Allotment planning

We have:

• One very large cold frame
• One eight foot by six greenhouse (but not actually erected yet, and not actually on the allotment, it’s still in boxes on the floor at home)
• half of one allotment and three quarters of another, that could technically be called ours, although it doesn’t work like that – we are growing collectively so there’s no dividing up plots into ‘your’ bed and ‘my’ bed, we’re all in the same bed (that’s not as dirty as it sounds)
• good but somewhat clay soil: one allotment suffers from bracing winds, the other may possibly suffer from not much sun at one end.


So now you know as much as I know. What would be your priorities for spring if you were me?

We’ve already ordered potatoes to plant on 201 and 235 has a large bed full of overwintering onions and garlic and a small bed with spring cabbage (not doing well) rhubarb chard (sort of okay) and broad beans – we will want more potatoes on 235 so we have to decide what varieties we’re going to plant there, given that the maincrop suffered from slugs but not blight. Everybody got tomato blight last year, so I’m going to try and work out which varieties might be a bit more blight resistant in Sussex, start them off in the greenhouse and move them down to the allotments when they are ready. But what I really want is to grow something interesting, something exciting, something to celebrate our first spring on both plots – ideas?

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-onions, allotment-planning

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

Fun with paper and glue

You may be wondering exactly what this picture has to do with allotments. Well, it’s our first ever, home-made, seed planting strips! Yes, they are a little late going in, but as we live in the soft south, we’re still hopeful that they will produce a crop.

The thing is, onion seed is fiddly, really really fiddly. And you can’t transplant onions. So … if you want to be sure your tiny onion seed is properly spaced when it goes into the ground, it requires some work (so we’ve been told) with paper and glue.

What you need to do is get some nice long strips of newspaper, about half an inch deep and the full width of the best of the press – the Telegraph is a perfect size, I’ve found – and measure six inch spacings. At each six inch point, you put a dab of ‘glue’ made from flour and water, and onto the glue you dot a single onion seed. Allow the whole business to dry and then pack it into a long tray for transport from home to the plot.

When you get there, all you need to do is dig a shallow trench about half an inch deep and lay the paper strips into it. Cover the trench and water if necessary. If you’re clever, you’ll pick a day when rain is forecast for the afternoon so you don’t even have to water them in.

You might be thinking this is a lot of effort (I might be thinking that too, after an evening spent with paste-brush, scissors and tiny seeds) and wondering if it’s worth it? Well, as yet we don’t know, so what we’re doing is preparing half our over-wintering onion seed this way, and simply dropping the other half into prepared rows by hand. As they grow we’ll be able to see if the extra work in preparing the strips has been worth it, or not, or even if it's better to make the extra investment in onion sets and not grow from seed at all. Watch this space …

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-seeds, allotment-winter-onions, growing-allotment-onions

October allotment tasks

According to the sage old allotment holders around me, we can probably continue harvesting carrots until around mid-October, although the slight frost that glazed the surface of the car this morning is a grim warning that winter is close – the point is that you need to lift carrots before there is a ground frost because it ‘pinches’ them, making them both soft and very sweet as some of the starches turn into sugars (which is the opposite of what happens to peas if you don’t harvest them, when the sugars turn to starch – life is strange) and because carrots keep for a month or more if laid in a box of slightly moist sand and kept in a cool dark place, harvesting early can mean having good firm carrots well into November, and nobody likes a limp carrot, do they? Ditto radishes.

On the other hand, tomatoes can continue to ripen on a windowsill if you pick them before the first frost and lay them in good sun. But if you let the frost get to them, and they wilt, disease will apparently invade the plant (like a shipload of Daleks) and may begin to build up, not just in the plant but in the surrounding soil too. Much as I love tomatoes I’m starting to think of them as the hypochondriacs of the allotment world, forever fainting or falling over or getting mysterious conditions that blight them forever.

And our onion bed is ready, after Tony's painstaking hand-weeding, our spring cabbage and some rhubarb kale are in the ground and broad beans are just waiting to hit the dirt, as they say!

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-chard, allotment-onions, allotment-radishes

Onions in autumn

There’s nothing like ignorance to get you through, is there? And my ignorance when it comes to overwintering onions is … profound. So far I’ve managed to find out that:

Onion sets are planted with the point at the top and the roots at the bottom and with the pointy bit level with the soil. They need to go into either very well-tilled soil or, if they are going into clay or less well worked ground, you need to dig or dib a little hole for them as they can easily be damaged by being pushed into the ground.

Unlike other plants, the smaller sets can actually be more productive because the bigger they are the greater the likelihood of bolting.

Pigeons and starlings (and in our area, seagulls) all have the habit of pecking the tops off the growing sets or just pulling them out of the ground. This year, rather than netting them, I’m going to try covering them with that weird and wonderful Scaraweb that somebody gave me (looks like Father Christmas crashlanded on the allotment and left his beard behind) but if the pesky pigeons do strike, I shall immediately go for a netting tent approach instead.

And so tomorrow - in go the onions!

Labels: allotment-birds, allotment-onions, allotment-overwintering-onions

Value-added crops

There’s a debate that is held over allotment fences and in sheds, usually amiable but sometimes rather heated – it’s about what it’s ‘worth’ growing. Is it worth growing potatoes? Is it worth growing carrots? Is it worth growing onions?

The argument on the one hand is that these staple crops can be so cheap to buy that once you factor in all your costs, it may be more expensive to grow them. Those costs aren’t just the seed you buy and the allotment rental, but also the hours you put into cultivating the crop, any fertilizer or pesticide you have to buy to keep your crop safe from predators and pests, any tools or supplies you need to purchase to tend and harvest your crop, the cost of transport, the cost of cleaning your crop and the cost of storing it.

On the other hand, the argument that most of us would make is that flavour and provenance are all important. Not only does home-grown food taste so much better, the grower has confidence that no unpleasant pesticides or herbicides have been applied and that the crop hasn’t been in cold storage for months, or washed in chlorine solution, or treated with a retardant to stop it ripening …

And home-grown carrots are lovely, because you can lift them when the are small and sweet and dense with flavour, and they are as sweet as a fruit. No need to cook them, just wash and eat!

What’s your favourite value-added crop?

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes