Purple sprouting broccoli in January

We just, just, just managed to pick enough broccoli on 31st January to make a meal out of. The pigeons have obviously done better than we have from our overflow plants, but now the secondary shoots are appearing and the pesky birds seem to be leaving them alone (at least for now).

We also harvested a monster parsnip. I’m not sure how we managed to overlook this goliath and he’s got his shoulders a bit nipped, possibly by the frost that preceded the snow, but even so there’s enough on this baby to make a very good soup, which is great, as the weather’s turned cold again.

What we didn’t manage to do was get any shallots planted. This made it all the more galling to do our monthly tour and discover that many of our neighbours already have the fine green shoots of shallot growth poking out of the frozen ground. On the other hand, Peter-from-two plots-up found that he’d had a whole tray of apples and a bag of shallots nibbled by rodents, so at least our shallots are still whole, and still in their bag, rather than inside a rat!

Speaking of wildlife, as we were heading for the gate we saw a large dog fox mooching around an apple tree on a plot, obviously finding rotten windfalls that were tastier than anything else around. What made it remarkable was that less than three yards away was the plot owner, digging in some manure! She said that the fox often came to within a couple of feet of her and she thought it was because she works shifts and is sometimes the only person on the site early in the morning or late in the evening, so he’d got used to her presence. I wish I’d had my camera handy.

Labels: allotment-parsnips, allotment-purple-sprouting-broccoli, allotment-rodents, allotment-shallots, allotment-wildlife

Allotment planting: broad beans

Yesterday was broad bean day. We’ve had broad beans overwintering on 235 and the seem to be doing okay, but there were many more ready to go into the ground and we’d seen the distinctive black and white flowers on many a plot during the previous week, so we felt that we should be getting ours sorted out too. Most broad beans are quite sturdy, but in windy Sussex they still need some support, so Himself got on with creating that, while I dug up the area that will become our brassica cage. It was horrible work, at exactly the wrong time of year, the soil is still cold and yet the perennial weeds have got away wonderfully, so that it was a combination of deeply compressed earth, tussocky grass and horrible root systems that had to be dug out.

I mention this so that you understand that while Himself was making pretty things, I was doing the ugly, unnoticed labour that later allows pretty things to be made – I don’t want you to think I was swanning around drinking tea and talking to the neighbours while he toiled away.

So eventually, bean supports!

Because of the mouse, shrew, rat problem (we’ve seen them all in the past year) we start all our peas and beans in pots and don’t plant them out until we’re sure the plant has grown enough to have completely absorbed the legume from which it grew – it’s those legumes that are so attractive to rodents that they dig up the plant (or seed) to eat it. Once the plant has taken the stored nourishment from that pea or bean, which is really an embryo, the plant doesn’t have the same attractiveness for rodents. I don’t know if they can actually smell the seed in the ground, but it seems to me that they can.

Our autumn-sown Aquadulce Claudia went into the ground on 235 in October, and have suddenly shot up, as they always do in spring. It’s often not necessary to pinch out the tops of autumn-sown broad beans as for some reason they don’t have the same blackfly problem as spring-sown ones, possibly because the overwintered leaves are very much tougher than the tender spring growth.

Labels: allotment-blackfly, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-perennial-weeds, allotment-rodents, aquadulce claudia