Allotment rain – at last, and tasks

Whee! After six weeks of nothing, our first real rain! Sadly, it’s accompanied by howling gales but you can’t have everything. At least our brassicas and lettuce will be getting a real soaking.

And at last we can stop going up every evening to water the peas. Our crop is going to be feeble anyway, we had only half a dozen pea plants and they got horribly wind-scorched before we got the windbreak up, but peas are, to me, the Faberge egg of allotment life – without peas fresh from the pod, the summer’s wasted. Of course we will need to go up again and check their supports, as this kind of wind could knock even a wrought iron terrace flat. They are just about ready for harvesting, so I’m keeping a very beady eye on them.

We’re also watching our radishes, which should be benefitting from this cool weather. We sowed another row last week and they are already showing two leaves, but I always think you can’t have too many radishes (and if you do, you can make cold radish soup, which is called poor man’s gazpacho in our house). As radishes will bolt if it gets too hot, we’re relatively pleased that this sowing is starting off in cool weather, as one school of thought argues that bolting behaviour is not just triggered by hot weather at the time, but may be a predisposition of hot weather at the time of germination. They only need water in July, never feeding.

And at the end of the month we’ll be sowing winter radish, spreading out the sowing period from late July to early September to ensure a supply over a long timeframe.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-lettuce, allotment-peas, allotment-radishes

Allotment bad weather

We haven’t had any bad weather since we got our plot, but with tonight’s storm warnings in the South we are planning to get up there early in the evening and work out what we can do to protect our plants.

It was perhaps a bad idea to put two rows of lettuce seed and two rows of carrot seed into a bed on Sunday! But as we haven’t seen how germination operates in our soil, we thought we’d conduct a kind of ‘test run’ so that we have some idea whether seedlings damp off, get wind damage, how well the soil holds water etc. As I say, our timing may have been less than perfect.

Of course the rain, if we get any, will be welcome, because we’re watering just about every night now and with the hot sea breezes, most water seems to evaporate almost before it hits the ground, even at dusk, but storms are a different matter because they wash the soil away from a plants roots and strong winds with heavy rain can break leaves or even stems on smaller plants. So we’ll be bodging up rain protection systems (I’m pondering banging together some wood to make a kind of upside down V-shaped cloche just for the storm warning period) and hoping that not too much stuff gets washed away ….

Labels: allotment-bad weather, allotment-carrots, allotment-lettuce

What’s up Doc?

Well, May Day supper is going to be lamb pitas with … early lettuce and spring onions and some skinny and red hot radishes. As Don, one of our allotment chums, grew some potatoes under-cover in a combination old tyre and plastic cloche type arrangement, we also have the first salad spuds of the year, from him! It’s a real joy when you eat the first meal of the year where all the veg came from your plot (okay, and from the plots of your generous friends) and even the mint that’s going into the lamb dish was harvested today by my own hand. The radishes could have done with another week, maybe, but they are searingly hot and make your mouth know it’s alive, that’s for sure!

And of course the work is coming faster than the crops now. Today it’s been hoe hoe hoe. May is the month for hoeing. Getting the heads off weeds now when they are tiny, means they don’t get their roots down which can make them harder to get rid of. And of course that means sharpening the hoe every ten minutes – I don’t know how people work with blunt hoes, Sweeney Todd could use mine to shave customers, because it makes the work of weed decapitation about 80% easier. And the other thing I’ve been doing, because the other half won’t, is thinning out the first lettuce and carrots – he’s too soft hearted to do it and then we end up with weedy plants, I’m ruthless and give the survivors the space to flourish!

Labels: allotment-lettuce, allotment-potatoes, allotment-radishes, allotment-tasks-may

Allotment tasks – everything in the ground

I can vouch for the fact that lettuce is a tough plant – apparently you can start sowing seed outdoors from early March, or, if you have cloches or polytunnels or some other form of shelter, from the middle of February! I don’t know about that, but we’re actually still harvesting our October sown lettuce which went right though the winter (okay it bolted but who cares?) with just a bit of horticultural mesh as protection. Just like carrots, you need to sow lettuce seed over a period of a couple of months to avoid a glut. I’ve never managed to get this right, I sow fortnightly and still get a glut, but I don’t mind, lettuce is perhaps the one crop I’m happy to see go from garden to compost bin without feeling guilt – it’s just so cheap and easy to grow!

If you remembered to sow spring lettuce last year, these should be coming ready for harvest at the beginning of March onwards.

Our neighbours are planting out both maincrop and new potatoes, or to be more accurate, the first plantings of new potatoes were going in on Sunday and the maincrops will be planted in mid March – we are growing our potatoes at home this year, using the tall bucket method, having been given the tall buckets, so it will be interesting to see how it goes in comparison to planting in the ground.

Labels: allotment-lettuce, allotment-potatoes, allotment-tasks-march