Allotment: pots, watering cans and predators

What I want to know is, what happens to the flowerpots? Is it like the sock monster that eats socks out of the washing machine or is there a genuine flowerpot thief around?

This is the way it goes. I buy forty pots. I take them to the allotment and put them in the shed. The following weekend I decide to transplant something and go to my brand new pot-stock …

… and there are about a dozen left.

I challenge Himself who reminds me that I’ve watched every move he’s made at the allotment in the past week and none of those moves involved pots.

I rack my brains and remember giving a couple of pots to neighbours, and actually, now I come to think of it, potting up a few alpine strawberries and giving them away too, but not 28 of them, for Heaven’s sake! So I go and buy some more pots and the following weekend …

And it was brought home to me very forcibly yesterday that we need a hosepipe on 201. I found myself trudging up and down with watering cans, and even at half-four in the afternoon, it was a hot and wearying task. I don’t want to be doing that twice a week. The thing is, we have an attachment but it’s the wrong one: we have a push-on hose coupler and we need a threaded hose coupler. I remember this every weekend, and then forget all week, until it’s time to do the watering again. This week, even the dog gave up following me and sat at the halfway point, content to point his head in my general direction and thus fool himself he was doing his canine duty in getting under my feet whenever I’m carrying something.

And the slugs have been at our peas again. They don’t bother the first batch we put out at all, which goes to prove that perfect timing can be everything. If you can get a crop to be tall and sturdy, and well-hardened-off, and plant it when two or three days of dry weather are expected, it’s much less attractive to slugs and snails. The second lot of peas were slightly smaller and had to be planted when we knew there would be a heavy dew for several nights and sure enough, they have been slugged almost into submission, despite applications of ash, sand and wildlife friendly slug pellets.

And whenever I straighten up from my watering, this is the view I get, through the pear tree that borders our plot into our 'back' neighbour's plot. Isn't it heavenly?

Labels: allotment-flowerpots, allotment-peas, allotment-watering

Allotment Problems

Well, maybe they are problems and maybe they aren’t – one is already solved anyway and the others may just be dilemmas.

1 – the case of the leaking kettle

"There once was a fine Kelly kettle
Whose owners would boast of its mettle
When a leak it appeared
Their joy disappeared
For their kettle no longer had fettle."

But the Kelly kettle company are wonderful people and they sent me a new storm kettle to replace the old one. How’s that for problem solving! It's nice to have a proper cup of tea up on the site again.

2 – the bees, the bees!

We were due a visit by a beekeeper next Sunday, to talk about setting up a hive on one of the plots. Since I put the article in the newsletter, half a dozen people have asked to have their plots considered for bee-housing. However the beekeeper turned up a week early and said he couldn’t undertake to put a hive on the allotment for a variety of sensible reasons including the fact that he’s going to be away for a lot of the summer. So we have two alternatives:

A – set up a bee cooperative amongst ourselves
B – find another beekeeper

In the midst of all this it turns out that an allotment holder has bee allergy and could go into anaphylactic shock and die if stung. Now that could happen as easily with a bumble bee as a hive bee, and he carries adrenaline, and now that we know at least … well, we know, because before yesterday, we wouldn’t have had a clue that the problem might be allergy rather than say a heart attack.

But what should we do now? Should the risk to him outweigh the benefit to over 300 allotment holders who should get better pollination of crops via the bees? If not, should we set up a cooperative and take on the responsibility of apiculture ourselves or find another beekeeper who might at least start us off? I admit to mixed feelings. I know that I already have enough to do as secretary, but if anything goes wrong and I’m part of the cooperative I shall be the one person that everybody knows how to get hold of, which means that I’ll be the one out all hours if there are panics and problems. Also I worry about the idea of having a hive when one person, at least, will be made unhappy and apprehensive about it. Suppose we drove him to give up his allotment – that would be horrible, irresponsible and against the ethos of everything we’re doing. Ugh. Any advice anyone?

3 – The water, the water!

Our mains water won’t be turned back on until April. The storage tanks along each row are virtually dry. Our water butt is less than a third full. The seedlings need water! What are folk to do if it doesn’t rain?

A – transport water to the site – which is expensive, hard work and environmentally damaging.
B – let their crops die as seedling plants – which is expensive, heart-breaking and silly.
C – badger the council to turn on the water – which could backfire because the council don’t like to be badgered and the rules say Easter. We ask them to stick to other rules so it seems odd to now start demanding that they break some, and it makes us seem inconsistent.
D – pray or dance or whatever (depending on belief system) for rain.

Ideas welcomed on this one too.

And we've made, painted and installed the last of our raised beds - this picture is pre-installation because by the time we'd finished I was too exhausted to go and find the camera again.

Labels: allotment-bees, allotment-kettle, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-seedlings, allotment-watering

Allotments – a la francais

As promised, French allotments! I was lucky enough to meet a group while I was in Castelnaudary who are more or less what you could call an allotment association, although they are nothing like what we call one.

To understand French vegetable growing for the kitchen, you have to understand something about French inheritance laws. It was once the case that any land owned by a father was divided equally between his children. This meant that farms were constantly subdivided, and sold back and forth between siblings if they wanted to keep the land together. In towns, something different happened. Where land surrounded a house (which often also had outbuildings and stables) it also was divided between children. As the land was built on and new houses encroached on the divided garden, many people ended up with a separate garden, sometimes on the other side of the road! These small gardens in isolated areas between houses are often mistaken for allotments by English visitors. The true French allotment or jardin ouvrier (workers garden) dates from 1896 when they were set up to give factory workers ‘a taste of nature’ – isn’t that nice? Anyway, like our own allotments they fell in number. There were around 800,000 at the end of the second world war but by the 1970s only 150,000 were still in existence. Now they are on the rise again.

This photo is of a jardin non-attenant – or detached garden, of the first kind, which is owned partly by the houses that back onto it, and partly by the houses on the other side of the road. As you can see, it fronts a river, and there are some ingenious systems in use to raise river water by pump siphons to irrigate the land. Other than that, it looks just like an allotment to me!

Labels: allotment-abroad, allotment-irrigation, allotment-styles, allotment-watering, french-allotment

Allotment weather and first steps on the plot

Well what a weekend! Blazing sun on Saturday, enough to burn even the most well sun-creamed allotmenteer’s nose, gales and rain on Sunday, and a Monday of persistent rain, mist and misery. We’re in a bit of a finger’s crossed situation, we won’t know until this evening whether our temporary (old sheet) windbreak actually help up through the vicious weather, and my big fear is not just that it blew down, but that it scythed its way across several neighbouring allotments, taking the tops off people’s Brussels Sprouts and wrecking their bean wigwams as it went!

We’ve got tomatoes to be planted out, once the weather settles (assuming it ever does) plus some beans, although the peas have been dire this year once again – either Sussex doesn’t like peas or peas don’t like germinating for us, I’m not sure which! We were going to try a special local variety this year, but we forgot (as usual) and by the time we went to buy them, they’d sold out.

We’ve also got to move a water butt that will (eventually) take the water from the shed guttering to give us a lovely, reasonably constant source of irrigation, and some wood to make fences. It’s difficult, to be honest, to know where to start – plant up as much as possible, then worry about structural things like paths and walls, or work on the structure first, and then plant up once we’re sure the plot will be somewhat protected and easy to get around. We’re open to good advice, if people want to offer some!

Labels: allotment-planting, allotment-watering, allotment-windbreaks, new-allotment