Seedy Sunday - allotment bargains!

Well, Seedy Sunday was a surprise – I don’t know how many people turned up, several hundred for sure, and a big increase on the previous year that we went, when there were perhaps fifty or so people in the hall – is this a sign of the recession in action, I wonder?

Anyway, we did extremely well, managing to swap for a lot of seeds and only actually buying a packet of Scarlet Emperor runner beans. We swapped to get:

• Ukranian beetroot (used to be available through Suttons Seeds, but now a heritage seed only – produces very good big roots, excellent for grating)
• Waverex peas – very sweet and very productive, as long as we don’t get too hot a spring
• Ragged Jack (also called Russian Red) kale – which is an oak leaf type kale where the leaves have a red tinge and the stems are quite purple – said to be very mild in taste
• Dwarf Green Curled kale – which is the one with the furled dark green leaves which loves difficult or windswept gardens and poor wet soils
• Palla Rossa chicory – that’s the deep red to purple, cricket ball shaped one that you see in shops – apparently it’s very winter hardy and we love it baked with parma ham and strong cheese!

So in other words, we got five packets of seeds for £1.50 which was the cost of entry, and I think that’s a bargain! We also went mad though, and bought slices of cake and cups of tea, which we enjoyed while listening to a female choir, so it wasn’t such a frugal trip as it might have been. But next year I shall take dozens of swaps; I noted what people were looking for this year and reckon I can save lots of popular seed, so I shall really splurge in 2010!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-chicory, allotment-kale, allotment-peas, allotment-seed-swaps, allotment-seedy-sunday

I hate those meeces to pieces

There’s almost nothing that can be done on the allotments right now. On 201 we can’t paint fences because the wood is too wet, we can’t dig because the soil is too wet. On 235 we were chagrined today to discover that something (mice?) has been along and eaten several of the broad beans we carefully protected with double-glazing panels just a week ago.

So we had a mystery: mice, birds, some kind of insect or monopod? We think it’s mice and there’s not a great deal to be done about that, except that June, our neighbour at the other end of the site, when we’re working on 201, gave us a tip. If you grow your beans and peas in pots, when they’ve got a good root system you can just lift off the pea or bean from which they grew and which is what attracts the mice to the plants. So when we plant our spring broad beans in the greenhouse, that’s what we will do. For now, on plot 235, we’ve simply put some more twiggy branches around the plants in case it’s birds, and stuck some bamboo canes that were dipped in Jeyes Fluid around the perimeter of the plants, in the hope that it will confuse the noses of the mice.

And Sunday is Seedy Sunday here in Hove actually, so I hope to find some seeds to swap/buy and I’ll tell you all about it next time!

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-mice, allotment-peas, allotment-pests, allotment-seedy-sunday