him.

It’s not all fun though; in the 1987 hurricane his allotment greenhouse blew away, and its replacement was taken by a storm in 1989 and last year, he had a terrible attack of sawfly on his gooseberries – because there’s no natural predator for them, he had to go and squash each one by hand! Andrew’s been a pioneer of organic gardening, switching from pesticides in 1987 because he became persuaded that there was a logical balance in nature that provided a predator for every pest (except the sawfly!)

What advice would he give somebody wanting to take on an allotment? “Don’t accept a corner plot, garden organically, provide plants used by small mammals and invertebrates so that you’re doing your bit for nature.”

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-personality, organic-allotment, sawfly