Germination and soil temperature

This is 201 today. Looks okay, doesn’t it? Himself’s bean frame looks very perky, I think.

I’ve just popped up to the plot in my lunch break and been deeply disappointed. I wasn’t expecting any parsnip seed to have germinated, nor any carrots or beetroot (well, maybe I was a bit hopeful on the carrot and beetroot front) but I was genuinely pretty confident that the radishes would be on their way. They are not. All these seeds are going into raised beds, which have been covered by glass for a week or ten days before planting, to get the soil warmed up a bit. And maybe six days is too soon for even radish, but I shall be really peeved if the first of them isn’t up by the end of the weekend!

By and large, it’s said to be better to sow a little bit late than a little bit early because if the soil temperature is too low for the seeds you’re sowing it will rot before it germinates.

For the first time I can remember, I’ve had seeds rot in the greenhouse, and it seems I am not alone, Gill at My Tiny Plot has had exactly the same problem. So fingers crossed that my outdoor sowings will work better than my greenhouse ones.

Labels: allotment-germination, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seeds

Allotment Potato Beds, Raised Beds and February Tasks

Well, I’ve discovered a problem I never expected – when you have two days of good weather in a row, in a February that has followed one of the worst winters you can remember, you go a bit daft.

We spent ALL Friday and ALL today at the allotment, and I have to go back tomorrow too – although only for plot inspections with Site Representatives, not for actual allotment work.

The thing is, I’m cream-crackered! On Friday, before we went to the allotment, I planted out the Babbington’s Leeks in the greenhouse. Once we got to the plot we dug the potato bed over again, Himself raked the bean and pea bed, and I dug compost and some sand into the two raised beds which seem to be pure clay. We planted potatoes in tyres on 235 and 201, on the basis that while it may not be organic, it’s at least environmentally friendly to use up some old tyres in this fashion – and it’s supposed to get you your earliest new potatoes up to three weeks earlier than other methods because as long as you keep one empty tyre above the height of the haulm, there won’t be any frost damage to the plant.

Today, while Himself planted carrots in one raised bed, having built a nifty fleece-covered lid for it too, I planted the Jerusalem artichokes that Janet very kindly gave us yesterday. We hadn’t planned anywhere for them, so it was a swift decision to stick them along the fence by the thornless blackberry. Then we marked out the herb and simples garden (sounds posh, but actually it’s the size of two broom cupboards!) because Ray had given the Association some lovely wallflower plants for any plotholder who wanted them, and I’d taken a nice big clump, before remembering that they needed to go in yet another area of completely untouched plot.

Janet took two of our rhubarb transplants and June had a couple too. Ray also say he’d like some so we agreed to drop four pots off to him on our way home as his plot is on our way to the gate. I found myself potting up loads more rhubarb as a result, and Himself got busy putting up the frame for the climbing French beans, Cherokee Trail of Tears, that Fran gave us as a seed swap. The frame is actually a bit of shop fitting that was being thrown out, and as we're 'waste not, want not' we said we'd take it. We've used another one horizontally to make a frame for our blackberry to climb up/along and there's a third version, which is actually two much skinnier sections, with rungs rather than a grid, that we're planning to turn into an ornamental archway at one entrance to the plot - note that word 'planning' because it's one of those things that sounds great but as it actually requires two fences to be re-built so that the arch actually has some purpose. I suppose we could just stick it up anyway, but it would look pretty silly. So instead it lurks in the shed and I fall over it and curse all the time. Anyway, you can just see the carrot bed, with its fleece lid, in the foreground of the blue bed with the frame in it.

And Himself had already dug up a huge clump of snowdrops from home that needed transplanting into the plot, so I did those, then dug over the first of the herb beds, the equilateral bed we’re calling it, and then Anita and John from next door asked if we wanted some old-fashioned purple iris that they had going spare, and of course we did, and they had to be planted out while himself hoed around the raspberries and …

I came home and fell asleep on the sofa! If this good weather carries on, I shan't be able to cope. Mind you, I can't afford any more time off work either, so perhaps that will stop us working ourselves to shadows. Although we've still got to plant sweet peas, marigolds, tomatoes, leeks ...

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-carrots, allotment-flowers, allotment-horticultural-fleece, allotment-leeks, allotment-potatoes-in-tyres, allotment-raised beds, allotment-seeds

Chitting potatoes and rescuing frozen crops

Our potatoes are chitting beautifully, which is good, as there is precious little else going on. Actually that’s not true. I just went to the cold bedroom where we are storing the potatoes that are chitting and just paused on the way to look at the propagator that holds the celeriac seeds and we have two seedlings! Whoop whoop! Okay they are actually too small to photograph – which means they are miniscule indeed – and their filament thin shape suggests to me, as a novice celeriac grower, that they are going to be prone to damping off, but we have them! And five minutes ago, when I started writing this blog, it was going to be about impatience and how, despite knowing that I couldn’t expect to see any celeriac seedlings, I’ve been checking them three times a day since I planted them a week ago.

Anyway, back to the spuds. What you want to see in terms of chitting is dark sprouts. Dark sprouts are lovely healthy growth elements, drawing on the stored reserves of the tuber from which they appear. Pale sprouts are weaker, created by a lack of something (usually light) or a surfeit of something (usually warmth). On that basis I am thrilled by the lovely purple and green hues of these sprouts, as they bode well for good cropping in the ground.

We keep our potatoes in a cold bedroom near but not under a north facing window so they get good indirect light but no heat. Sadly, many of our allotment neighbours have got used to keeping their chitting potatoes in their allotment sheds and the fierce frosts of the past couple of weeks has meant that their spuds have frozen – and if an exposed potato gets frost blight, that’s pretty well the end of it. If this has happened to you, turn your potatoes and see if you can find any areas that haven’t been frost damage (which shows as black wet slime, very nasty). If you have undamaged areas, cut the damage away, put the good bit on kitchen towel and allow it to keep growing, spritzing it with cold water from a sprayer every third or fourth day, because it will need extra moisture to replace that lost through the cut surfaces. It won’t be as good as a whole spud, but as you can cut good potatoes up to make more when it comes to planting, it’s worth salvaging what you can now.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-chitting-potatoes, allotment-seeds

More Celeriac

As a couple of people have commented on the celeriac issue, let me explain why I’m so addicted to this particular vegetable.

It’s like celery but better – I enjoy the taste of celery but hate the strings, and also, I’m not too keen on anything that is quite such hard work on the old jaw! Celeriac has the same delicate flavour, but because it’s a root vegetable (well actually, I think it’s a bulb) it’s much more versatile – you can grate it and use it raw in coleslaw, boil it and mash it like potato, steam it and turn it into a soufflé – it’s really a vegetable with a thousand uses.

It’s good to store – while it doesn’t cope particularly well in the ground once the first frosts arrive, it does seem to cope well in storage in a cool dry place. I tend to peel, chunk and blanch mine and open freeze it before packing it into big freezer bags. Then I can take out as much as I want for a given recipe. I might use it to make soup, or as a roasted vegetable with carrots, potatoes, swede and onion, or mix it fifty-fifty with potato to make a mashed topping for pies.

There are downsides to celeriac - The first is that dodgy germination rate – from what I can gather, anything from a third to a half of seeds might not come up. The second is that it likes a long time in the ground but doesn’t like hot weather, which makes it a bit of a bugger to grow! Last summer the seedlings Maurice gave us did wonderfully, because the weather was so appalling, so this year I’m almost hoping my celeriac does badly as that should mean we’ve had hot and sunny weather. If it’s dry they need to be watered: they are a bog margin plant by nature, and if it’s overly sunny, you might want to cover them with a bit of fleece. We grew ours through mulch fabric last year, this year I think I shall put them in a raised bed.

And if you can’t get seed locally, try for a seed swap – there are several online swapping agencies that can help you.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-crops, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-seeds

Sowing Celeriac

Soilman says we should be sowing celeriac, and as this was one of last year’s big hits, after Maurice gave us some seedlings, I am following Soilman’s advice by planting our seeds this weekend. It’s yet another crop that I’ve never grown from seed myself and what I’ve managed to find out is this:

Germination is a more than a bit little erratic so I shouldn’t expect all my seeds to come up (I do though, always, and always get disappointed when they don’t, even real sods like parsnip).

They shouldn’t be hardened off outside until it's properly warm because a sudden drop in temperature can force the plant to bolt which stops it becoming bulbous at the root.
When all risk of cold snaps is past, they should be planted out 40 cm apart and kept both watered and mulched as they like a moist environment and not too much sun. Given what a rotten summer we had last year, it’s not surprising that ours did rather well! What I didn’t do was remove the lower leaves to expose the bulbous root, but several experts do advocate this, so I might try removing half and leaving half (on different plants obviously, not half on each plant) to see what difference it makes.

They can be harvested from early autumn but don’t usually cope well with a frost so it’s important to have them really well covered with mulch if you want to leave them in the ground after November.

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-crops, allotment-seeds

Seeds, Apples, Peas, Frosts

I ordered the seeds, exploding cucumbers, celtuce, asparagus peas and all. Even some lemon chilli seeds. And we don’t eat chillis so what I’m going to do with them I don’t know. Still, it’s all in a good cause, because if we don’t keep these older, odder, rarer species in cultivation, they won’t be there when we want them.

This picture shows the last apple on a neighbouring allotment’s tree. It’s Maurice’s allotment actually and whenever I pass it, I remember the old nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear, but a silver apple and a golden pear’. Doesn’t it look lovely, if a little lonely …?

Experimental peas – 14 have germinated, but it’s just too cold to hang around and count which were pre-soaked and which weren’t, so I’m going to give it another week, buy which time any that are going to come up, should be up, and then work out if there was any advantage to pre-soaking.

On the plus side, the heavy frosts are breaking up our newly-dug soil beautifully. On the minus side, they stop us doing any more work because it’s just too damn cold to dig!

Labels: allotment-apples, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-peas, allotment-seeds

Seed Catalogues

Oh hell, every penny I get given at Christmas tends to go on seeds. It’s an addiction, I know but there doesn’t seem to be a Seed Buyers Anonymous that I can call on for help. In fact, just about everybody I know has the same weakness.

The only thing that stops me is not being really sure what I’m doing (and that doesn’t always stop me, I won’t bore you with the years I’ve spent trying to germinate Romneya Coulterii but it involves wood smoke, ash, stratification … and so far, no Romneya!) so this year I’m trying to limit myself. Not easy when himself gets in on the act.

What he wants to buy is exploding cucumbers, celettuce and rainbow quinoa. Now quinoa I’m happy to grow (except he doesn’t eat it, so why does he want to grow it?) but exploding cucumbers? And a plant that looks like a lettuce on top of a celery stalk but apparently tastes like neither?

Why?

Because they are a challenge and a novelty. And no matter how often we sit down and talk about productivity, staple food crops and filling the freezer for winter, we always end up with one or two of these novelties that usually go nowhere but soak up hours of effort. Last year it was the peanut plant which produced exactly nothing for all our labours.

I do rather fancy purple Brussels sprouts, although apparently they are not as productive as their green cousins. And I have a sneaking desire for yellow leeks too, so perhaps we should limit ourselves to one flight of fancy each … but then we’ll go to February’s seed swap and come back with armfuls of weird things that caught our eyes. Honestly, we’re hopeless!

Labels: allotment-seeds, seed-catalogues, seed-swap

Fun with paper and glue

You may be wondering exactly what this picture has to do with allotments. Well, it’s our first ever, home-made, seed planting strips! Yes, they are a little late going in, but as we live in the soft south, we’re still hopeful that they will produce a crop.

The thing is, onion seed is fiddly, really really fiddly. And you can’t transplant onions. So … if you want to be sure your tiny onion seed is properly spaced when it goes into the ground, it requires some work (so we’ve been told) with paper and glue.

What you need to do is get some nice long strips of newspaper, about half an inch deep and the full width of the best of the press – the Telegraph is a perfect size, I’ve found – and measure six inch spacings. At each six inch point, you put a dab of ‘glue’ made from flour and water, and onto the glue you dot a single onion seed. Allow the whole business to dry and then pack it into a long tray for transport from home to the plot.

When you get there, all you need to do is dig a shallow trench about half an inch deep and lay the paper strips into it. Cover the trench and water if necessary. If you’re clever, you’ll pick a day when rain is forecast for the afternoon so you don’t even have to water them in.

You might be thinking this is a lot of effort (I might be thinking that too, after an evening spent with paste-brush, scissors and tiny seeds) and wondering if it’s worth it? Well, as yet we don’t know, so what we’re doing is preparing half our over-wintering onion seed this way, and simply dropping the other half into prepared rows by hand. As they grow we’ll be able to see if the extra work in preparing the strips has been worth it, or not, or even if it's better to make the extra investment in onion sets and not grow from seed at all. Watch this space …

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-seeds, allotment-winter-onions, growing-allotment-onions

Companion planting - is it rubbish or is there something to it?

Here's a list of the things I've been told to plant together or seen planted together:
• French marigolds in between tomato plants
• Carrots and leeks together because they have strong scents that drive away each other's pests
• Nasturtiums with cabbages because the nasturtium leaves are apparently more popular with caterpillars than cabbage leaves (I'd love this to be true!)
• Garlic planted among roses to ward off aphids

You see, I'm about to order my seeds for next year, and I was wondering about all this - I can bring home some garlic to put in around my roses, and I can harvest nasturtium seeds from any of my neighbouring allotments, so should I get some French Marigold seeds and try the experiment? Or is it complete tosh?

Labels: allotment-companion-planting, allotment-seeds

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

Really rotten allotment jobs in February

There can’t be a nastier time of year than February, on the allotment. I know I should be trying to find the good things about this month, but I do really, really, really detest almost everything that has to be done this month.

The worst job is turning over last year's potato bed and looking for those titchy leftover potatoes that hid in the ground and – if you don’t remove them – can spread diseases or pass on blight to this season’s crop. They have a lovely name: volunteers, but it’s a perfectly rotten job, back-breaking, time-consuming and fiddly.

The seed flats and everything above three inch pots are going to be used from next month onwards, and although every November I say I’m going to wash and sterilise all the pots at the end of the growing season, so they are ready for spring, I never do, and so I end up ferrying bagloads of flats and pots backwards and forwards as this is a task much more easily done with hot water at home.

The final horrible task for February is spreading black polythene over the first beds we’ll be planting next month, so that the soil underneath gets a chance to warm up before we begin to plant out seedlings that will be protected by cloches.

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-seeds, allotment-tasks-february

Allotment Gardening – February tasks

What we’re up to right now, is:

Sowing certain plants indoors trays or pots - early beetroot, beans, summer cabbage, globe artichoke, lettuce and broad beans.

Last year we grew heritage broad beans, red ones, which were obviously a precursor of the Windsor variety. To just run through the difference - broad beans come in two main types (there are others, like dwarfing and heritage but with a bit of lateral thought you can usually see where your two foot tall beans or your burgundy coloured beans fit into one or the other type):
• The Long-pod plants have up to nine oblong beans per pod, hence the name! Generally considered the most hardy of the broad beans, these are the only ones it’s really worth sowing in autumn – when they should give you a crop about three weeks earlier that a spring sowing of the same variety.
• The Windsor varieties have only four to six round beans per pod. These are generally said to be tastier than the Long-pods and are less inclined to develop leathery skins. But they aren’t as hardy and should really only be sown in spring.

So we’re splitting the difference and going for dwarf broad beans and heritage beans grown from last year’s saved seed.

Sadly we don’t have room for spinach, although I notice a neighbour is sowing flat after flat, so maybe I’ll have something that he’ll be willing to swap for some of his first spring spinach to go in salads.

We’re also going to try, after last year’s success, sowing outdoors under cloches because while our February sown beetroot did nothing, we had plenty of lettuce and spring onions by doing this last year.

We’ve covered our rhubarb and we’re using up the last of our parsnips – the year’s turning again!

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-digging, allotment-seeds, allotment-tasks-february