Allotment strawberry beds

My new strawberry plants arrived in the middle of last week, so I grabbed the chance on Monday to go and plant them out. Okay, that’s not strictly accurate, I skived off work (I work for myself, so I had to explain myself to myself when I got back from the allotment) to take advantage of the good weather, and I’m glad I did because it has rained, non-stop, since then.

I ordered Strawberry Alice because they are late season and I already had runners from our old strawberry bed, which are mid-season, so I hope this will give us strawberries for longer. I’ve decided to plant them in two different raised beds, partly because the way the runners from the old neglected bed (which, let me remind you, was not neglected by us but by the previous allotment owners) had managed to travel at least two yards outside the bed, so anything that limits that rampaging has to be a good thing! Himself put in another two rows of broad beans, which makes five (and I feel sure there should be a joke about how many rows of beans make five, but I can't think how it would go) while I planted the two strawberry beds.


The top of the plot, previously known as the allotment shame, has been rotavated and as I had a new compost bin to install, I got on with that too, turning the compost from bins one and two and setting up bin three. I’m expecting the compost from bin one to be ready in spring, bin two in the autumn of next year, but bin three won’t be ready for a couple of years as it has been started off with a lot of twiggy stuff that came out of the rotavation process.

Now we need to get some weed-suppressing membrane down over the dug area, in the hope of smothering a few of the perennial weeds that will recover from being chopped to pieces in short order. In fact, if you want to propagate bindweed (but who would be so insane?) rotavating it is the best way, as every tiny fragment puts out roots and becomes a new plant. I hope I got most of the bindweed out before the machine arrived but it doesn’t take more than a single length of the disgusting stuff to spread itself right over a lovely newly dug area – especially if the blades have chopped it up and spread it out, all ready to take over!

Labels: allotment-bindweed, allotment-broad beans, allotment-compost, allotment-strawberries

Allotment – too much rain!

I don’t know about you, but our winter digging programme has been totally derailed by the amount of weather we’ve had this week. Every time we’ve tried to get to the plot to dig, it’s either rained heavily just as we’re about to set out, or we’ve got there to find that the ground is too wet to work.

It’s very annoying, as winter digging is one of the things that we failed to do adequately last year, mainly because we were still pulling out six foot thistles and enormous clumps of rampant horseradish and suckering raspberries, so we were determined to get everything properly double-dug and manured this year. I can only hope that as November continues it will get colder and less wet or we’re going to have to rethink our plans – we have so much unworked ground still to dig that it will take us all winter to get it into reasonable shape.

My seedling globe artichokes are looking a bit sad – I’d hoped to get them into the nursery bed this week too, so that they can have it as a bit of winter protection before being transplanted in spring to take their place with the plants I set out last year. I really have to get that done this weekend, as well as putting the strawberries in their new raised bed, which at the moment resembles a paddy field surrounded by wooden walls!

Labels: allotment-artichoke, allotment-digging, allotment-strawberries

October allotment harvest and crop rotation

I’ve managed to dig over the whole of the strawberry bed although this picture shows the halfway point of digging.

The result is a pile of old strawberry plants, with roots as tough and woody as elder, that’s about waist high and over a metre long – seriously that strawberry bed was over-crowded. About a quarter of the bed was grass, which has been impossible to weed out because the strawberries were so closely crowded, so we won’t have that to contend with next year either.

I’ve also got about six strawberry runners potted up to replant in a raised bed, and I’ve ordered another nine plants from a supplier. That will give us two different varieties – ours are rather late so I’ve ordered an earlier cropper so that we can have a longer strawberry season. To be perfectly honest I got fed up with spending so many of the best days of the year picking and freezing strawberries so if I can spread that out a bit it’s better for my mental health!

While I dug the strawberry bed, Himself dug over the area that had held the peas and beans in the summer. This year the broad beans, French beans, peas and petits pois will go into the area where our first early potatoes were planted. The ground in which we had maincrop potatoes (our biggest failure) needs a lot of work to get it truly productive, so we hope to work in lime over the summer and get it ready for next year’s brassicas. And our potatoes will go where the peas and beans were – crop rotatation, not exactly perfect, but pretty good for year 2 on a previously neglected plot, I think.

And we also harvested another trug full of borlotti beans, the last of the beetroot (okay, we missed them and only found them when we were digging over) and a few carrots, as well as some alpine strawberries – still delicious!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-crop-rotation, allotment-rough-digging, allotment-strawberries

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

Mid-June Allotment Harvest

Okay, I’m bragging, but we’re thrilled with the haul we’re getting from 201, given that we only took it over in October 2008.

We can’t take credit for the strawberries, because they were in place before we got our plot, but the broad beans, peas, sweet peas, radishes and rhubarb are all products of our labour since last autumn!

The broad beans have been a bit of a disappointment – they aren’t cropping nearly as heavily as the overwintered beans that we planted on 235 because the spring-planted seedlings have been hideously attacked by blackfly. So we’ve learnt our lesson for next year: even if the mice do take a few seeds over the winter, it’s much better to plant them in situ because they don’t get the problem with blackfly that the spring planted ones do.

The peas are delicious though, and so far only one batch has made it to the saucepan, all the others have been eaten straight out of the pod. We are pea gluttons and no mistake.

The rhubarb hasn’t produced heavily this year, which is not surprising given that we only transplanted it in November, but it’s very tasty and didn’t bolt in May like the more established rhubarb on other people’s plots did.

So, time for a recipe?

Rhubarb and Strawberry Pudding

6 sticks rhubarb, cut into chunks
250 grams strawberries, hulled and halved
250 grams caster sugar in two 125 gram amounts
75 grams butter or margarine
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
150 grams plain flour mixed with 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
150 ml milk

While the oven is getting to 180 C or gas 4, grease a large square baking dish, wash fruit if necessary, and put in a bowl with 125 grams of sugar, stirring until fruit and sugar are well mixed. I like to use lemon verbena sugar for this recipe (just put some lemon verbena leaves in a jar with white caster sugar and store for around a month, shaking every couple of days to get a lovely lemony scent and savour).

Then pour them into the baking dish and spread them out evenly. Beat the rest of the sugar with the fat and add the egg and vanilla before alternating additions of milk and big spoonfuls of flour. Beat until smooth and pour the batter over the fruit. Should cook in around an hour, or when a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean. Lovely with cream or thick yoghurt and equally good hot or cold. This is not a neat and tidy pudding though, so don’t expect it to look posh, even if it tastes scrummy.

Labels: allotment harvest, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-recipes, allotment-rhubarb, 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

Alpine Strawberries, Raised Beds and Ruminations

I was expecting to admit defeat on the strawberry germination front. Despite excellent advice and carefully packaged seeds from Patrick and Steph there had been a long period of absolutely nothing happening. But today there are four absolutely tiny seedlings in the white alpine strawberry seed tray! They are minute in a completely different way to the celeriac, which is tall and spindly, the strawberries are tiny but soil-hugging, looking like tiny green pinpricks on the surface of the John Innes #2. I’m very excited, especially as I have more seeds yet to plant, and hope that there will be enough seedlings to be able to raise some for other allotment holders. And we potted up about nine rhubarb at the weekend, so we’re definitely stockpiling goodies to be sold/donated/given away, which is part of our brief in working this plot for the Allotment Society.

Anyway, because the strawberries are just too intsy to photograph, here’s a picture of our first raised beds being installed. The wood was sourced by me from Freecycle, the beds were designed and constructed by Himself from old decking, and I painted them. He hammered them into the ground. I dug the soil over. In other words, it’s been a real collaborative effort. The idea is to have nine of them, all in different colours, but we haven’t agreed on which nine crops they will house yet: definitely celeriac, climbing French beans, summer salads and chicory but the rest are up for grabs, as it were.

What I’ve been ruminating about is the excitement of germination. I’ve been out to the greenhouse three times to look at the strawberries, and I know Himself will go and have a look as soon as he gets home. But having mentioned this to an otherwise good friend today, I was disturbed to find her reaction to be lukewarm. She’s not ‘into’ planting things, she told me. I can’t understand that at all. I’ve tried, but it’s like saying you’re not into breathing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-celeriac, allotment-chicory, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-rhubarb, allotment-strawberries

The secret treasures of allotment life

Okay, the secrets of plot 201 is what I really mean. Like Sarah at She Who Digs we’ve got a new plot!

Well, not exactly. Once again we’re co-workers, but this time on a plot which hasn’t been worked for at least a year – and it really shows. The weeds were up to my chin when we first saw it, and the path had completely disappeared under grass and who knew what (I know what now, see below!)

201 does have a glorious shed, something like a small Swiss chalet – and of course there’s a downside to that too, because several of the panes of glass in the three windows have been broken and the pear tree that hangs over the roof in a very pretty way has also rubbed some very pretty holes in the roofing felt, meaning that the roof leaks in a very unpretty way which has to be sorted out pronto. But even so, I can imagine long summer evenings in the shed with a glass of something cool and refreshing, or maybe even an hour in a hammock under the pear tree … why not? A girl can dream.

Back to reality. I was expecting nettles, and I got them. I was prepared for thistles and that was good, because we have plenty. I was even ready for bindweed, fortunately, as that seems to be our major crop at present (it was twelve feet up a holly tree and five yards along the fence – is there a Guinness Book of Records entry for the most invasive bindweed?) but what I wasn’t expecting, and had no idea could even happen, was the total invasion of plot 201’s gorgeous brick-built path by … strawberry runners!

Yes, seriously. The middle section of the path is so riddled with tiny strawberry plantlets that it’s a danger to walk on it. When we finally found the strawberry bed they came from, we were amazed, it's more like a strawberry jungle - but an invading one. Who knew strawberries could be such a pest?

I’m reduced to digging them out, one by one, with an old fork. And there’s something really weird about that. Because as I was squatting in the rain, turfing out weeds with a bit of cutlery, I remembered a picture my Mum took of me when I was two-and-a-half, crouching in the garden, digging a hole with a soup-spoon – according to her, it was my constant obsession for months. Some things never change then!

Labels: allotment-strawberries, allotment-trees, allotment-weeds, new-allotment

Three days, two pairs of hands, one strawberry bed!

On Friday we had a day off and went to the allotment. Sue of the glorious tomatoes gave us a tray of strawberry runners and the idea was born – build a strawberry bed. First we chose a place in full sun, then we made the frame from decking.



On Saturday we dug out the turf under it. Then we filled it with a mixture of soil and well rotted compost.



On Sunday we planted our strawberries!



It's amazing what you can achieve in a weekend ... if you don't mind a few blisters!

Labels: allotment-raised-beds, allotment-strawberries