Plotting and planning on the plot

Hurrah! 201 has new bunting!

And what are we celebrating? Nothing, yet, although the tops of the first earlies have just peeked through the soil so we certainly hope to be celebrating potatoes soon. What we intend to celebrate is the moving of the brassica cage, seen at the bottom left of this photo. Hopefully, when I next post, it will magically appear at top left! We need to move it for crop rotation purposes, so that we don't end up with club root in our brassicas.

However, for that magic to happen, not a little blood, sweat and tears has to happen first. We have to dig it out where it’s bedded in, and then one of us stands one side of the fence, one the other, and we ‘walk’ it up the allotment to its new home. Why do we have to walk it over the fence, which is obviously a complicating factor?

Um, because my wonderful new triumphal arch means we can’t carry it up the path … and we've got crops on both sides of the path that can't be walked on so we can't take it either side of the arch either.

Sigh.

Bit of a planning failure there, eh?

Labels: allotment -crops, allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-first-earlies, allotment-paths

Winter colour on allotments

What colour would you call this path? I have to say that when I saw it last week I felt a bit … dazzled? It just seems too garish for an allotment, to me at least. Still, it’s not my path so I don’t have to worry about it.













On the other hand, a colour I’m particularly happy to see is this lovely shade of purple which is glowing gently from the brassica corner – my purple Brussels sprouts didn’t blow at all and look lovely, tightly-budded little beauties that they are. I wonder why though? Do they take up nitrogen better than the green ones or perhaps they need less of it? I have no idea why they stayed as tight as buttons while the green Brussels sprouts with which they are inter-planted went off in big rose-like blowing frenzies. Does anybody else know what the answer is?

I’ll tell you what though, that dried blood did the trick. Once I’d picked off all the blown sprouts (and stir fried them, waste not, want not!) and sprinkled dried blood and watered it in (and what a stinking job that is) the sprouts higher up the green Brussels stems are just as unblown as the purple ones. Lesson learned for next year: stake better, lime more, and ensure that if they start to blow I take remedial action on day one.

I suspect that to keep the colour in the purple Brussels they will need to be steamed rather than boiled, so I might try a test run this weekend when I go up to get some more Jerusalem artichokes to make soup. I want to have purple vegetables on our Christmas dinner table, and I’m hoping for both purple sprouting broccoli and purple Brussels sprouts. The first broccoli floret has appeared, so the timing is looking good.

Still no frost to kill off the whitefly though … but lots of rain to wash them away. And we lifted our bean frame this week, so that we can put it in its new location once we’ve manured the soil where it’s going to go. If it every stops raining, we might be able to get on with things a bit!

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-brussels-sprouts, allotment-paths, allotment-whitefly

Seeds, Awards, Ice, Parquet

We have 22 celeriac seedlings! Can you see them? Don’t worry if you can’t, it’s not your eyes, they are incredibly tiny, spindly things (can that be right?)




Anyway, going from the miniscule to the hefty, here’s a picture of the ‘parquet’ going down in front of the shed – it’s old bits of fence post (some of them have hefty nails hammered flat on the side that’s sunk in the sand) painted with whatever dribs and drabs of woodstain happened to be lying around. It looks wonderful, if I say so myself, and turned out to be a great way to use up bits of wood that would otherwise be burnt or go to landfill.




And from the hefty to the strange … there was a defunct wormery on the plot when we arrived, and this weekend we found this strange ice had formed on top of it water in it – now these shapes aren’t in any way part of the wormery so we don’t know why they happened. Ghost worm art, maybe?



Now then, how’s your plot? Because it’s that time of year when nominations are made … The Observer has a new Ethical Garden category which you can enter, online, until March 9th and somebody gets to win a £500 voucher for Hen and Hammock, which I assume isn’t a pub, nice though that idea is. Anyway, it’s a chance for those of us who care about sustainability and the environment to get our gardens and/or recreational gardens (that’s what allotments can be classed as if they are not primarily used for crops) into the public eye.

If it appeals to you, then you can enter or nominate somebody else here. And I wish everybody the very best of luck!

Labels: allotment-awards, allotment-ice, allotment-paths, allotment-seedlings

Allotment tasks – December

This is the month to start forcing rhubarb. The simple way to do it is to set a large bucket or dustbin over the hibernating crown to encourage the fresh, pink shoots to form – they do this better in darkness. A good mulch of straw or well rotted manure or compost cast over the crown before covering creates extra warmth to speed up the process further. As we now have a greenhouse (hurrah) and we’ve dug up and transplanted some crowns this year, we took one good root home, left it out in the frost for a couple of nights (this apparently accelerates the new growth. I am not convinced, as all the other advice is to protect crowns from frost but hey, it’s an experiment!) and then potted it up in a large pot with good compost, covered the pot with a black box, and set it in the greenhouse. The box exclude the light while the heat in the greenhouse should drive the forcing process so that we end up with slim, pink rhubarb as early as March!

If the weather is mild and expected to continue so for a couple of days, you can sow broad beans in a sheltered spot. The advantage of this, assuming you can keep the mice away from what they always view as an early Christmas feast, is that aphids find the tops of overwintered broad beans much less attractive than spring sown ones, because the overwintered leaves are much tougher.

this is also the ideal time to lay new paths, as can be seen in the proud example of the new plotholders on plot 254. And if the soil is neither frozen or waterlogged, you can always dig, and dig and dig …

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-december, allotment-forcing-rhubarb, allotment-paths

November – no end to allotment tasks!

I don’t quite understand why, when everybody else seems to be winding down, and Soilman has even gone into hibernation, I seem to be getting busier!

Partly it’s because the days are so short now, that I’m lucky to get half an hour of gloom on the allotment when I’ve finished my ‘real’ work, so everything seems to take forever to get done, and partly it’s because a new allotment, particularly one that’s been neglected, just has so much that needs to be done.

So far we’ve:

1. sort of sorted the shed – more to be done in Spring, but it’s at least watertight now
2. begun to restore the cold frame – or at least, Tony has, while I just make admiring noises
3. cleared about a tenth of the runners, slugs, bindweed and thistles from the strawberry bed – that’s my job, and horrible, fiddly, backbreaking work it is too
4. started to clear the brick path – very satisfying, especially as it means less risk of slipping on something slimy and end up on your a**e!
5. laid some shuttering to make new paths – again, very satisfying, it gives the allotment a sense of structure.

What we haven’t begun on yet is:

1. mending dodgy fence posts
2. laying a new hardstanding
3. cutting back the holly tree
4. moving the compost bins
5. refixing the entire far end fence which is now leaning against the rest of the fence, looking pathetic
6. any planting
7. any digging.

If we had brassicas this year then this is also what I’d be doing:

1. keeping my Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli and kale tidy and weed-free, and staking the outer Brussels against wind damage
2. sowing broad beans is something I’ve already done on Duncan’s allotment, although how many will come up, given that we appear to have mice, is anybody’s guess.

I wonder if things will slow down in December ...?

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-fences, allotment-paths, allotment-tasks-november

The view from the allotment

Yes, we’ve got a new plotshare! We’re really excited about it, and about the ideas that the original plotholders have for the site, which include a little green space for their kidlets to range semi-freely while Mum and Dad work on the plot – it’s quite wonderful.

Perhaps one of the most wonderful things is the view from ‘our’ plot into that of our back neighbour, who clearly thinks (as I do) that allotments should be beautiful as well as useful. Her plot has been established for many years, of course but it’s a reminder of how well things can work out if you plant with an eye for attractiveness as well as utility.

We have practical things to do first though, including establishing some permanent paths (currently there are grass paths, which require a lot of maintenance and can be treacherous in winter) and getting some windbreaks up, as the courgette and bean seedlings are being battered around by today’s ‘light breezes’ which is Sussex for ‘mild gale’ anywhere else! And there’s a shed to be got and installed, seedlings to be planted up, half a plot to be rotavated, a terrible mess of bindweed and couchgrass and other nasties in one corner, totally strangling what used to be some rather nice plum trees … there’s a lot of work ahead, and I can’t wait!

Labels: allotment-paths, allotment-share, beans, courgettes, new-allotment, plum-trees