Allotment planting February

We finally managed to get our Golden Gourmet shallots in the ground – just in time for predicted snow in the week! We’ve sown three rows, with some sand added to the soil to give them the lighter conditions they like, and we’ve covered the rows with a little netting because we’ve had problems in the past with pigeons pecking out both shallots and onions. No photo, because, seriously photos of shallots being planted are really not interesting! What I do is scrape away a little soil and drop the shallots in – making sure they are root end down – and then just rearrange the soil around them. Lots of books recommend that you ‘simply push the shallot into the soil’ but they don’t presumably, have the clay that we do and the writers don’t presumably, mind losing a few shallots to rot as you push them down onto what turns out to be a stone, puncturing the bulb, which then sits in the cold, and usually damp, winter soil, gently mouldering away instead of growing. I am a pinch-penny gardener and I think the extra couple of seconds required to scrape a shallow trench into which to drop them is worth the effort!

I also transferred two barrows of lovely manure from the heap outside the shop to the bed for our first early potatoes – it’s a pretty long walk with a barrow so two a day is the most I can manage. I’ll need six barrows for the firsts, seconds and maincrops, so I’ll do two a weekend, and still have a couple of spare weekends to dig it in before I have to think about planting the first earlies.

In the greenhouse we’ve started off Feltham First and Meteor peas in toilet roll inner tubes (aka anti-mice devices), a tub planting of Nantes carrots which I’ll hope to be harvesting as baby salad carrots in six weeks time, and two trays of Elephant leeks for transplanting into pots when they are two inches tall, and then again to the plot a little later on. All in all it’s been a productive weekend!

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-leeks, allotment-peas, allotment-shallots

Allotment Learning Curve – what we won’t do next year

When everything is so busy, and the thistles are growing faster than almost anything else on the plot, even though we thought we’d pulled every last one of them up in November, and when, if you stand still, the bindweed actually grabs your ankles and tries to climb up your leg, it can be difficult to stop and take stock.

But we did.

We sat down and looked at what we’d grown and decided what we need more of, and less of, in 2010.

• First, asparagus peas. Like The Cottage Smallholder we have decided that these are a swizz! The companies that market these as a vegetable should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act (or whatever) as I don’t think even a hungry goat would enjoy them. They are fabulously pretty, and we’ve decided to use up the many seeds we have left as a ground cover crop for any bare soil we have next year – they should work like any other legume and if we cut the tops off to compost, their ground covering behaviour which keeps down weeds, plus the pretty flowers (and the roots left in the soil to convey nitrogen) mean we won’t have entirely wasted our money on them. But we will never, ever eat them again. Vile.

• Second, we won’t grow outdoor tomatoes. Ours have developed blossom end rot through uneven watering – not because we watered unevenly but because deluges of rain, followed by a couple of sweltering days, then more rain made it impossible to give them a regular watering regime. Also, blight is on the next allotment but one to ours, so I reckon they will have it by the end of the week – greenhouse tomatoes only for us next year.

• Third, more peas please! We have some kilos of peas in the freezer, but we could easily have doubled our planting – we do love our peas and there’s never a day when I look at peas and think that I can’t bother with them!

• Fourth, spuds. I think we need more varieties with later croppers to take us through the year. This suggests we need to do more research on the keeping properties of various maincrop potato varieties – we have been very happy with our potatoes this year, apart from the ones grown in tyres which were rubbishy.

And by that point, the bindweed had reached our knees and we had to start moving again or become a permanent fixture on the plot. But the picture is our French bean harvest for the day – excellent! And if you think that’s an odd shadow looming over them, it’s Rebus, the Cairn Terrier, who is very fond of raw French beans and will ‘guard’ the trug all day for a single bean as his reward.

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-peas, allotment-potatoes, allotment-tomatoes, allotment-weeds

Allotment problems: nursery beds, weedkiller and wind

We’ve discovered a problem and it’s self-inflicted. As regular readers will know, there’s a bit if a ‘debate’ between me and Himself. I’m an organic gardener and so is he, until he sees a weed, at which point the strongest possible weedkiller gets bought and sprayed liberally around the place. Of course I don’t know anything about this until he comes home and tells me …

So a few weeks ago, Himself got fed up with me pouring boiling water on the dandelions and thistles, which, to be fair, were popping out of the ground almost faster than I could boil the kettle, and indulged in some herbicidal mania.

And then, about two weeks ago, he planted some red Brussels Sprouts seeds in our nursery bed. Up they came, and two or three days later, they disappeared. At first I thought slugs, but no, there were no tiny stumps left, the seedlings had gone without a trace.

I went to find the herbicide he’d used, but the packet had been thrown away. I’m absolutely sure that the weedkiller stayed on the surface of the soil and, as the tiny plants appeared, coated their leaves and killed them. At first he didn’t agree, but having watched a row of radishes (the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the vegetable world: almost indestructible and a sometimes a little tough to digest) appear and disappear in similar fashion, he’s convinced. It’s a minor tragedy, especially as we used up all the seed …

And the wind on 235 is so much stronger than on 201, which is close to a line of fenced gardens, that the broad beans on the first plot are all growing at an angle and the ones on 201 are still bolt upright. We’d managed to forget this simple fact over the winter, but it’s being forcibly brought home to us by the simple effect of weather on crops. Although, not to boast or anything, we have had our first peas of the season already ...

Labels: allotment-nursery bed, allotment-peas, allotment-weeds

Allotment: pots, watering cans and predators

What I want to know is, what happens to the flowerpots? Is it like the sock monster that eats socks out of the washing machine or is there a genuine flowerpot thief around?

This is the way it goes. I buy forty pots. I take them to the allotment and put them in the shed. The following weekend I decide to transplant something and go to my brand new pot-stock …

… and there are about a dozen left.

I challenge Himself who reminds me that I’ve watched every move he’s made at the allotment in the past week and none of those moves involved pots.

I rack my brains and remember giving a couple of pots to neighbours, and actually, now I come to think of it, potting up a few alpine strawberries and giving them away too, but not 28 of them, for Heaven’s sake! So I go and buy some more pots and the following weekend …

And it was brought home to me very forcibly yesterday that we need a hosepipe on 201. I found myself trudging up and down with watering cans, and even at half-four in the afternoon, it was a hot and wearying task. I don’t want to be doing that twice a week. The thing is, we have an attachment but it’s the wrong one: we have a push-on hose coupler and we need a threaded hose coupler. I remember this every weekend, and then forget all week, until it’s time to do the watering again. This week, even the dog gave up following me and sat at the halfway point, content to point his head in my general direction and thus fool himself he was doing his canine duty in getting under my feet whenever I’m carrying something.

And the slugs have been at our peas again. They don’t bother the first batch we put out at all, which goes to prove that perfect timing can be everything. If you can get a crop to be tall and sturdy, and well-hardened-off, and plant it when two or three days of dry weather are expected, it’s much less attractive to slugs and snails. The second lot of peas were slightly smaller and had to be planted when we knew there would be a heavy dew for several nights and sure enough, they have been slugged almost into submission, despite applications of ash, sand and wildlife friendly slug pellets.

And whenever I straighten up from my watering, this is the view I get, through the pear tree that borders our plot into our 'back' neighbour's plot. Isn't it heavenly?

Labels: allotment-flowerpots, allotment-peas, allotment-watering

Planting Peas on an Allotment

We spent the weekend preparing a runner bean frame (more of that later in the week) and planting peas. I’m of the opinion that you’d can’t have too many peas, and my family generally agrees. Okay, you have to pick peas every day, and okay, you then have to pod them (we aren’t nearly so keen on mange-tout) but even so, our current planting of 76 pea plants is nothing. We have another 140 to go. There are about 28 peas on 235, supported by twiggy branches, and on 201, until Sunday, we had 24 peas growing up a bit of fencing. There were another 24 to go into the ground, which is what I did.

Here’s the pea fencing, which is wire mesh stretched between a metal post banged into the ground and the fence. And below the fence, holes made with a bulb dibber, to put the pea plants into.We grew the peas (Meteor) in toilet roll inners – which allows them to have a really good root development before we put them in the ground. Because we have a bit of a rodent problem, there’s virtually no point planting peas or beans directly in the soil, as the mice dig them up and eat them. Any they miss, they dig up as soon as the first true leaves appear! It seems that growing the peas in this way means that the seedling uses up the pea from which it has grown, making the plant much less attractive to mice - although pigeons still have the occasional rampage.

The seedlings are planted on both sides of the fence and are tall enough when planted out to immediately self-twine themselves onto the fencing. The first row had horticultural fleece to protect them for the first week or so that they were in the ground, but now we hope that the fact that the are close to the fence and other structures will mean that if we do get late frosts (still 12 days to go to our last frost date of 2008) they won't be severe enough to damage the peas, even if they reach them.
Back in the greenhouse there are 100 petits pois being grown two to a paper pot – because they are even smaller than Meteor, we can rip the bottom out of their pots and plant them both at once, if both come up, and the spacing will still be about right for petits pois. And then there are another 40 Meteor, which is another two rows of fencing, which should be ready in about two week’s time.

That means that if we do get any really vicious late frosts, horrible weather or insane attacks by mating pigeons on the peas that are already in the ground, all is not lost.

Labels: allotment-fencing, allotment-peas

Allotment frosts and fears

So, after we spent the weekend planting out peas (Meteor) and second early potatoes (Charlotte), we had a heavy frost on Sunday night.

The peas on 201, which is fully fenced, are planted against a bit of old wire mesh with metal posts to hold it steady and Himself pegged some horticultural fleece over them in a sort of makeshift tent. I have every confidence that they will be fine. But on 235, where there is no fence to provide even limited frost protection, the peas are being supported by twiggy branches and they don’t have any fleece over them. I have every expectation that they will have been blighted by air frost, but I’m hoping I might just be able to nip out the blackened tips and they’ll get back on course.

The broad beans on 235 have been overwintered – they were protected by old double-glazing panels supported on bricks until about a week ago when they got too tall and were pressing their heads against the glass. I know that if they’ve been frost-blighted, they should come back if I take out the tops, which we’d probably do anyway, given that broad bean tops attract blackfly like nobody’s business. The second sowing of broad beans is still in the cold frame at 201, so they should be fine.

The good news, as far as I am concerned, is that I prevented Himself watering the onion sets on 201 on Sunday afternoon – onions don’t need a vast amount of water, and had they been given a good soak, they would probably have lifted from the ground on the frost and could have been wiped out. Of course, all this is speculation until I get up there, this afternoon, to see what the actual damage is.

Our latest frost date is, as far as I can discover, 18 April, so there are plenty more frightening nights ahead. Some plants, like the Japanese quince hedge in the photograph, have a special enzyme that protects them from frost damage: snowdrops have it too, which is why they don't blacken when they are blanketed in snow. I could wish that some clever boffin would hybridise it into spring vegetables ...

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-fences, allotment-frost, allotment-peas, allotment-potatoes, horticultural fleece

Celeriac, cold frames and peas

I’m very worried about our celeriac seedlings – they are, not to be too polite about it – scrawny. Soilman said on his blog that these were difficult creatures to grow, but really I think all ours are going to give up the ghost. The only thing to do is try and give them enough light (without too much heat) and see if they pull through, but I shall be starting off another tray of seeds this weekend, to see if we can’t get a later germinating bunch to still produce tubers by harvest time.

On the other hand, the peas are great – they’ve got to go in the ground this weekend because the second crop we set to germinate last week are already appearing. We can put peas on both 235 and 201 so we stand a good chance of getting a big harvest and as we and Dunk all like peas, I don’t think there will be complaints about overstocking! They freeze well too.

The cold frame on 201 looked ridiculously big when we took over the plot in October last year, this week it’s half full and starting to look worringly small …

You can see rhubarb potted up to share with other allotment holders, wallflowers, those sturdy peas I mentioned earlier, blackcurrant and redcurrant cuttings taking root, the asparagus seedlings I came back with last week and a globe artichoke that seems to be deceased but might still surprise us by putting out some growth. A good haul, I think.

And today's task, after committee meeting, will have to be planting out our first early potatoes - watch this space!

Labels: allotment-artichoke, allotment-asparagus, allotment-celeriac, allotment-cold-frame, allotment-currants, allotment-peas

Seedy Sunday - allotment bargains!

Well, Seedy Sunday was a surprise – I don’t know how many people turned up, several hundred for sure, and a big increase on the previous year that we went, when there were perhaps fifty or so people in the hall – is this a sign of the recession in action, I wonder?

Anyway, we did extremely well, managing to swap for a lot of seeds and only actually buying a packet of Scarlet Emperor runner beans. We swapped to get:

• Ukranian beetroot (used to be available through Suttons Seeds, but now a heritage seed only – produces very good big roots, excellent for grating)
• Waverex peas – very sweet and very productive, as long as we don’t get too hot a spring
• Ragged Jack (also called Russian Red) kale – which is an oak leaf type kale where the leaves have a red tinge and the stems are quite purple – said to be very mild in taste
• Dwarf Green Curled kale – which is the one with the furled dark green leaves which loves difficult or windswept gardens and poor wet soils
• Palla Rossa chicory – that’s the deep red to purple, cricket ball shaped one that you see in shops – apparently it’s very winter hardy and we love it baked with parma ham and strong cheese!

So in other words, we got five packets of seeds for £1.50 which was the cost of entry, and I think that’s a bargain! We also went mad though, and bought slices of cake and cups of tea, which we enjoyed while listening to a female choir, so it wasn’t such a frugal trip as it might have been. But next year I shall take dozens of swaps; I noted what people were looking for this year and reckon I can save lots of popular seed, so I shall really splurge in 2010!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-chicory, allotment-kale, allotment-peas, allotment-seed-swaps, allotment-seedy-sunday

I hate those meeces to pieces

There’s almost nothing that can be done on the allotments right now. On 201 we can’t paint fences because the wood is too wet, we can’t dig because the soil is too wet. On 235 we were chagrined today to discover that something (mice?) has been along and eaten several of the broad beans we carefully protected with double-glazing panels just a week ago.

So we had a mystery: mice, birds, some kind of insect or monopod? We think it’s mice and there’s not a great deal to be done about that, except that June, our neighbour at the other end of the site, when we’re working on 201, gave us a tip. If you grow your beans and peas in pots, when they’ve got a good root system you can just lift off the pea or bean from which they grew and which is what attracts the mice to the plants. So when we plant our spring broad beans in the greenhouse, that’s what we will do. For now, on plot 235, we’ve simply put some more twiggy branches around the plants in case it’s birds, and stuck some bamboo canes that were dipped in Jeyes Fluid around the perimeter of the plants, in the hope that it will confuse the noses of the mice.

And Sunday is Seedy Sunday here in Hove actually, so I hope to find some seeds to swap/buy and I’ll tell you all about it next time!

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-mice, allotment-peas, allotment-pests, allotment-seedy-sunday

Birds and Brassicas

Here’s the first of the allotment holder bird-scarer tactics that I’ve seen on our site, and this is really impressive – not only is the Eagle Owl relatively accurately coloured, it’s life-sized, and by some means that I couldn’t elicit, its head turns from side to side. I’m not sure how long it keeps birds off brassicas, because presumably they work out, sooner or later, that the owl might look like an owl, but it doesn’t smell like an owl or fly like an owl, and I don’t know how much the batteries (I assume it’s batteries) cost to keep it running, but it’s quite compulsive to stand there and watch it, and as long as you do that, you’re scaring the birds for the plot-holder too!

Pea seedling update – 37 peas have germinated to date in the (unheated) greenhouse in toilet roll inners. 28 in the pre-soaked section, 9 in the unsoaked section … seems pretty conclusive to me!

Labels: alllotment-brassicas, allotment-bird-scarers, allotment-peas

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

Pea seeds – to soak or not to soak …

Do you or don’t you soak your pea seeds before germination? Old wives’ tales say that you should (it speeds up and increases germination) or that you shouldn’t (it breaks through the embryonic seed case and allows disease in) or that you should soak them in paraffin (to prevent mice eating the seeds).

So we decided on a bit of an experiment – and one packet of smooth peas (hardy growers but not as sweet as the later wrinkled peas), a whole bunch of toilet roll inners and some compost later … a test!

Fifty-one seeds were soaked overnight in cold water. Fifty-one weren’t. Each seed was planted in a toilet roll inner and put in an unheated greenhouse. The soaked seeds had a blue wavy line drawn around their toilet roll inner for instant identification. That was nine days ago.

Today – two pea seedlings!

But both, rather worryingly, have appeared in the unsoaked tray. Perhaps there will be a better germination rate from the soaked seeds by the end of the experiment, but right now, it looks to me as if soaking pea seeds might be a waste of time. In the spirit of allotment innovation, I’ll keep you posted as the germination progresses (hopefully) and we’ll see what the final outcome is when we get to plant the seedlings out.

Labels: allotment-germination, allotment-overwintering-crops, allotment-peas

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

April showers, peas and pods

Everybody always tells you that early peas can be sown outside from mid March right through to June, but we had that ‘gardener’s gut feeling’ this year that kept us from early sowing, even though we’re on the south coast. And a good thing too, given that frosts and floods have kept us busy in the last two weeks of March! Now we are starting to sow successionally, and using varieties which are both earlies and maincrops, but specifically that do well in Sussex, as the first couple of years of pea harvest here have us the unhappy experience of ‘empty pod’ which is apparently a problem with some varieties here.

Because pea plants can cast quite a shadow over smaller vegetables, we’ve adopted the clever idea of Bert’s Pyramids – allowing us to have lots of plants in good sun with their shade being cast into the pyramid’s interior! Making pyramids from cane isn’t particularly difficult, much to our surprise.

Labels: allotment-empty-pod, allotment-peas, allotment-pyramids