Allotment planting February

We finally managed to get our Golden Gourmet shallots in the ground – just in time for predicted snow in the week! We’ve sown three rows, with some sand added to the soil to give them the lighter conditions they like, and we’ve covered the rows with a little netting because we’ve had problems in the past with pigeons pecking out both shallots and onions. No photo, because, seriously photos of shallots being planted are really not interesting! What I do is scrape away a little soil and drop the shallots in – making sure they are root end down – and then just rearrange the soil around them. Lots of books recommend that you ‘simply push the shallot into the soil’ but they don’t presumably, have the clay that we do and the writers don’t presumably, mind losing a few shallots to rot as you push them down onto what turns out to be a stone, puncturing the bulb, which then sits in the cold, and usually damp, winter soil, gently mouldering away instead of growing. I am a pinch-penny gardener and I think the extra couple of seconds required to scrape a shallow trench into which to drop them is worth the effort!

I also transferred two barrows of lovely manure from the heap outside the shop to the bed for our first early potatoes – it’s a pretty long walk with a barrow so two a day is the most I can manage. I’ll need six barrows for the firsts, seconds and maincrops, so I’ll do two a weekend, and still have a couple of spare weekends to dig it in before I have to think about planting the first earlies.

In the greenhouse we’ve started off Feltham First and Meteor peas in toilet roll inner tubes (aka anti-mice devices), a tub planting of Nantes carrots which I’ll hope to be harvesting as baby salad carrots in six weeks time, and two trays of Elephant leeks for transplanting into pots when they are two inches tall, and then again to the plot a little later on. All in all it’s been a productive weekend!

Labels: allotment-carrots, allotment-leeks, allotment-peas, allotment-shallots

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

Still snow – still no work on the plot

We’ve been to the plot to harvest some parsnips from the raised bed which were only a bit frozen in, and to collect some of the leeks that had been heeled into a sheltered corner of the plot in expectation of the rotten weather, but we really hadn’t expected rottenness of this duration! Some of the purple-sprouting broccoli has flowered nicely, but as it’s also frozen solid, we left it in place, hoping to get up as soon as there is a thaw and harvest the lot.

It feels very strange not to be able to do anything vegetable-growing wise – we wandered around and I managed to take a few atmospheric photographs of the sun going down over the snowy site.

I peered at my broad beans which are poking through the snow and seem to be fine, but who knows? Snowdrops have a special enzyme in their cells that allows them to survive minus temperatures without damage, but I’m not sure that broad beans do and I’m bracing myself to discover that when the snow goes, so do the broad beans. It would be a tragedy if they do, but as snow acts as an insulator, removing it at this point would be more likely to damage the seedlings than help them.

The bed in which we should have been planting our shallots is under six inches of snow, as it turns out to be in an area where a drift has built up. The shallots themselves are in a cupboard under the stairs – who knows when they will eventually get into the soil?

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-leeks, allotment-parsnips, allotment-shallots, allotment-snow

Allotment work indoors

One of the things about allotment life that amazes me is how much ‘stuff’ goes on behind the scenes and is known to only a few. I’m not talking about arcane practices with comfrey or potting compost, but the vast amount of hard work done by allotment committees up and down the land.

I had a taste of it myself this week, spending a couple of hours ‘bagging up’ in our allotment shop. We take orders from our allotment-holders for a wide range of potatoes, onions and shallots, and when the orders arrive in HUGE bags and sacks, we then weigh out the orders we’ve received and pack them individually in (environmentally friendly) paper bags. People can then come in and collect their orders from the shop and get on with chitting their potatoes and planting their shallots, confident that they’ve only had to order what they can use, and that we’ve cast our eyes over each 25 kilo sack and rejected any that didn’t come up to the mark.

If you’ve ever had a seed or plant order arrive rotten, or dried up, or damaged, then you know how annoying it can be, not least because a lot of the time the company has sold out of your preferred variety and you have to take a substitute or a refund – neither of which is palatable when you’d hoped to have your first choice of veggies. And with spuds in particular, people have strong preferences and it can be very difficult to find new supplies of chitting potatoes if you’re let down, so you end up with something you don’t like nearly as much, just to get potatoes into the ground for the summer. So we safeguard our allotment-holders by ordering in bulk to get the best quality at the best price.

If you’re an allotment-holder with an allotment shop, spare a thought for the people who try and make sure you’ve got everything you need to make your plot productive: it’s a real labour of love!

PS in case you were wondering, that's Len, not me, I haven't been misleading you about my gender, I promise!

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes, allotment-shallots

Allotment shallots

I will start by being honest – these are not shallots we’ve grown ourselves! They are Andy’s shallots and if anybody has green fingers, it’s him.

We did grow shallots, but I’m not allowed to tell the story because it doesn’t present himself in a good light. It doesn’t present me in a good light either, but it’s even murkier light that falls on him. Maybe he’ll let me, if I ask him nicely.

Anyway, shallots – the tradition is to plant them on the shortest day (round about 21 December) and harvest on the longest (round about 21 June) and you set them in the ground like an onion, with just the tops visible. Don’t push them down into the earth unless your soil is profoundly sandy, as this damages them and can allow mould and disease to enter the bruised and broken areas.

Set about six inches apart and weeded carefully, they can otherwise be broadly ignored until the growing tops begin to yellow, which is harvest time. They keep very well and have a wonderful flavour, like onions but richer, sweeter and more nutty. If you have never grown shallots - get some! They are one of the allotment treasures that make life worthwhile: their flavour and texture are like liquid gold and you will never regret your investment.

The one thing I am not sure about is another bit of tradition – I’ve read in several places that if you want large shallots you should plant small ones, and if you want small shallots (why would you?) you should plant large ones. Does anybody know if this is true, and if so, why?

Labels: allotment-shallots

Allotment doings

October is usually a funny old month on allotments – many more organised allotment holders have cleared out their summer crops and dug in their manure or compost. The rest of us (the majority) still have pillars and wigwams of seedy beans, fading sunflowers, bolting lettuces and other end-of-season crops hanging around looking like the tall plain girl who never got asked to dance at the school disco.

I notice that one of my neighbours has already got his shallots in. There’s a saying about shallots – ‘plant on the shortest day and harvest on the longest’ which basically means any time after 23 September, the autumn equinox when the day and night are the same length, is good for shallot planting. If your soil gets a lot of frosts early in the year then the sooner you get them in the ground, the more they will establish themselves before they get frozen to the spot.

It’s also AGM month for our allotment site. Have I done a good enough job as secretary? Will I be voted on or off? It’s a nerve-wracking question, because if I get voted off then I lose my allotment, because I am only caretaking it for the allotment association I serve. Suddenly I feel like Gordon Brown, facing an election and wondering whether there will be anything left for me on the other side of the ballot box …

Labels: allotment-agm, allotment-beans, allotment-october, allotment-shallots

Next year’s allotment potatoes and onions

We’ve placed our order for seed potatoes, onions and shallots. In potatoes we chosen:

• Maris Bard: which is said to be a smooth white skinned variety and white flesh and the traditional new potato taste. A very early and heavy cropper with good drought resistance
• Wilja: this is our second early potato, it’s a heavy cropper with medium dry texture with a good frying colour and great for boiling
• Cara: which is a round and rather pink tuber especially round the eye areas. It’s a very good baking spud and withstands drought. The claim in that it’s highly disease resistant, including the dreaded and horrible blight.

Our shallots will be Golden Gourmet – a yellow shallot that is resistant to bolt and is said to store well through the winter and our onions are going to be Sturon – an early onion which should form medium sized globe-shaped with very good keeping qualities so it stores far into winter. The brochure says it offers good bolting resistance although bolting hasn’t been an issue for us so far.

This is a completely different set of varieties to the ones we grew this year and in part we’ve done that deliberately to see how different varieties compare on our soil. Our 2009 potatoes were:

• Accent – first early, highly productive – as shown in the photograph above!
• Pink Fir Apple – lovely salad potatoes, high cropping for us, but a bit of a fiddle to clean and prepare.
• Desiree – performed really badly for us, but that’s probably because our soil wasn’t as well prepared as we would have wished.

We don’t know what our shallots were - they were the tag end of a bag given to us by a neighbour, and we grew overwintering onions which we decided weren’t a great idea as although they are juicy and tasty, they don’t offer the same keeping qualities we’d like.

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-potatoes, allotment-seed-potatoes, allotment-shallots