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

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

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