Raspberry Bed - the final allotment version

Because I got nagged by email, I have somewhat reluctantly agreed to post a picture of the raspberry bed. It doesn’t look like anything much at this time of year, and certainly I don’t look like anything much, planting raspberries in my pixie hat and old allotment coat! You can see the raspberry canes that Tony dug out of the middle of the strawberry bed - and that I then cut the old wood from and pruned to planting height - laying across the planting string. We offset the plants from one side of the string to the other, to make weeding and harvesting slightly easier and to give each plant the maximum amount of air ventilation and sunlight – if you plant them in straight rows, the front one shields the next from the sun and the second one shields the third, so by halfway down the row, the plants are getting very little sun indeed.

As I say, it looks like nothing much now, but wait until I show you another picture in late Spring, when the canes will be shooting up and the leaf buds will have opened to show the lovely fresh green of new leaves.

We’re still doing lots of structural work – you can see that the cold frame is completely half finished! In other words, the front end of the frame has been reglazed and is ready to be used, but the back end hasn’t had its glass covers put back on yet because we’re waiting for the wooden frame to dry out – it was utterly sodden with rainwater and we don’t want to dry it too fast or it will warp and not fit the base. Initially Tony used webbing on the front end of the frame: it allowed the glass cover to fall back away from the frame without actually hitting the ground on the other side and breaking the glass – that lasted two nights! On the third morning we went up and found that mice had eaten straight through it. Now we have a wooden prop that fits into a narrow groove cut into the front edge of the lid – it means we can’t open it past the vertical, but it also means the mice can’t catch us out by chewing through it. We’re hoping that the regular presence of Rebus the Cairn Terrier will discourage the rodents from visiting us quite so often.

And if possible, I shall report on 235's onion experiment in my next post. I wanted to report today, but the rain and wind were so strong I actually couldn't see the onion bed well enough to check how many seeds had germinated. Oh the joys of a winter allotment!

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-winter-onions

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

Fun with paper and glue

You may be wondering exactly what this picture has to do with allotments. Well, it’s our first ever, home-made, seed planting strips! Yes, they are a little late going in, but as we live in the soft south, we’re still hopeful that they will produce a crop.

The thing is, onion seed is fiddly, really really fiddly. And you can’t transplant onions. So … if you want to be sure your tiny onion seed is properly spaced when it goes into the ground, it requires some work (so we’ve been told) with paper and glue.

What you need to do is get some nice long strips of newspaper, about half an inch deep and the full width of the best of the press – the Telegraph is a perfect size, I’ve found – and measure six inch spacings. At each six inch point, you put a dab of ‘glue’ made from flour and water, and onto the glue you dot a single onion seed. Allow the whole business to dry and then pack it into a long tray for transport from home to the plot.

When you get there, all you need to do is dig a shallow trench about half an inch deep and lay the paper strips into it. Cover the trench and water if necessary. If you’re clever, you’ll pick a day when rain is forecast for the afternoon so you don’t even have to water them in.

You might be thinking this is a lot of effort (I might be thinking that too, after an evening spent with paste-brush, scissors and tiny seeds) and wondering if it’s worth it? Well, as yet we don’t know, so what we’re doing is preparing half our over-wintering onion seed this way, and simply dropping the other half into prepared rows by hand. As they grow we’ll be able to see if the extra work in preparing the strips has been worth it, or not, or even if it's better to make the extra investment in onion sets and not grow from seed at all. Watch this space …

Labels: allotment-onions, allotment-seeds, allotment-winter-onions, growing-allotment-onions

Allotment sheds

This is what everything at our allotment looked like, and felt like, today – covered in fat drops of rain that make fruit slip from your fingers as you tried to pick it, dropped on your head and neck at unexpected moments when you were digging, or made the grass slippery underfoot so that as you carried tools and pallets and posts to and fro. Not a great deal of fun, to be honest.

But it had to be done, because next Sunday – come hell or high water (and high water looks considerably more likely!) we are going to put up El Shed! Yes, the partly-painted shed is to be in place by the end of next weekend, and that’s that.

So today we had to get a couple of things done, to whit: clearing out some slimy old lettuce to make room for the overwintering onions (so far we have the onion seeds but not the sets or the two kinds of garlic - hard neck and soft neck) and banging in some pallets along the side of the allotment where the prevailing wind whistles across with Siberian bitterness. Duncan busied himself with digging over the ground where the shed will stand, and I did a soil pH test which confirmed what we already knew – our soil is neutral!

Labels: allotment-fruit, allotment-shed, allotment-winter-onions