First earlies in the ground at last!

We finally got to plant out our first earlies on Monday, or at least the first batch – we got two rows in the ground, running North to South, where the peas were planted last year. Our crop rotation, given that we’re still bringing areas of the plot into cultivation, is that the potatoes and the peas/beans have essentially swapped places from where they were last year, our brassicas will be going into the area of the plot which was rotovated in November and nearly everything else is going into raised beds.

I’m happy to have made a start on the spuds, although I can tell that Himself and I will fall out over the rest of the planting because I want to make sure we have enough room in the best soil for our maincrops, which were a dismal failure last year through running out of room and having to plant them in relatively unimproved soil that hadn’t been used for several years as far as we can tell.

Himself, on the other hand, has confidence that we’ll get all the potatoes: first earlies, second earlies and maincrops into well prepared soil in good time. As earlies don’t keep as well as maincrops, I’m willing to throw away a row of first earlies that are ready to be planted, in favour of getting a row of maincrops into that spot in a few weeks. He isn’t.

My argument is a good one, I think. It’s that we actually only got 8lb of maincrop potatoes for our 5lb sowing – which is a truly pathetic result by anybody’s measure! His argument is that we’re better organised this year, which is year 2 on plot 201; the soil is in better nick; and we won’t be co-working on another plot so our energies won’t be divided.

I wonder who will win?

Labels: allotment-first-earlies, allotment-potatoes

First early potatoes and February weather

I can’t believe that some of our allotment-holders have already put their earliest spuds in, but they have!

I won’t be planting mine until at least mid-March, but this allotment-holder appears to know something I don’t – I fully expected to find some containerised potatoes had been planted on site over the weekend, as I know a lot of our plot-holders are very keen to start off first earlies in tubs and sacks, but I was utterly gobsmacked to find these substantial rows of potatoes already well earthed up.

I shall track down the gardener and find out what variety he or she has planted and what aftercare they use, as my soil stills seems too cold and wet to make a good base for potato planting, but perhaps there’s something to be learnt from this grower? Or perhaps they are just wildly optimistic …

Labels: allotment-potatoes

Early potatoes and how to grow them

Quite a few people we know don’t grow potatoes and I can understand why – they take up a lot of space, and require a lot of work, compared to simple plant and harvest crops like carrots or beans. However, there are good reasons to grow potatoes if you have the room: you can invest in non-supermarket varieties that are often tastier than shop bought ones, you can grow enough to store for the winter months when potatoes can become expensive or get the earliest croppers which taste delicious and are much cheaper to grow than to buy!

Very early potatoes are called ‘earlies’ when you grow them yourself and ‘new’ when you buy them in the shops. They are planted at almost the same time as maincrop (standard) potatoes but you harvest them much earlier in the year.

Soil preparation is essential – if you’ve dug the ground over and added as much compost as you can, you should get a good potato harvest. Last year we ended up putting seed potatoes in ground that hadn’t been adequately dug – it really wasn’t worth it as we barely got a crop from them.

Position is key – potatoes like sun, and are best grown in north-south rows to make the most of it – they need lots of space and you can’t grow them in the same ground two years running without risking the development of diseases that will run rampant through your crop. Be aware that potatoes and tomatoes are both part of the nightshade family, so you can’t grow potatoes in soil that held tomatoes in the previous year.

Chit (encourage sprouts on) your seed potatoes by putting them in a cool, light, airy position from around mid February . Lots of people put their seed potatoes in egg boxes – I used to, but now I just put them in a shallow tray and have done with – it doesn’t seem to affect their ability to sprout!

I know people who rub off all but three sprouts. I never bother with that either, although it is supposed to produce fewer but larger potatoes. The key thing is to ensure that the growing sprouts are green – if they are yellow or white the plant isn’t getting enough light.

In most places you’ll want to set your potatoes out around mid March – early potatoes need to be about a foot from each other, with the rows about two feet apart.

And later on we’ll get to the mysteries of earthing up …!

Labels: allotment-chitting-potatoes, allotment-new-potatoes, allotment-potatoes

And yet more snow covers the allotment …

About two inches of fresh snow fell in the night, so instead of being able to tell you anything about our planting regime, I’ll talk a little about our Wilja potatoes which are sprouting nicely in their brown paper bag – a bit worrying really, as they will have sprouts like triffids by the time we can actually get them in the ground at this rate1

We chose Wilja because it’s a second early with a high yield. It also has a good even shape and after wrestling with Pink Fir Apple last year I really fancy a potato that isn’t quite so knobbly as it was a bit of a pain to dig and clean the Pink Fir to be honest.

Wilja is said to be a good fryer and boiler and also suitable for roasting, and it used to be grown, traditionally, on Romney Marsh which implies it doesn’t mind a bit of standing water and as our second earlies are going into the lowest part of the plot (which is currently under six inches of snow) we might have gambled on exactly the right variety for us this year! It also has good resistance to common scab and drought and is only moderately susceptible to blight. As it’s a second early, we’re happy to try it as the blight generally affects maincrops most.

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-snow, wilja

Still no allotment work

As you can see, 201 is sitting comfortably under another blanket of snow. So while we can’t be doing much, we’re reflecting on what we will be doing when we get the chance. So, starting in reverse order, and as I’ve mentioned before, we had a terrible maincrop potato failure in 2009, mainly because we hadn’t had time to prepare the soil properly.

This year our maincrops are Cara: a white skinned potato that has pink eyes and a creamy coloured flesh. In texture they are ranked as waxy, which means they stay firm when cooked and keep well. They are good for boiling and very good for baking and are said to be slug resistant. They are a later Maincrop which suggests we’ll be harvesting closer to October than September, and like most later cropping varieties they will tend to be larger and therefore more suitable for baking, than earlier croppers.

We’re hoping, if the weather clears soon, to put plenty of manure and compost in our maincrop planting site, to enrich and break up the soil ready for the potatoes to be planted out, once they’re chitted, around early April.

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-snow

Allotment work indoors

One of the things about allotment life that amazes me is how much ‘stuff’ goes on behind the scenes and is known to only a few. I’m not talking about arcane practices with comfrey or potting compost, but the vast amount of hard work done by allotment committees up and down the land.

I had a taste of it myself this week, spending a couple of hours ‘bagging up’ in our allotment shop. We take orders from our allotment-holders for a wide range of potatoes, onions and shallots, and when the orders arrive in HUGE bags and sacks, we then weigh out the orders we’ve received and pack them individually in (environmentally friendly) paper bags. People can then come in and collect their orders from the shop and get on with chitting their potatoes and planting their shallots, confident that they’ve only had to order what they can use, and that we’ve cast our eyes over each 25 kilo sack and rejected any that didn’t come up to the mark.

If you’ve ever had a seed or plant order arrive rotten, or dried up, or damaged, then you know how annoying it can be, not least because a lot of the time the company has sold out of your preferred variety and you have to take a substitute or a refund – neither of which is palatable when you’d hoped to have your first choice of veggies. And with spuds in particular, people have strong preferences and it can be very difficult to find new supplies of chitting potatoes if you’re let down, so you end up with something you don’t like nearly as much, just to get potatoes into the ground for the summer. So we safeguard our allotment-holders by ordering in bulk to get the best quality at the best price.

If you’re an allotment-holder with an allotment shop, spare a thought for the people who try and make sure you’ve got everything you need to make your plot productive: it’s a real labour of love!

PS in case you were wondering, that's Len, not me, I haven't been misleading you about my gender, I promise!

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes, allotment-shallots

Next year’s allotment potatoes and onions

We’ve placed our order for seed potatoes, onions and shallots. In potatoes we chosen:

• Maris Bard: which is said to be a smooth white skinned variety and white flesh and the traditional new potato taste. A very early and heavy cropper with good drought resistance
• Wilja: this is our second early potato, it’s a heavy cropper with medium dry texture with a good frying colour and great for boiling
• Cara: which is a round and rather pink tuber especially round the eye areas. It’s a very good baking spud and withstands drought. The claim in that it’s highly disease resistant, including the dreaded and horrible blight.

Our shallots will be Golden Gourmet – a yellow shallot that is resistant to bolt and is said to store well through the winter and our onions are going to be Sturon – an early onion which should form medium sized globe-shaped with very good keeping qualities so it stores far into winter. The brochure says it offers good bolting resistance although bolting hasn’t been an issue for us so far.

This is a completely different set of varieties to the ones we grew this year and in part we’ve done that deliberately to see how different varieties compare on our soil. Our 2009 potatoes were:

• Accent – first early, highly productive – as shown in the photograph above!
• Pink Fir Apple – lovely salad potatoes, high cropping for us, but a bit of a fiddle to clean and prepare.
• Desiree – performed really badly for us, but that’s probably because our soil wasn’t as well prepared as we would have wished.

We don’t know what our shallots were - they were the tag end of a bag given to us by a neighbour, and we grew overwintering onions which we decided weren’t a great idea as although they are juicy and tasty, they don’t offer the same keeping qualities we’d like.

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seed-potatoes, 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

Gluttier and gluttier – excess allotment crops

According to the Allotment Cookbook by Kathryn Hawkins, you can boil new potatoes, drain and toss in melted butter, and put in a freezer bag, and they will survive being frozen for 6 months. Has anybody tried this method?

I’m making lots of potato ‘things’, like our favourite mashed potato laced with strong cheese, steamed red chicory, bacon bits and chopped onion, which is then packed into containers and frozen – lovely with summer cabbage, for example. I’ve never tried freezing whole new potatoes though and the idea has its appeal.

Our Pink Fir Apple potatoes have gone insane – they must have heard me saying I was disappointed and bucked their ideas up, because we have bushels of them and they are delicious, but even I can’t eat potatoes more than twice a day. We’ve had potato soup, potato salad (hot and cold), potato and cucumber soup (cold), potato mash, fried potatoes with shallots and baked new potatoes with mint dressing. So new ideas would be welcome.

And even as I speak, the borlotti beans are making a bid for glut status – although I know what to do with them: dry them!

Labels: Allotment Cookbook, allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-potatoes, Kathryn Hawkins, pink fir apple potatoes

Allotment new potatoes and running repairs in the rain

Today we got everything the wrong way round. We arrived at the plot with a short list of necessary chores, the most important of which was getting the new lid on the cold frame. But we got seduced by the glories of sweetcorn. We have never grown sweetcorn before and it was not the best germinator in the greenhouse so we never really expected to see this on our plot. It’s amazing. Sweetcorn. Wow! If it tastes half as good as it looks I shall be one happy allotment holder – fresh corn on the cob is one of my greatest pleasures, as are barbecued cobs with a black pepper and butter dressing.
Anyway, back to what we were supposed to be doing. Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago, when we had the lids propped open to allow our nascent cucumbers some air circulation, a rogue breeze (of about gale force seven!) smashed the heavy glass-glazed lids down onto the frames, causing massive damage. So Himself has spent the last couple of weeks reglazing the panelled lids, moaning on a regular basis about the fact that they were made (by the original plot-holders, not by us) from soft wood so they have warped and twisted in the heat and rain, and today we took the second one up to replace on the frame.

But as I say, the sweetcorn seduced us, so then we had a good look at everything, and then we had a chat with June who was walking past, and they we decided to dig a couple of potato plants and then …

This happened. The reason that the church in the distance looks blurry is the heavy, heavy rain. The reason the sky looks so leaden is the heavy thunderclouds that were hammering and, well, thundering, overhead. I couldn’t manage to get a picture of the lightning, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
And you can see the second lid to the cold frame, leaning against the raspberry supports, can’t you? So you will understand that we had to stand, with icy rain sliding down the back of our necks (me) or hitting us right in the eyes (Himself), with thunder deafening us and lightning making us jump out of our skins, until each of the six fiddly little screws was fastened on the fiddly little hinges and the lid could be lowered into place. On the plus side we didn’t have to water the cucumbers, the rain did it for us. On the minus side we did have to empty out our shoes before getting in the van. Yes, it rained that much … summer, isn’t it fun?

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-cucumbers, allotment-potatoes, allotment-sweetcorn

Tomatoes and tomato blight

The current hot weather and last night’s storm have left us expecting to see Phytophthora infestans when we get up to the allotment. It’s the fungus which causes both tomato and potato blight and in both cases the warning signs are the same, brown marks on the leaves which spread quickly and then the tomato fruit will begin to brown and rot away. Underground, if it attacks the potatoes, they too will begin to rot and the blight can spread from one plant to another with astonishing speed.

The fungus is carried by wind and rain and takes a real hold during Mill’s periods which are times of warmth and dampness. It takes around three or sometimes four days of warm and wettish weather to allow the fungus to proliferate, so the first rule to obey during warm times is to water when necessary only and not to spray water on the leaves of tomato or potato plants – water the roots only.

There’s no organic treatment for this kind of blight, so we’ve been having a low level debate about whether to try to prevent/control it or not. We lost all our tomatoes on 235 last year to tomato blight.

To try and treat it, you have to destroy infected plants in their entirety – ripping them out and removing them from the site, preferably burning them to destroy the fungal spores which will otherwise lurk in the soil for years. You can also try to preserve your tomatoes by spraying them with a copper treatment (which is not organic) BEFORE the blight appears. This means that 24 hours into what might become a Mills Period you have to spray … and that’s what we’re debating, because you can always hope that dry weather will slow the progress of the fungus and that by planting with good spacings and removing and destroying any parts of the plant that have blight, you can save your crop – but only if the weather cooperates!

We haven’t reached a decision yet – remain organic and possibly lose our tomatoes or spray with copper and lose my organic principles? Watch this space!

Labels: allotment-potato-blight, allotment-potatoes, allotment-tomato-blight, allotment-tomatoes

Allotment tasks: Earthing-Up and Hardening-Off

I hope I’m not the only person who hates earthing up potatoes? It’s one of those things that I suspect may separate the allotment diehard from the allotment wimp. Possibly there are people out there (and not all of them blokes in flat caps and wellingtons) saying ‘A a good day’s earthing-up is my idea of Heaven’ and really meaning it.

I really do hate earthing up potatoes. It’s back breaking work (particularly if your soil is 99.9% clay, as our is at present) and although it looks lovely to see the neat rows of potatoes, with their piled heaps of earth, the process of getting there involves hours of heavy labour with a rake and such complex situations as not treading on the next row to be earthed-up as you work. And even if that makes me an allotment wimp, I shall be a wimp till the end of my days.

Hardening off plants is another kind of endurance test, but it’s a bit more like the old days, before people had tumble dryers and automatic washing machines and your Granny (or your Mum, depending how old you are) used to keep an eye on the weather once the washing was on the line, because rain would destroy a whole day’s hard labour over the washtub and mangle.

Hardening-off is the process of getting tender, usually indoor or greenhouse raised plants ready for the rigours of a British Spring. I don’t mind it so much as earthing up spuds, but I do get fed up with running out to check:

1. The dogs haven’t cocked their legs on the tray of borlotti beans that is on the ground because it’s too tall for the outdoor staging
2. That the slight crashing sound wasn’t a frog leaping from the pond into the same beans
3. That the wind isn’t so strong it’s threatening to snap the stems of the sunflowers that are out for the first time today (it’s not too strong – and a certain amount of wind is good for making seedlings grow shorter and develop stronger stems, that’s why commercial flower growers have fans over their seedling trays)
4. That the rain is only light (wrong, it’s torrential – all nine trays of tomatoes, beans [four kinds], herbs, hardy trees and violas have to be taken indoors)

Then, half an hour later, the rain stops and you start all over again …

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-hardening-off-plants, allotment-potatoes

April seedlings and potatoes

As of this morning we have nine sweetcorn seedlings, 23 dwarf kale seedlings, and more than 50 petits pois seedlings all springing out of their pots.

And we have five rows of maincrop potatoes (Desiree and Pink Fir Apple) which we planted using a bulb dibber, which is so much easier than trenching them. We’d already planted two rows of first earlies on 201, one row on 235 (and half a dozen tubers went into tyres on both sites, which should be harvestable about a fortnight earlier than those in the ground) and two rows on each plot of second earlies.

There’s a horrible fact about potatoes – when you’re planting them, it seems like you are planting acres, but when you have planted them, and you step back and look at the results, it’s never quite enough to get you through the year without buying spuds.

We also had to earth up our first earlies – they had suddenly put out masses of lovely strong foliage, so that was more back-breaking work with the rake, to cover the potatoes thoroughly so they don’t go green. Another horrible fact about potatoes is that while you can sometimes find easier ways to plant them, I don’t think there is ever an easy way to earth them up – just plain old hard work.

Labels: allotment-potato-tyres, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seedlings

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

Allotment Seedlings

Planting and growing has begun! We have three trays of Meteor pea seedlings waiting to go in, but they’ll need some kind of cover or they will simply rot in the ground and the greenhouse is burgeoning (isn’t that a great word?) with leeks, both Babbington and annual, broad beans, alpine strawberries and sweet peas.

We’ve put out our first early potatoes – some went into tyre stacks three weeks ago, but the rest of the first earlies went out last weekend. The first early carrot is showing in the raised bed that is covered with horticultural fleece, and the currants are all budding beautifully. At least two of the transplanted raspberries have started to bud too – mind you, that means that at least twelve haven’t budded yet. I gave them some potash, to try and encourage them.

I put potash around the strawberries too and dug out some more free-ranging raspberries – I don’t know why I bother mentioning it, I’m going to be saying ‘I dug out some more raspberries’ for the next five years at least. These were in the spot where I want to plant sweetcorn.

But still I’m panicking about getting seeds started – why does everything have to start off at once? Himself has been busy thinking about runner bean supports and also a brassica cage, because the horrible, awful, nasty pigeons are dead keen on picking purple sprouting, calabrese and even kale, and strewing the remnants on the ground. So a cage to keep them off seems like a good investment.

Labels: allotment broad beans, allotment-fruit, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seedings

Quick and dirty allotment gardening

Actually, that’s misleading. There’s a lot of dirty but not much quick I’m afraid. The past week has meant every spare minute we’ve been digging. Digging. Digging.

And it’s really tough digging too, as plot 201 hasn’t been worked for at least a year, probably two. Compared to Duncan’s plot, where the soil has been turned and rotovated at least twice it’s like digging through rock when it’s dry and clay when it’s wet, but it will be worth it when we put our early potatoes in.

What do you think of our scarecrow? He’s called The Green Man and I rather like the idea of an abstract bird scarer – whether the birds will actually be scared by a cartoon man is another matter ….

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-potatoes, allotment-scarecrow

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

July is bursting out all allotment

We’ve got more potatoes than we know what to do with plus beetroot, onions, garlic and rhubarb going into the freezer. Not bad for a first year. What we don’t have are some of the lovely rarities that other people have managed to establish – see picture!

I really want a vine that we can harvest for grapes – dessert grapes might be pushing it a bit, but we could grow wine grapes I reckon. Of course, to succeed we’d need to have a greenhouse (and we don’t even have a shed yet!) so I’m overreaching myself more than a little bit, but the idea’s been planted and now I am browsing catalogues to see which would be the best variety.

Of course you can make wine from anything (the rhubarb in the freezer for example) and now my mind is also running over what crops might be convertible to a cheeky little vintage in a few year’s time. Do you make wine from allotment crops? If so, what’s your best recipe?

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-recipes, allotment-wine

Rotten allotment tasks

Things I have discovered I hate doing:

Digging potatoes in the wet – I know we should have got them out of the ground when the weather was fine, but remember, strictly speaking they aren’t our potatoes: Duncan grew them and we felt he should have first dibs. Then the heavens opened and it doesn’t matter who dibs now, the spuds are lurking sullenly in clayey, gluey soil and are horrible to dig out. They have to be washed in a bucket of water before we take them home, where the first ones we dug could actually be laid out in the sun to toughen for a few hours before transporting home. If you can do that, they keep a lot better, but if you leave them in the sun for more than about eight hours they start to go green. Fat chance of that, this week!

Weeding in the wet – Yes, you can hoe, but if you have clay soil like us, even the sharpest hoe gets clogged with clay very quickly, so bucket number two (the one that doesn’t have potatoes in soak) has to be used to wash the clay off the hoe every few feet. Ugh.

And I hate not being able to get my storm kettle going ...

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-rain, allotment-tasks-july, allotment-weeding

Potato Heaven

Perhaps you have to be an allotment holder to develop this particular reflex, it’s the one that springs into action when you see the first potato flowers appear above the big green leaves and it’s a kind of manic grinning superiority. It stays on your face as you wander around neighbouring plots, noting that your potatoes are ‘ahead’ and only fades if you come across an allotmenteer who has more floriforous potatoes than you.

The humble spud may seem an unlikely cause of such joyous facial displays, but anybody who has eaten ‘fresh from the ground’ potatoes knows that there is nothing to compare to them – even artichokes and asparagus are hardly more wonderful than the taste of home grown spuds.

And the reason I’m going on about them is that we met somebody yesterday who might want some assistance on their plot – I’m not going to say too much about it, because I might jinx things, but one of the ways I measure the real nature of an allotment holder is their potatoes. Anybody can grow potatoes, there’s no trick to it, but taking pleasure and pride in your spuds is the mark of somebody who doesn’t have pretensions about allotments (which I once heard described by a truly pretentious woman as ‘my little potager’) and who knows the true value of fresh home-grown veg. The person we met yesterday bent over his potato rows and smiled the smile of a happy potato grower, so I hope he’s going to take to us too, as it made me like him at once.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-potatoes

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 spuds and tomatoes

Why mention potatoes and tomatoes in the same sentence? Because they are related! Yes, both are part of the nightshade (solanaceae) family, although you’d never know it to look at their fruits – the potato flower does give some hint of the relationship though.

Not only is it still fine to plant maincrop potatoes (traditionally the cut-off date has been considered to be the middle of April) but if your soil hasn’t warmed up, you may actually get a better crop from putting them in a bit later, as cold soil will check the development of early crops. If you did get them in the ground early and if you planted early potato varieties, don’t forget that you still need to protect the emerging plants from any frosts that might still be on the horizon, as potatoes can be severely damaged by a late frost. The easiest way to do this will small potato plants is to draw a little soil from the edges of the bed over the whole plant it will shove its way through in a few days without any difficulty – larger plants will need a cloche or horticultural fleece cover for the frost-threatening nights, but don’t leave it on in the day. Leave 15 inches between each potato for these later crops, using a generous amount of well rotted garden compost to cover the entire length of the trench before raking the soil back over.

You should also wow tomato seeds about now because they need a little heat to germinate, you can keep them in a heated greenhouse, or on a windowsill or in a bottom heated propagator. Water the compost well, scatter the fine seed over the top and cover thinly with vermiculite or sand. When two sets of 'true' leaves appear, pot them on. Plant them slightly deeper than before so that the baby leaves (scientifically termed the cotyledens) are just sitting on the surface. Keep them on a warm windowsill and turn them every day.

Potato courtesy of baronsquirrel

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-tomatoes

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

Really rotten allotment jobs in February

There can’t be a nastier time of year than February, on the allotment. I know I should be trying to find the good things about this month, but I do really, really, really detest almost everything that has to be done this month.

The worst job is turning over last year's potato bed and looking for those titchy leftover potatoes that hid in the ground and – if you don’t remove them – can spread diseases or pass on blight to this season’s crop. They have a lovely name: volunteers, but it’s a perfectly rotten job, back-breaking, time-consuming and fiddly.

The seed flats and everything above three inch pots are going to be used from next month onwards, and although every November I say I’m going to wash and sterilise all the pots at the end of the growing season, so they are ready for spring, I never do, and so I end up ferrying bagloads of flats and pots backwards and forwards as this is a task much more easily done with hot water at home.

The final horrible task for February is spreading black polythene over the first beds we’ll be planting next month, so that the soil underneath gets a chance to warm up before we begin to plant out seedlings that will be protected by cloches.

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-seeds, allotment-tasks-february

Spuds, spuds, glorious spuds

You’re supposed to start chitting your potatoes from late January in warmer parts of the country or in February in cooler areas or in other words, about six weeks before you intend to plant them. To chit a potato, find the rounder, blunter end that has a number of ‘eyes’ and stand each potato with it’s blunt end up in trays of sawdust or old egg boxes, giving them plenty of natural light. When the shoots are about half an inch to an inch long, you can plant them out. Early potatoes also take up the least room, so if you are short of space, these are the ones to concentrate on. From about mid-March, around here at least, you should dig a trench four to six inches deep, give it a sprinkle of fertiliser and set the potatoes about a foot apart with about sixteen inches between rows, taking care not to break the shoots on the tubers and make sure they point upwards. Cover them with soil but don’t stamp it down, just firm lightly at this point.

When shoots appear above ground you need to earth up each row by covering it with a ridge of soil so that the shoots are just buried – repeat whenever the shoots appear and you should have excellent potatoes to lift from June right through to September, if you’re lucky!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-potatoes, allotment-preparations, seed potatoes