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