Allotment crops in February

There’s not an awful lot going on around the allotments right now. Some people still have Brussels sprouts and kale, on 201 we have a tiny amount of kale but all our Brussels have been harvested. We have also just finished up our parsnips although there are a couple of celeriac still in the ground, I don’t know if they will be any good or not.

We’ve started off our tomatoes too, or at least our beef tomatoes, in a heated propagator at home. We didn’t grow beef tomatoes last year, and I missed them. Now we have a greenhouse I can feel a bit more confident about getting really big tomatoes to ripen, which they just haven’t the past three years, in the open.

The bad news is, it’s snowed again. Nothing has actually settled, but the ground is frozen, which is rather depressing. However, poking through the solid earth I found that the rhubarb, which is indestructible, is on its way. So we’ll at least have broad beans and rhubarb this year …

Labels: allotment-kale, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-tomatoes

Allotment Tasks for November

We’re going to be harvesting leeks – ours have done well, although next year I might try collaring and blanching them to get even more lovely white tender length.

The great thing about leeks is that they put up with an awful lot: they grow in a wide range of soil conditions, really only objecting to being waterlogged and they are pretty hardy so you can leave them in the ground in winter until you need to harvest them.

We’re leaving the leeks in the raised bed to be harvested between full winter and late spring, as even if the ground freezes, they have a good degree of frost protection from the bed and from the bark mulch that forms a path around the beds, but we’ll be lifting the ones that were planted in the open and then brushing them off, and storing them in a box of sand in the shed, where they will stay nice and fresh for around a month

And we’re lifting a rhubarb to force at home because we love the sweet stems that don’t need peeling. Although you can simply cover a plant as soon as it starts to grow (round about February) we’ve found that if we lift one and overwinter it in the house, we can actually get champagne rhubarb (the thinner, pale pink stems that are strawberry sweet) at the same time as people are only just starting to cover outdoor rhubarb to force them! We pot a crown into a small dustbin and keep it in the porch with another bin over the top to exclude all light. We need to water it a couple of times a month, but because our porch faces south, the crown gets plenty of heat and by the end of February we can be harvesting rhubarb. Then we replant the crown and don’t harvest it at all the next year to allow it to rebuild its strength as forcing exhausts the plants resources.

Labels: allotment-leeks, allotment-rhubarb

Mid-June Allotment Harvest

Okay, I’m bragging, but we’re thrilled with the haul we’re getting from 201, given that we only took it over in October 2008.

We can’t take credit for the strawberries, because they were in place before we got our plot, but the broad beans, peas, sweet peas, radishes and rhubarb are all products of our labour since last autumn!

The broad beans have been a bit of a disappointment – they aren’t cropping nearly as heavily as the overwintered beans that we planted on 235 because the spring-planted seedlings have been hideously attacked by blackfly. So we’ve learnt our lesson for next year: even if the mice do take a few seeds over the winter, it’s much better to plant them in situ because they don’t get the problem with blackfly that the spring planted ones do.

The peas are delicious though, and so far only one batch has made it to the saucepan, all the others have been eaten straight out of the pod. We are pea gluttons and no mistake.

The rhubarb hasn’t produced heavily this year, which is not surprising given that we only transplanted it in November, but it’s very tasty and didn’t bolt in May like the more established rhubarb on other people’s plots did.

So, time for a recipe?

Rhubarb and Strawberry Pudding

6 sticks rhubarb, cut into chunks
250 grams strawberries, hulled and halved
250 grams caster sugar in two 125 gram amounts
75 grams butter or margarine
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
150 grams plain flour mixed with 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
150 ml milk

While the oven is getting to 180 C or gas 4, grease a large square baking dish, wash fruit if necessary, and put in a bowl with 125 grams of sugar, stirring until fruit and sugar are well mixed. I like to use lemon verbena sugar for this recipe (just put some lemon verbena leaves in a jar with white caster sugar and store for around a month, shaking every couple of days to get a lovely lemony scent and savour).

Then pour them into the baking dish and spread them out evenly. Beat the rest of the sugar with the fat and add the egg and vanilla before alternating additions of milk and big spoonfuls of flour. Beat until smooth and pour the batter over the fruit. Should cook in around an hour, or when a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean. Lovely with cream or thick yoghurt and equally good hot or cold. This is not a neat and tidy pudding though, so don’t expect it to look posh, even if it tastes scrummy.

Labels: allotment harvest, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-recipes, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-strawberries

Rhubarb facts, myths and a recipe

Rhubarb is the monster in the garden. It grows as fast as Jack’s beanstalk and is supposedly poisonous. Served as part of school dinners it occasioned grimaces and fake spewing up in the lunch-line when the whisper went back ‘It’s rhubarb and custard for afters’ and it’s the name of a cartoon dog remembered fondly by people of a certain age.

Rhubarb is delicious, but the leaves are poisonous so you shouldn’t be eating them or feeding them to livestock. It is safe to compost them, but if you’re canny, you’ll tear them up a bit to ensure they biodegrade thoroughly. Rhubarb poisoning symptoms include: burning mouth and throat, breathing difficulties, eye pain, stomach ache and nausea, vomiting, coma and seizures – scary or what?

And don’t eat raw rhubarb stalks (as if you would) because although it won’t kill you, it will make you feel wretched.

But rhubarb is also delicious, easy to grow and keeps rabbits out of the plot if you plant it around the edge. And if you make it into a meringue, your family will love you to bits.

Rhubarb Cloud

1 kilo rhubarb
4 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 egg whites
180 grams castor sugar
A small piece of grated fresh ginger, or half a teaspoon of powdered ginger

Preheat oven to 220°c. Cut the rhubarb into thumb-length chunks and then mix it with the brown sugar. Put the mixture in a lightly buttered ovenproof dish and cook for around thirty minutes until it has softened and is giving up its juices.

Put the rhubarb aside while you let the oven cool to 180°c. Beat the egg whites until stiff and as they reach the peaking stage, add the castor sugar in a couple of stages and ginger. Now spread this over the rhubarb and bake for twenty minutes until it has a golden tinge. Serve at once.

Labels: allotment-compost, allotment-recipes, allotment-rhubarb

Alpine Strawberries, Raised Beds and Ruminations

I was expecting to admit defeat on the strawberry germination front. Despite excellent advice and carefully packaged seeds from Patrick and Steph there had been a long period of absolutely nothing happening. But today there are four absolutely tiny seedlings in the white alpine strawberry seed tray! They are minute in a completely different way to the celeriac, which is tall and spindly, the strawberries are tiny but soil-hugging, looking like tiny green pinpricks on the surface of the John Innes #2. I’m very excited, especially as I have more seeds yet to plant, and hope that there will be enough seedlings to be able to raise some for other allotment holders. And we potted up about nine rhubarb at the weekend, so we’re definitely stockpiling goodies to be sold/donated/given away, which is part of our brief in working this plot for the Allotment Society.

Anyway, because the strawberries are just too intsy to photograph, here’s a picture of our first raised beds being installed. The wood was sourced by me from Freecycle, the beds were designed and constructed by Himself from old decking, and I painted them. He hammered them into the ground. I dug the soil over. In other words, it’s been a real collaborative effort. The idea is to have nine of them, all in different colours, but we haven’t agreed on which nine crops they will house yet: definitely celeriac, climbing French beans, summer salads and chicory but the rest are up for grabs, as it were.

What I’ve been ruminating about is the excitement of germination. I’ve been out to the greenhouse three times to look at the strawberries, and I know Himself will go and have a look as soon as he gets home. But having mentioned this to an otherwise good friend today, I was disturbed to find her reaction to be lukewarm. She’s not ‘into’ planting things, she told me. I can’t understand that at all. I’ve tried, but it’s like saying you’re not into breathing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-chicory, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-strawberries

Allotment Perennials

Apart from potting up loads of rhubarb, to be either sold or given away to other allotment holders (I want to give it away, the committee may overrule me and either sell it or ask for donations) I’ve been thinking a lot about allotment perennials these past few days. There’s raspberries of course, needing to be pruned now to get going for the autumn harvest (if you have autumn fruiting ones, the summer fruiting ones should be pruned after harvesting). And black, red and whitecurrants, all of which are lovely to make jam and jelly with, and give you years of service. Our thornless blackberry is a joy – and even thorny brambles produce gorgeous fruit.

So what else?

How about perennial leeks? Oh yes! They are properly called Babbington’s Leek, and I’ve just been given half a dozen bulbils by the lovely Fran who helps organise Seedy Sunday. Plants for a Future says: Division in late summer or early autumn. Dig up the bulbs when the plants are dormant and divide the small bulblets at the base of the larger bulb. Replant immediately, either in the open ground or in pots in a cold frame. Bulbils - plant out as soon as they are ripe in late summer. The bulbils can be planted direct into their permanent positions, though you get better results if you pot them up and plant them out the following spring.

Doesn’t that sound great? They are like a mild leek or Welsh onion, as far as I can tell.

And how about perennial rocket, also from the lovely Fran. This is apparently a totally different plant to cultivated rocket with more finely cut leaves and a much stronger flavour, which is more complex but doesn’t get silly-hot like rocket does just before it bolts. It seems that it hates root disturbance and tends to sprawl, so needs a bit of room to allow it to self seed, at which point you lift the seedlings in a big dollop of soil so as not to derange the roots and give the plantlets a new home.

Also, somewhat scarily, I’ve agreed to take some tomato seedlings from Fran to raise up so that we can have a tomato tasting day on the allotments and then people can say which seed they’d like me to save for them so that they can then have seed to raise their own tomatoes in perpetuity – gulp!

Labels: allotment-leeks, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-tomato, babbington's leek, perennial rocket

Allotment: perennial crops

We can’t take any credit for this, it was planted long before we arrived but we’re going to have the pleasure of harvesting it, that’s for sure! If we’d been around in the autumn, I would have taken greater care of our rhubarb crown, although it seems to have coped pretty well without me.

What I would have done is cut it back a little and mulched the crown with about four inches of compost to feed the roots and also protect the first growth from any frost in the months ahead. With only one crown I would also have forced it which makes the stems more tender (less of those fibrous strings) and sweeter, as well as bringing it on a bit earlier in the season. With several crowns I’d force half and leave the others, so as to space out the crop a bit.

To force rhubarb I usually use a big old bucket, often one with some holes about its person. Those holes need to be patched with a bit of tape and folded newspaper. Just chuck the container on top of the crown as soon as the first crinkled new leaves appear and it will provide both a micro-climate (removing the wind-chill as well as protecting from frost) and remove light which blanches the stems, making them more tender. This brings on the rhubarb so its ready to harvest between three and six weeks before unforced rhubarb. It does also make the stems a bit narrower in diameter than unforced rhubarb which is why I like to grow both. When the crown starts to lift the bucket I take it off and harvest the stems, leaving that crown to recover in the sun and feed itself for the following year when I’ll leave that one unforced and force all the ones that were un-bucketed in the previous year.

Labels: allotment-forcing-rhubarb, allotment-rhubarb

Allotment chills

Do wind chill factors affect plants, does anybody know? I have a feeling they must do, but I can’t find any information in any of my books on the subject, only lots of stuff about ambient or air temperature.

In any case, it feels like it’s freezing on the allotments, although the temperature gauge says 7 degrees, so that’s why I’m wondering about wind chill. Things are coming up, like rhubarb (is it possible to stop rhubarb coming up, I wonder?) and garlic, but whether the latter carries on coming up is anybody’s guess. The harvest last year seems to have been variable in the extreme, with the eastern side of the UK having a better garlic crop than the western side, apparently. Because it keeps raining, and the mud is somewhat clinging, there’s no real point digging over the ground, although there’s no reason not to weed, and many of my neighbours who did weed and then put down weed suppressors in January, have been back to hold them down with BIGGER rocks and BIGGER stakes this week, because there’s quite a lot of weed-suppressing material (newspapers, old carpets and bits of fruit box) that has blown into the surrounding fences in the gales we keep having.

I’ve been thinking about successional sowing, which we were utterly useless at last year and whether there’s a simple system to be better at it this year – any suggestions? We had loads of simple crops like lettuces and carrots that it should be possible to sow and harvest in succession, but we seem to forget, or our new sowings catch up with our old ones, and we end up with a glut – carrots are okay, there’s no limit to the amount of carrot one can freeze or turn into carrot soup or carrot cake, but what on earth do you do with a glut of lettuce?

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-garlic, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-weeding