Heavy winters make for a hectic allotment spring

I’m so very panicked and depressed when I look at this photograph from a year ago – the peas were almost ready to hit the ground running, the rhubarb was bursting from its pots, we had wallflowers ready to be planted, trays and trays of leeks that were already a couple of inches tall …

And so far, this year, we have absolutely nothing in the cold frame at all. Even the greenhouse isn’t quite entirely full yet (90% full maybe – which is okay, perhaps, although it feels like some kind of moral failure) and all we have in the ground is some shallots.

This weekend I must get some garlic planted, as well as rest of the manure into the soil for the potatoes which are now showing lovely dark shoots. I just hope that the weather cooperates!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-crops, allotment-seedlings

March allotment greenhouse

Here are the Big Red tomato seedlings, which I have, since this photo was taken, transplanted into individual three and a half inch pots. There were fourteen seeds in the packet and ten of them germinated, which I think is a pretty good rate of return – I shall keep three seedlings for myself, and once the others are four inches tall I’ll take them down to the allotment shop to be sold to raise funds.

The leeks are springing out of their compost, but I still think I’m not going to have enough of them – I probably need to start another tray of seeds. The Nantes carrots are showing pretty well now, and I’ve got some more nasturtium seeds on the go. The peas have almost all germinated – about thirty have appeared between 8am and midday!

I need to be starting other tomatoes, and deciding if I’m going to grow peppers from seed or wait until I can get plants from either another allotment holder or a nursery – we’ve not grown them from seed ourselves before, not having had a greenhouse. And the cucumbers should go in next week too … it’s all getting rather hectic!

And last night the frost was this heavy … I feel quite depressed when I think about it.

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings, march-allotment

April seedlings and potatoes

As of this morning we have nine sweetcorn seedlings, 23 dwarf kale seedlings, and more than 50 petits pois seedlings all springing out of their pots.

And we have five rows of maincrop potatoes (Desiree and Pink Fir Apple) which we planted using a bulb dibber, which is so much easier than trenching them. We’d already planted two rows of first earlies on 201, one row on 235 (and half a dozen tubers went into tyres on both sites, which should be harvestable about a fortnight earlier than those in the ground) and two rows on each plot of second earlies.

There’s a horrible fact about potatoes – when you’re planting them, it seems like you are planting acres, but when you have planted them, and you step back and look at the results, it’s never quite enough to get you through the year without buying spuds.

We also had to earth up our first earlies – they had suddenly put out masses of lovely strong foliage, so that was more back-breaking work with the rake, to cover the potatoes thoroughly so they don’t go green. Another horrible fact about potatoes is that while you can sometimes find easier ways to plant them, I don’t think there is ever an easy way to earth them up – just plain old hard work.

Labels: allotment-potato-tyres, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seedlings

Allotment Problems

Well, maybe they are problems and maybe they aren’t – one is already solved anyway and the others may just be dilemmas.

1 – the case of the leaking kettle

"There once was a fine Kelly kettle
Whose owners would boast of its mettle
When a leak it appeared
Their joy disappeared
For their kettle no longer had fettle."

But the Kelly kettle company are wonderful people and they sent me a new storm kettle to replace the old one. How’s that for problem solving! It's nice to have a proper cup of tea up on the site again.

2 – the bees, the bees!

We were due a visit by a beekeeper next Sunday, to talk about setting up a hive on one of the plots. Since I put the article in the newsletter, half a dozen people have asked to have their plots considered for bee-housing. However the beekeeper turned up a week early and said he couldn’t undertake to put a hive on the allotment for a variety of sensible reasons including the fact that he’s going to be away for a lot of the summer. So we have two alternatives:

A – set up a bee cooperative amongst ourselves
B – find another beekeeper

In the midst of all this it turns out that an allotment holder has bee allergy and could go into anaphylactic shock and die if stung. Now that could happen as easily with a bumble bee as a hive bee, and he carries adrenaline, and now that we know at least … well, we know, because before yesterday, we wouldn’t have had a clue that the problem might be allergy rather than say a heart attack.

But what should we do now? Should the risk to him outweigh the benefit to over 300 allotment holders who should get better pollination of crops via the bees? If not, should we set up a cooperative and take on the responsibility of apiculture ourselves or find another beekeeper who might at least start us off? I admit to mixed feelings. I know that I already have enough to do as secretary, but if anything goes wrong and I’m part of the cooperative I shall be the one person that everybody knows how to get hold of, which means that I’ll be the one out all hours if there are panics and problems. Also I worry about the idea of having a hive when one person, at least, will be made unhappy and apprehensive about it. Suppose we drove him to give up his allotment – that would be horrible, irresponsible and against the ethos of everything we’re doing. Ugh. Any advice anyone?

3 – The water, the water!

Our mains water won’t be turned back on until April. The storage tanks along each row are virtually dry. Our water butt is less than a third full. The seedlings need water! What are folk to do if it doesn’t rain?

A – transport water to the site – which is expensive, hard work and environmentally damaging.
B – let their crops die as seedling plants – which is expensive, heart-breaking and silly.
C – badger the council to turn on the water – which could backfire because the council don’t like to be badgered and the rules say Easter. We ask them to stick to other rules so it seems odd to now start demanding that they break some, and it makes us seem inconsistent.
D – pray or dance or whatever (depending on belief system) for rain.

Ideas welcomed on this one too.

And we've made, painted and installed the last of our raised beds - this picture is pre-installation because by the time we'd finished I was too exhausted to go and find the camera again.

Labels: allotment-bees, allotment-kettle, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-seedlings, allotment-watering

Allotment greenhouse in early spring

Or, to put it another way, why you can’t turn round without knocking over a tray of seeds. We’ve never had a greenhouse before, nor an allotment at this time of year, so we may be overdoing things a bit. Here’s the list:

Celeriac – in the dining room, because they look so fragile and the dining room isn’t very warm anyway.
Peas – 50 seedlings currently evenly divided between the (unheated) greenhouse at home and the cold frame at the plot. They are meteor and living up to their name, if they don’t get in the ground soon they will be an impenetrable jungle of pea tendrils
Nasturtiums – don’t ask why Himself planted two trays of nasturtium seedlings and put them in the greenhouse. He got carried away …
Broad beans – two lines were overwintered on 235, but the mice have got to quite a few of them, so we’ve started off another packet of seeds in pots in the greenhouse, and this time (assuming they germinate) we’ll nip off the seed embryos before we plant them out
Leeks – one tray in the greenhouse
Tree seedlings – one tray in the greenhouse
Alpine white strawberries – one tray of seedlings doing well, in the greenhouse
Sweet peas – a tray and a half, two seeds per pot, in the greenhouse
Rhubarb – sixteen transplants in the cold frame at 201
Currants – eighteen cuttings in the cold frame at 201: I took this picture of our own transplants on 29 January - on Monday they had grown so much I couldn't get all three into the picture - rhubarb is very strange stuff!
Globe artichoke – one, in a pot, doing badly, in the cold frame at 201

And that’s before we plant out the four varieties of potatoes or the onion sets …

The words bitten off and more than we can chew rather come to mind!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings

Seeds, Awards, Ice, Parquet

We have 22 celeriac seedlings! Can you see them? Don’t worry if you can’t, it’s not your eyes, they are incredibly tiny, spindly things (can that be right?)




Anyway, going from the miniscule to the hefty, here’s a picture of the ‘parquet’ going down in front of the shed – it’s old bits of fence post (some of them have hefty nails hammered flat on the side that’s sunk in the sand) painted with whatever dribs and drabs of woodstain happened to be lying around. It looks wonderful, if I say so myself, and turned out to be a great way to use up bits of wood that would otherwise be burnt or go to landfill.




And from the hefty to the strange … there was a defunct wormery on the plot when we arrived, and this weekend we found this strange ice had formed on top of it water in it – now these shapes aren’t in any way part of the wormery so we don’t know why they happened. Ghost worm art, maybe?



Now then, how’s your plot? Because it’s that time of year when nominations are made … The Observer has a new Ethical Garden category which you can enter, online, until March 9th and somebody gets to win a £500 voucher for Hen and Hammock, which I assume isn’t a pub, nice though that idea is. Anyway, it’s a chance for those of us who care about sustainability and the environment to get our gardens and/or recreational gardens (that’s what allotments can be classed as if they are not primarily used for crops) into the public eye.

If it appeals to you, then you can enter or nominate somebody else here. And I wish everybody the very best of luck!

Labels: allotment-awards, allotment-ice, allotment-paths, allotment-seedlings

Allotment Tasks – Warming the Soil

Of the not-very-many things to be done on an allotment in January, warming the soil is perhaps one of the most important and most neglected. And we’re just starting to think about warming ours, having finally dug enough of it to actually think we might get some crops in!

The point about warming the soil is that it helps germination by two means: it absorbs the warmth of the sun in the day, and slows down the loss of that heat at night, which can protect from frosts. If you have hardy crops like carrot, they will germinate in the soil at around 8 degrees Celsius but tender crops like French beans won’t germinate until soil temperature is 12 degrees Celsius – and remember that air temperature tends to be at least a degree above soil temperature and may be as much as three degrees higher than clay soils. Dry soils warm faster because water holds the cold, so having raised beds with good drainage can improve germination if you have a heavy soil

There are two ways to really warm your soil: the first is adding compost or manure which both breaks up heavy soils, giving them less water trapping, and tends to change the albedo (surface colour to us simple folk) making it darker and therefore more inclined to take in, rather than reflect back, the sun’s rays.

The second thing, of course, is to cover the soil with glass, plastic or cloches. Clear plastic is reckoned to be the best option, and this kind of cloche can be lifted easily to hoe out the weed seedlings, which will germinate very fast, and that’s always great news because once those seeds have germinated and you’ve chopped the seedlings in two, they can’t come back to strangle your plant seeds when you do put them in the ground. So quite obviously, the ideal situation is to put down your cloches a couple of weeks before you plan to sow seed, and get ruthless with the weedlings when they appear.

So why, I wonder, don’t we have any cloches … possibly because we are ill-organised and spend too much time chatting. Oh dear, oh dear, I can see allotment-holder-failure on the horizon!

Labels: allotment-cloches, allotment-seedlings, allotment-soil

Celery – an allotment crop to fear

Hmmmm … Maurice gave us celery seedlings. Now I do love celery, especially fresh with a good slice of a local sheep’s milk cheese or braised with carrots in a chicken stock topped with cheddar. But ...



...it is supposed to be a b***** to grow.

The first thing my reference books tell me is that rotationally it should be included with potatoes, which rather scotches the idea I’d had of digging up our row of first early spuds and putting the celery in there – but as we have nowhere else to put it, it may be the only option. The second thing that I’m told is that at least I might be getting the timing right for once

I learn that it prefers rich soil, stuffed with organic matter, that will hold moisture but offers good drainage – well, well, well, in other words, the best of all possible worlds; and it does well in wet locations – so far we’ve no idea if we have any wet locations because it hasn’t been wet enough to assess the plot.

Onward! Celery is a heavy feeder and needs plenty of fertiliser for quick growth, says the book – well I’m not sure I want quick growth. I want tasty celery and I’m prepared to wait for it.

Celery will be bitter if it isn't blanched. Ah, but since my book was published in 1972 (the old ones are still the best in many ways) new self-blanching varieties have come onto the market. But which do we have? Answer, we don’t know. So I’ve fired off a quick email to Maurice, to ask, and will await his reply. Blanching is achieved by covering the plants to protect them from the sun. Okay, that I understand. As the plants grow, pile soil up around them to blanch the stems. Maybe so, or maybe just tie brown paper around them, particularly if they are self blanching? I saw that done at the BBC garden at Berryfields and it looked both elegant and much less work than damping soil and making cones around plants. Still I shall have to wait for Maurice to reply. Meantime I shall ponder the wisdom of jumping in at the deep end.

Carrots and celery courtesy of Steffenz

Labels: allotment-blanching, allotment-celery, allotment-seedlings

Allotment generosity

Here’s what we’ve been loaned or given so far:

Petrol powered strimmer (loan)
Van (loan)
Celery, tomato, garlic, leek and cabbage seedlings
Echium seedlings
Water butt
Wood and pallets to build fencing
Unlimited amounts of advice!

It’s amazing how nice people can be when they see you up on the plot. We’ve noticed it before of course, but because we’ve always been ‘visitors’ on other people’s plots, we’d sort of assumed it was the plot owner’s sunny personality that caused the generosity.

Now we have a plotshare, we’re finding that the generosity continues (and I don’t have a sunny personality, so it can’t be that!)

We haven’t forgotten our old friends who gave us so many opportunities to work alongside them until we got a plot of our own – on Sunday we’re going up to sink a small pool liner for Beryl, and I’ve potted up a marsh marigold to give it an instant start – a kind of housewarming present for a pond!

Tomorrow’s tasks:

--Plant cabbage seedlings
--Water if necessary
--Weed around beans and beetroot
--Work out where to put celery! It’s self-blanching, but even so, we didn’t think we’d get any in this year, so we’re having to be a bit flexible about our plot plans.

Labels: allotment-june, allotment-seedlings, allotment-tasks

Making an allotment seed bed

So far we haven’t had one of these, because, as you may have realised by now, we are sort of ‘squatters’ helping out on various allotments as we wait and hope for one of our own … which could be a long wait indeed, given that there are twice as many people on the waiting list as there are actual allotment plots on our site. Still, we’re happy being allotment-jobbing-gardeners, and it does mean we learn a huge amount from other people and get to experience many different styles of allotment.

So as well as contributing to Maurice’s pond (only by providing plants, he has a co-worker already who did the heavy digging) and helping Sally with a bit of trellis building, this weekend has been devoted to helping build a seed bed.

Seed beds are small areas of an allotment or garden used to germinate seedlings that can be moved to permanent sites later – the soil has to be very thoroughly dug over, with stones and other debris removed and we’ve been doing that, standing on a nice wide plank so that we don’t compress the soil behind us as we work. Now, with a few days of glorious fine weather, we are going up to rake the top surface to form a fine tilth – a soil top which is fine and crumbly and will allow plants to take root easily.

Then we’ll use the same plank to make a v-shaped drill in which to plant the seeds: the plank means the line of seedlings will be nice and straight without having to fiddle with sticks and strings. And then we wait for them to come up …

Labels: allotment-seed-bed, allotment-seedlings, allotment-seeds

Allotment tasks for April

Assuming that you’ve already shovelled away the snow from your paths, that is! Given the unpredictability of the weather, this is possible the time to focus on the work that can be done indoors by giving the bulk of your attention to plants that can be sown now to germinate either in the greenhouse or on a windowsill at home. For me, this means pots of:

Aubergine
Celery
Outdoor Cucumbers
Tomatoes

And we tend to start off our tomatoes in a little bottom-heated propagator as we grow both the cherry tomatoes and the really big beef tomatoes which are so wonderful as a stuffed vegetable – and those latter get a better start with bottom heat which means we get bigger fruits come harvest time.

Neighbours of ours are daring to sow French beans under cloches outdoors, but I still think they’ve jumped the gun. You can’t sow French beans without some kind of weather protection until all threat of frost is passed, (early or late May, depending on where you live) but they won’t cope well with extremely low temperatures even under a cloche or polytunnel so I think that by waiting a week or two, we’ll get just as good a harvest as they will.


Allotment greenhouse courtesy of Beachcomber1954

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings

April allotment tasks

Here’s a general gardening tip that may help if, like us, you’re pondering when – if ever – it may be possible to plant out some of your more tender crops: peg horticultural fleece over the ground a week or so before you intend to plant. Even such a small rise in soil temperature can make a big difference to the success of the seedlings. Usually, in April, there’s a long list of plants to sow or seedlings to plant out, especially if March has been bitter – and now April is shaping up not to showers but snow flurries, covering the soil may even make the difference between plant survival and failure.

If you are planting out carrots, that horticultural fleece can also serve to protect them from carrot fly – if you bury the edges of the fleece after you’ve covered the seeds, the carrot root fly can’t gain access to lay her eggs alongside the seeds. If she does get in, the eggs hatch and then the grubs dig into the carrots and destroy the crop.

What you might be putting in the ground now is:
• Beetroot
• Peas (in mild areas) and broad beans
• Broccoli
• Cruciferous plants like Brussels Sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower
• Leafy crops like kale, chard, kohl rabi, spinach
• Leeks
• Salad crops like rocket, lettuce and radish

Allotments courtesy of muggers

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-in-april, allotment-seedlings