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