And into the ground the onions go …

We certainly picked a hot day to plant out the onions – and while we won’t know the outcome of the germination for a couple of weeks, I can already say that it’s certainly worthwhile doing the business with paper and paste if you’re a little bit cack-handed (clumsy, in polite speak) as I am. It wouldn’t be the easiest procedure on a windy day, but we had a fine, calm one. And the ‘simple’ method, of digging a trench and dropping an onion seed into it every six inches, sounds great but when you try to drop just one, tiny, black, onion seed at regular intervals, you end up doing a lot of cursing, in my experience.


We also grabbed the chance to plant out our garlic: we’re growing two varieties this year, Mediterranean Wight and Solent Wight, just to see how a softneck and a hardneck garlic compare.

We’re also busy harvesting all the squashes – we lost all the pumpkins Duncan planted, not quite sure why, but we think the planting through a growing membrane allowed water to build up under them as condensation which then rotted the side that was on the ground/membrane. Next year we shall lift them all onto mesh trays to try and give them an air gap. The hard squashes have done much better though, and as the neck that joins the fruit to the plant has begun to narrow, showing that the parent plant is becoming dormant and no longer feeding nutrients to the fruit, it’s time to get them off the site and somewhere warm and dry for a couple of days to toughen the skins, before putting them in a cool airy place to keep until they are wanted.

And, like everybody else, we’re still weeding. Weeds are the first things to appear in spring, and the last to disappear in winter … depressing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-garlic, allotment-october, allotment-squash, allotment-winter-onions

Three sisters planting for allotments

A friend of mine is trying out this system of planting, made famous by several Native American tribes and thinks I should too. The basic principle underlying the process is simple and elegant – if it works. What you do is plant the three sisters: sweetcorn, squash and beans all in the same hole. The theory is that the corn makes a support for the (runner) beans, the squash (courgette or cucumber) helps to suppress weeds by providing a ground cover something like a living mulch and the beans are a nitrogen fixer, improving the soil for both the other crops. The beans should finish first, and when the corn is ready to harvest the squashes can be allowed to run rampant, as they do.

Hmmm … I can see how it might work somewhere closer to the equator, but here? I think that the wetter, cooler climate of the UK will cause the following:

1. The beans will get very leafy and shade the squashes
2. The corn will mature more slowly than the beans, meaning that the cobs also get shaded by the bean leaves and thus won’t ripen
3. The squashes will be slow to ripen but will otherwise do fine (they are pretty indestructible)

It seems to me that this might not be a system that translates very well to the British allotment, not least because one usually has enough space to grow whatever one wants, and although I can find quite a number of people online who’ve said they are going to grow the Three Sisters way, I can’t find any reports on the results and that makes me wonder how well it works.

Has anybody out there tried it? Want to share the outcomes?

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-corn, allotment-squash, three-sisters-planting