Battening down the hatches, and the cloches …

Clever Andy makes these himself. All it requires is horticultural fleece, flexible water pipe and some bits of batten. He says the cheapest horticultural fleece is to be found in Slovakia, and I believe him, but I also suspect it’s only worth buying it if you were already planning a trip there for some other reason!

Cloches like this are valuable at this time of year (assuming they haven’t been blown away by the gale force winds) as they protect tender seedlings from wind and rain, frost and snow, cats that are looking for a toilet. In a few weeks time, impossible as it may seem now, the caterpillar, grub and worm infestation will begin, and the cloches again keep such annoying pests as caterpillars and cabbage root fly away from your favourite crops.

Also they are nice and lightweight which is important when you’re growing rotational crops that need to be covered, like cauliflower, which should never be grown two years running in the same soil. The point is that Andy’s cloches cost him pennies, while the kind you can buy in shops will definitely cost pounds – such a clever allotment holder!

Labels: allotment-creation, allotment-tips, cauliflower, cloches

Allotment Open Days

Helen tells me that Brighton and Hove Organic Garden Group’s allotment open day was a tremendous success with over two hundred people turning up! They were very happy that many of those visitors were younger ones, who took part in a Bug Hunt with Dave Bangs and who were able to use the recently planted "wigloo" – see picture - as shelter from the sun. They raised around £270.00 from sales of plants, tea and cakes and bric a brac, which will be donated to Moulsecoomb Forest Garden and Wildlife Project.

I asked her why they’d had an open day and she replied that the allotment project was set up about two years ago to provide the group with a space to meet, work together and demonstrate organic methods of cultivation. The open day allowed them to invite the wider community to see what they’ve been doing and for the allotment volunteers to put their feet up and enjoy the space with their friends and family. BHOGG was set up about six years ago to promote organic gardening and provide a support network for local growers. Monthly meetings and a quarterly newsletter provide spaces for people to share ideas and information. There’s also a gardening advice "hotline" for members and email for enquiries (details below). The group tries to offer a wide range of activities and to make them accessible to as many people as possible. This is important to try and demystify organic gardening which is really just gardening with nature in mind. An organic gardener strives to look after all the creatures that inhabit their gardens and allotments to deliver a harmonious balance. A major focus is the soil - because a healthy soil will produce healthy plants better equipped to fend off predators or disease - so no chemical fertilisers or weedkillers are allowed as these deplete the soil.

There is plenty of information available for would be organic gardeners today. The Garden Organic website is a good place to start www.gardenorganic.org.uk or go to the local library and find a good organic gardening book.


More about BHOGG: To join BHOGG please go to the website at www.bhogg.org where you can download a joining form. For the gardening advice or enquiries email bhoggroup@yahoo.co.uk

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-open-day, allotment-tips, organic-allotment

Allotment holders up close

This is Ron Buckman, local allotment site representative and Grand Old Man of allotmenteering. Normally, when we use the term Grand Old Man we’re talking about a star of the stage and screen, a theatre impresario or a literary lion, but it fits Ron extremely well. Not only has he had an allotment on our site for over twenty five years, but prior to that he had allotments at two other sites as well – it’s a lifetime of experience and it shows when you see his plot, which is workmanlike, thriving and productive. He’s a Grand Old Man for another reason too – have a guess how old he is?

Ron is also very modest about his achievements, which are not just about being able to produce good crops from his land – as you can see, he’s been recognised for his contribution to the world of allotments generally. He’s a stalwart of the shop, where we buy our various supplies and provisions, he’s a fount of information about what to grow, where, when and how, and he is the repository of local history about our site and its characters and development over many years. Walking round the site with him is an education – he seems to know almost everybody we pass, and he can sum up the history of nearly every plot, tell you its soil conditions and what its been used for in the past, and what has succeeded and failed on it, drawing on his in depth knowledge of the land and its users.

I’ll be describing in detail how Ron grows his unbelievably large and highly-scented sweet peas a bit later in the year, so that we can all have a go at emulating his methods, but in the meantime he has one piece of wisdom for all new allotment holders which is worth bearing in mind. “To keep a plot going,” Ron says, “you need to put in about ten hours a week. A lot of people come here, clear their plot, plant a crop and expect to come back in a couple of weeks and find something growing – they won’t. You need to put in the time at the beginning, and then you get something out at the end.”

It’s a statement that’s true about most things in life, but you don’t often get such a detailed prescription for success, so when it comes to an allotment, ten hours a week is what you need, and Ron should know.

As to how old he is, I still don’t quite believe it myself, especially since I visited his plot and saw how much of it he’d dug over ready for planting, but Ron is actually eighty seven – and if that’s not evidence for how good allotments can be for your health and fitness, I don’t know what is!

Labels: allotment-holder-interview, allotment-personality, allotment-tips

How's your allotment growing?

Usually, in July, we are busier watering the plants than anything else, but this year it’s been the reverse, we are busy trying to keep the plants out of the water as much as possible!

This is a time to keep on top the weeds – it’s easier to attack them with a hoe when they are tiny seedlings than to have to dig them up or pull them out as fully grown plants. Remember that hoeing bare soil is still a good idea because it will kill off any tiny seedlings that your eyes haven’t spotted.

Despite the awful weather, your vegetable harvest should be in full swing now and most people are picking or harvesting the following:

Broad Beans – if yours haven’t got rust yet, you’re a lucky allotmenteer. If they have, harvest the entire crop now and destroy the plants, don’t compost them because your heap almost certainly won’t get hot enough to destroy the rust spores, especially in this damp weather.
French Beans
Runner Beans
Cabbage
Carrots
Cauliflower
Celery
Courgettes – harvest now, or wait a few weeks and let them turn into soft-skinned marrows to be stuffed
Cucumbers
Lettuce
Onions – the onions are struggling this year, its almost impossible for them to dry properly and you may have to lift early and put them on wire mesh indoors to finish off properly.
Spring Onions
Peas – harvest peas every day, it takes less than 24 hours for the sugar in peas to convert to cellulose, changing from sweetness to a kind of flouriness that is not nearly so tasty.
Early Potatoes - When you harvest your potatoes take care to remove all the tubers because any left behind will sprout next year and become a weed and may also act as a repository for disease and potato blight spores. It's often worth forking over a few days after harvesting potatoes because more seem to miraculously appear. When you have harvested your potatoes you might like to consider sowing a green manure crop - mustard is fast growing and is supposed to confuse the potato eel worm into breeding at the wrong time. However, mustard is actually a brassica so don't use it if you suffer from club root.
Radish
Spinach
Tomatoes – if you buy bananas, put the skins under your tomato plants, the ethylene that is given off by mature bananas helps ripen the fruit.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-tips

The Sweet Pea man of Hurstpierpoint

I haven’t managed to interview my own resident sweet pea expert, Ron, yet, but my recent visit to the Hurstpierpoint allowed me to meet another sweet pea man – another genius with these gorgeous, highly-scented flowers. As you can see, his sweet peas are second to none (except, maybe, Ron’s!) and he agreed to share some of his secrets. The key to producing huge blooms like this is cordon growing. And it is quite a lot of work – but the evidence suggests that if you like sweet peas as much as I do, it’s well worth it.

Here’s what you do:

1. Choose a sunny spot and hammer two stakes into the ground to make a row.



2. Attach parallel wires between the posts, one at the bottom and one further up. Push canes into the soil every nine inches or so and secure them to the wires.



3. Plant one sweet pea in front of each cane – the Sweet Pea man of Hurstpierpoint has actually colour-coordinated his along the rows, but you might choose to mix the really highly scented varieties like the grandifloras amongst the others (the Spencer varieties usually have bigger flowers but less scent) to encourage the pollinators who will be drawn by the fragrance and then travel around the rest of your plot.



4. Let the plants grow to a foot tall and then select the strongest shoot and remove the rest – painful, but necessary if you want really strong flowers.



5. Tie this shoot to the cane and regularly pinch off side shoots and tendrils – this step means the plant gives all its strength to the flowers rather than dissipating it in side shoots and climbing growth. You will need pea rings or horticultural tape to keep tying the primary shoot to the cane.



6. When the plants have reached the top of the canes, untie them and lay the stems on the ground, parallel to the row.



7. Now re-tie stems to a cane further along the row, so the tip of the plant reaches about a foot up its new cane.

This is why so many people grow sweet peas on the allotment rather than in the garden at home - it's just too much to be expected give up so much garden space for a single plant, but on your plot you can extend the cane row as far as you like without losing much in terms of space.

Labels: allotment-flowers, allotment-secrets, allotment-tips, sweet peas