April Allotment planting

The Easter weekend was all about peas. First, the sweet peas went in around their bean-wam. These are a mixture of saved seed, F1 hybrids (some kind of charity seed that helps fund support for returning soldiers that I got talked into buying in the allotment shop) and the last of the year before’s cottage garden highly-scented pastel seed. Should at least make for an interesting display.

The bean-wam is in the middle of the herb bed - last year it ended up being used for borlotti beans because we simply ran out of usable soil on 201. We had nearly a quarter of the allotment unused but as it hadn't been dug for years, there was little point trying to plant it until we'd dug and fed it. This year the borlottis are going where we had potatoes last year, the potatoes are breaking up the ground that wasn't used at all in 2009, and the bean-wam will host the sweet peas this year and next year maybe I'll have a proper herb planting in there. Maybe.

Then it was real peas. 320 of them. There are both Meteor and Feltham First but in this picture you can only seethe back lot (Meteor) and the front row, still to be planted, are entirely are Feltham First. They are also the result of successional sowings – the ones you can see at the left-hand end of the picture went in two weeks before the ones that you can't see, at the far right. We still have all our maincrop peas to sow yet, but they go directly into the ground.

Our early peas get sown in toilet roll inners because of mice, but the maincrops don’t seem to suffer so much – probably because there is so much else for them to be nibbling on that a few peas aren’t as enticing as they are earlier in the year when there’s no variety to the rodent diet.

The radishes are up (the parsnips aren’t, not worried yet though) and the first of the beetroot are up too. All in all it’s looking properly springlike on 201 at last!

Labels: allotment-peas, allotment-potatoes, allotment-sweet-peas

Allotment colours

Okay, I’m showing off a bit. The last of the sweetpeas were needing to be picked and having picked them, I couldn’t resist harvesting a twilight purple kohlrabi to set alongside them and then the green table begged to be a setting … very arty, I hope you agree.

So, back to the adventures with kohlrabi – I wasn’t thrilled by the flavour in a casserole, so I tried it in a coleslaw, as suggested by plot-holder Duncan. That was better but still not exactly thrilling, so finally I cut this kohlrabi into chunks, sprinkled it with garlic, herbes de provence and salt and roasted it in olive oil with carrots, potatoes and peppers: superb! Since then we’ve also tried kohlrabi oven chips (like potato chips but oven roasted, well sprinkled with black pepper and chili flakes) which were just as good.

As I’m spending most of my weekends digging over the bottom of the allotment so that we can use it for root crops this year (we have no idea when it was last planted, it has turned into a impressive jungle of weeds and even a weekly digging only reduces it to a wasteland, rather than an outright jungle) I’ve got a healthy appetite for the vegetables we harvest. This weekend I’ve got to deal with two giant courgettes – very nearly marrow sized – and they are not my favourite vegetable but I’m determined to find a similarly superb recipe to make them a family favourite. Tonight I’m trying the first one in a coconut milk curry with chickpeas … I wonder if that is going to be the answer?

Labels: allotment-courgettes, allotment-kohlrabi, allotment-sweet-peas

So what did you get?

I didn’t find a shredder in my Christmas stocking, sadly. Nor did I get a tree house. But I did get:

A heritage seed collection with twelve varieties including purple and yellow climbing beans, sweet peppers, tomatoes, carrots and what they call tatsoi but I call rosette bok choy and which I ate when I was in china – very tasty. The pack came from www.realseeds.co.uk whom I’ve never purchased from myself, so I hope they’re as good as my usual heritage seed suppliers, Chiltern seeds at www.chilternseeds.co.uk/

Some plasticised sweet pea rings, so there’s no excuse for me not growing sweet peas as good as Ron’s!

And I’ve got some wonderful sweet pea seeds on order: Queen of the Isles, which is red and white striped and has a very good fragrance and Black Knight, which is solid maroon and has a gorgeous scent too.

And my sympathies go out to gardeners on plots near Jubilee Road and Dunraven Business Park, Bridgend, Wales, who are unable to eat their Christmas Brussels Sprouts and parsnips as a “precautionary measure” while the soil on their allotment site undergoes tests for contamination, following the discovery, way back in August that two plots, relocated from the ASDA store site on Coychurch Road, contained polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Allotment holders were told a report was due before Christmas with a risk assessment to be completed in January – but it seems it hasn’t turned up so far.

Labels: allotment-christmas, allotment-gifts, allotment-news, allotment-sweet-peas