Allotment soft fruit

Last year Pat and Steph at Bifurcated Carrots were kind enough to send me some white alpine strawberry seed. At the same time, we had to move 201’s overgrown, highly rampant raspberries into an area where they could be corralled. I planted my strawberry seed and dug up my raspberry canes without any expectation of fruit from either this year.

The seed went into the greenhouse and came up as absolutely tiny plantlets. I grew some on for myself and gave all the others away – some went to the allotment that grows crops for the local hospice, so I hoped that the plants would be given enough time to prove themselves before being dug up to make room for something else.

How very wrong I was to doubt!

Okay, we’re not exactly in a glut situation, but the strawberries never will be a glut crop – they grow a few fruit at a time over a long time frame, so you get just enough to have with your breakfast cereal or to snack on at lunchtime. They are delicious - tangy, almost citrus-flavoured and very soft, more like a raspberry in texture than a strawberry. The raspberries themselves have done very well to fruit at all, so I’m definitely not complaining about their productivity.

So this is with thanks to Pat and Steph, and an encouragement to people who’ve only grown seed from seed companies – it’s not difficult to harvest seed, and it seems quite easy to grow it too. If I can do it, anybody can!

Labels: allotment-alpine-strawberries, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-strawberries

New Allotment: Old Weeds and Exhausted Strawberries

Yet another lovely experience shared by many an allotment holder who takes over a plot that’s been neglected for a while is the sad realisation that to preserve what you’ve got might be a harder task than starting from scratch.

Last autumn we built a strawberry bed on 235 from salvaged wood and planted it with strawberry runners offered by lovely neighbours. We lost two of those runners over the winter (one was dug up by the fox, no idea why) and replaced them in April with plants that are flowering beautifully. What the crop will be like in year 1 is anybody’s guess, but it’s very easy to hoe between the plants and maintain the raised bed.

Then we move to 201, where the strawberry bed is said to be productive and to have very tasty fruit (at least neighbour-but-one Tracey tells us she had a good crop off them last summer, which is good to know, it would be horrible if they’d been wasted!) but which was so overgrown that I despaired. Today, after two intensive weeding sessions, I still despair, but more of ever being able to stand straight again than of the strawberries.
Essentially, to try and rescue the bed, I’m having to hand-weed this enormous bed, pulling out clumps of grass from between the plants, cutting tangles of runners that have obviously run riot for five years or more, taking out all the diseased leaves (and a few plants) and trying to get a bit of nourishment into the soil for this year.

I shall then take this year’s runners and stick them in pots over the winter, so that they can establish a root system before cutting them from the parent plant next spring, and then create a whole new bed somewhere else on the allotment where the soil is less exhausted.
And of course, the dear strawberries haven’t stayed in their bed – runners have travelled several yards away from their original home and even crossed the path and rooted on the other side of the plot!

Still, strawberries are worth it, aren’t they?

Labels: allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-strawberries, allotment-strawberry-bed

Allotment Perennials

Apart from potting up loads of rhubarb, to be either sold or given away to other allotment holders (I want to give it away, the committee may overrule me and either sell it or ask for donations) I’ve been thinking a lot about allotment perennials these past few days. There’s raspberries of course, needing to be pruned now to get going for the autumn harvest (if you have autumn fruiting ones, the summer fruiting ones should be pruned after harvesting). And black, red and whitecurrants, all of which are lovely to make jam and jelly with, and give you years of service. Our thornless blackberry is a joy – and even thorny brambles produce gorgeous fruit.

So what else?

How about perennial leeks? Oh yes! They are properly called Babbington’s Leek, and I’ve just been given half a dozen bulbils by the lovely Fran who helps organise Seedy Sunday. Plants for a Future says: Division in late summer or early autumn. Dig up the bulbs when the plants are dormant and divide the small bulblets at the base of the larger bulb. Replant immediately, either in the open ground or in pots in a cold frame. Bulbils - plant out as soon as they are ripe in late summer. The bulbils can be planted direct into their permanent positions, though you get better results if you pot them up and plant them out the following spring.

Doesn’t that sound great? They are like a mild leek or Welsh onion, as far as I can tell.

And how about perennial rocket, also from the lovely Fran. This is apparently a totally different plant to cultivated rocket with more finely cut leaves and a much stronger flavour, which is more complex but doesn’t get silly-hot like rocket does just before it bolts. It seems that it hates root disturbance and tends to sprawl, so needs a bit of room to allow it to self seed, at which point you lift the seedlings in a big dollop of soil so as not to derange the roots and give the plantlets a new home.

Also, somewhat scarily, I’ve agreed to take some tomato seedlings from Fran to raise up so that we can have a tomato tasting day on the allotments and then people can say which seed they’d like me to save for them so that they can then have seed to raise their own tomatoes in perpetuity – gulp!

Labels: allotment-leeks, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-tomato, babbington's leek, perennial rocket

Raspberry Bed - the final allotment version

Because I got nagged by email, I have somewhat reluctantly agreed to post a picture of the raspberry bed. It doesn’t look like anything much at this time of year, and certainly I don’t look like anything much, planting raspberries in my pixie hat and old allotment coat! You can see the raspberry canes that Tony dug out of the middle of the strawberry bed - and that I then cut the old wood from and pruned to planting height - laying across the planting string. We offset the plants from one side of the string to the other, to make weeding and harvesting slightly easier and to give each plant the maximum amount of air ventilation and sunlight – if you plant them in straight rows, the front one shields the next from the sun and the second one shields the third, so by halfway down the row, the plants are getting very little sun indeed.

As I say, it looks like nothing much now, but wait until I show you another picture in late Spring, when the canes will be shooting up and the leaf buds will have opened to show the lovely fresh green of new leaves.

We’re still doing lots of structural work – you can see that the cold frame is completely half finished! In other words, the front end of the frame has been reglazed and is ready to be used, but the back end hasn’t had its glass covers put back on yet because we’re waiting for the wooden frame to dry out – it was utterly sodden with rainwater and we don’t want to dry it too fast or it will warp and not fit the base. Initially Tony used webbing on the front end of the frame: it allowed the glass cover to fall back away from the frame without actually hitting the ground on the other side and breaking the glass – that lasted two nights! On the third morning we went up and found that mice had eaten straight through it. Now we have a wooden prop that fits into a narrow groove cut into the front edge of the lid – it means we can’t open it past the vertical, but it also means the mice can’t catch us out by chewing through it. We’re hoping that the regular presence of Rebus the Cairn Terrier will discourage the rodents from visiting us quite so often.

And if possible, I shall report on 235's onion experiment in my next post. I wanted to report today, but the rain and wind were so strong I actually couldn't see the onion bed well enough to check how many seeds had germinated. Oh the joys of a winter allotment!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-winter-onions

Raspberry frames

For such a delicate fruit the raspberry needs a heavyweight support system to give of its best. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks investigating other people’s raspberry cane arrangements, so that we could decide what to do with ours. There’s everything from concrete stanchions with solid metal poles running laterally across them through to individual rustic wooden fenceposts with wires wrapped around them. Raspberries grow to six feet tall, quite comfortably.

And so we're busy, constructing the right frames for our raspberries, whenever the weather allows. This is real winter work.

In spring you plant new canes, tying their stems to the supports and then feed and mulch.

Pruning is a little complicated because you prune summer fruiting varieties in autumn, cutting canes that bore fruit to ground level and tying in the strongest new stems to the wires, then in the cold of winter you trim the tops of the canes to about six inches above the top wire. But autumn fruiting varieties get pruned in mid-winter, cutting every stem to ground level. In either case, planted north-south they usually get the most evenly distributed sunlight although they don’t require actual heat.

Our raspberries have invaded the strawberry bed on 201, or perhaps the strawberries took over the raspberry bed, it’s difficult to tell – in either case, they’ve got to be straightened out and taught to live apart. Both fruits are prone to be invasive though, so I can see we’ll be digging up random fruiting plants for years to come.

I wonder why we say a ‘raspberry’ to denote a rude noise made with the lips?

Labels: allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit