Allotment soft fruit

Last year Pat and Steph at Bifurcated Carrots were kind enough to send me some white alpine strawberry seed. At the same time, we had to move 201’s overgrown, highly rampant raspberries into an area where they could be corralled. I planted my strawberry seed and dug up my raspberry canes without any expectation of fruit from either this year.

The seed went into the greenhouse and came up as absolutely tiny plantlets. I grew some on for myself and gave all the others away – some went to the allotment that grows crops for the local hospice, so I hoped that the plants would be given enough time to prove themselves before being dug up to make room for something else.

How very wrong I was to doubt!

Okay, we’re not exactly in a glut situation, but the strawberries never will be a glut crop – they grow a few fruit at a time over a long time frame, so you get just enough to have with your breakfast cereal or to snack on at lunchtime. They are delicious - tangy, almost citrus-flavoured and very soft, more like a raspberry in texture than a strawberry. The raspberries themselves have done very well to fruit at all, so I’m definitely not complaining about their productivity.

So this is with thanks to Pat and Steph, and an encouragement to people who’ve only grown seed from seed companies – it’s not difficult to harvest seed, and it seems quite easy to grow it too. If I can do it, anybody can!

Labels: allotment-alpine-strawberries, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-strawberries

Spring Cleaning the Allotment

Well, not really spring cleaning, but trying to get it looking organised and tidy – if you take photos from just the right angle, so that you miss out the huge top area of rough scrub, thistles and dock, it almost looks as if our plot is going great guns.

Stand in the wrong place, of course, and you can see the heap of rubbish still waiting to be collected by the council, the mouldering heap of compost, threaded with bindweed and nettles, that we’re trying to level, and the mound of holly branches, old pallets and general tat that isn’t going to be collected by the council, or be of any use to us, but is too green or wet to be burnt in the incinerator. Oh well!

So we put up some bunting around the raspberry canes, just because we could, and set a couple more raised beds in place, so that even though there’s nothing in most of them, it looks as if we’re productive - six beds down so far (does that make me sound like Henry VIII or something?). Then, hurrah! The council lorry turned up without warning (as it always does) and dropped off a huge load of wood mulch made from Christmas trees. So now, between our raised beds, we have a lovely fragrant carpet of pine chippings. And because John and Anita on the plot next to hours wanted some chippings too, I was busy with my barrow, wheeling heaps of chippings around the site. Quite the little paragon.

It was committee meeting weekend too, so I’ve been busy typing minutes and drafting letters – it’s a funny thing, but when I took on an allotment I had this mad idea that it would involve LESS sitting at the computer, not more …

Labels: allotment-appearance, allotment-cleaning, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries

Raspberry Bed - the final allotment version

Because I got nagged by email, I have somewhat reluctantly agreed to post a picture of the raspberry bed. It doesn’t look like anything much at this time of year, and certainly I don’t look like anything much, planting raspberries in my pixie hat and old allotment coat! You can see the raspberry canes that Tony dug out of the middle of the strawberry bed - and that I then cut the old wood from and pruned to planting height - laying across the planting string. We offset the plants from one side of the string to the other, to make weeding and harvesting slightly easier and to give each plant the maximum amount of air ventilation and sunlight – if you plant them in straight rows, the front one shields the next from the sun and the second one shields the third, so by halfway down the row, the plants are getting very little sun indeed.

As I say, it looks like nothing much now, but wait until I show you another picture in late Spring, when the canes will be shooting up and the leaf buds will have opened to show the lovely fresh green of new leaves.

We’re still doing lots of structural work – you can see that the cold frame is completely half finished! In other words, the front end of the frame has been reglazed and is ready to be used, but the back end hasn’t had its glass covers put back on yet because we’re waiting for the wooden frame to dry out – it was utterly sodden with rainwater and we don’t want to dry it too fast or it will warp and not fit the base. Initially Tony used webbing on the front end of the frame: it allowed the glass cover to fall back away from the frame without actually hitting the ground on the other side and breaking the glass – that lasted two nights! On the third morning we went up and found that mice had eaten straight through it. Now we have a wooden prop that fits into a narrow groove cut into the front edge of the lid – it means we can’t open it past the vertical, but it also means the mice can’t catch us out by chewing through it. We’re hoping that the regular presence of Rebus the Cairn Terrier will discourage the rodents from visiting us quite so often.

And if possible, I shall report on 235's onion experiment in my next post. I wanted to report today, but the rain and wind were so strong I actually couldn't see the onion bed well enough to check how many seeds had germinated. Oh the joys of a winter allotment!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-winter-onions

Raspberry frames

For such a delicate fruit the raspberry needs a heavyweight support system to give of its best. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks investigating other people’s raspberry cane arrangements, so that we could decide what to do with ours. There’s everything from concrete stanchions with solid metal poles running laterally across them through to individual rustic wooden fenceposts with wires wrapped around them. Raspberries grow to six feet tall, quite comfortably.

And so we're busy, constructing the right frames for our raspberries, whenever the weather allows. This is real winter work.

In spring you plant new canes, tying their stems to the supports and then feed and mulch.

Pruning is a little complicated because you prune summer fruiting varieties in autumn, cutting canes that bore fruit to ground level and tying in the strongest new stems to the wires, then in the cold of winter you trim the tops of the canes to about six inches above the top wire. But autumn fruiting varieties get pruned in mid-winter, cutting every stem to ground level. In either case, planted north-south they usually get the most evenly distributed sunlight although they don’t require actual heat.

Our raspberries have invaded the strawberry bed on 201, or perhaps the strawberries took over the raspberry bed, it’s difficult to tell – in either case, they’ve got to be straightened out and taught to live apart. Both fruits are prone to be invasive though, so I can see we’ll be digging up random fruiting plants for years to come.

I wonder why we say a ‘raspberry’ to denote a rude noise made with the lips?

Labels: allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit