Early February - Blustery & Grey

Early February - Blustery & Grey
Newly dug over square beds 07/02/11

Thursday 22 September 2011

Starship Trooper

My leek crop has been completed decimated in just over a week. What I initially thought was just a few outside leaves drying and turning brown, quickly escalated into a full scale attack of what - on the surface - looked like the dreaded rust.

But rust is not the culprit.

On Tuesday's school run I bumped into Rachel - fellow novice plot holder, whose plot is diagonally across from my SE corner - and after telling her of my leek woes she told me that there was big sign up at the allotment entrance warning allotmenteers about "some sort of leek-munching creepycrawlie".

So off I headed last night to remove my leek crop from the ground and deliver it home to a fiery death in our 'not to be used as a garden incinerator' chiminaya. And lo-and-behold Rachel was right: a huge sign warning of the deadly Brown Leek Moth - a little blighter from Bulgaria that is apparently marching inland from the Eastern and Southern coasts of Britain, devouring and deep-mining the innards of many a leek crop. They lay their eggs, eggs sprout caterpillars, caterpillars bore down into leaves and flesh, damaged flesh rots, game over.

I snapped a couple of my sorry alliums in two and their weeping bodies told testament to the destructive power of the Leek Moth wrigglers: great slimy bore holes driven right down the shaft of each vegetable, rendering them all completely inedible and only fit for burning.

The bucket of pulled leeks sat sadly in the boot, fragrancing the car with the delicious scent of cheese & onion crisps for the trip home. Which only made the whole evening feel even more tragic.

And I still stink of smoke from the burning :(

Friday 2 September 2011

Le Canny French!

We had our family holiday in Saint Jean de Monts (in the Vendee region of France) this year. It was very reminiscent of Cornwall in that it lashed down with rain half the time and was full of British campers and number plates. We made the best of it - I dragged the kids to the beach in the gloom and gales, and whilst we enjoyed a paddle and a sand castle construction session, my good wife sat huddled in jeans, jumper and multiple towels in our little beach tent complaining that we weren't in Spain.

Since we've had the allotment I've taken to noticing what is growing in country properties, farmers fields and gardens a lot more. The Vendee is an extremely agricultural region - apart from the campsites that string the coastline, farming seems to be the only local industry - and the fields are wholly populated with either beef and diary cattle or sweetcorn. The amount of maize growing was fantastic*.

The number of village and suburban properties with their own little vegetable plots was far higher than anything I've ever seen in Britain. Although we only saw a handful of proper allotment plots, almost all of the non-holiday let houses seemed to have a section of garden assigned to growing vegetables, the most obvious and popular being tomatoes - more on this in a second.

What was really noticable though was the height of these plots - apart from a single line of French climbing beans spied on one of the allotments, almost everything was grown below waist height. Presumably the sea winds coming in off the Atlantic are so strong and destructive that nothing grows above the low garden walls that offer protection against the lashing horizontal gales**.

The other object that kept cropping up in these garden plots were old wooden crates, masterfully recycled by the canny French as tomato plant supports. For smaller plants, said boxes seemed to be positioned behind the plants to offer wind protection as well as supporting the fruit - popped on the top of the box the fruit was in the ideal position to ripen in the sun. Larger plants (Marmande?) were interspersed in their lines with boxes either side of them, giving less wind protection but additional support for the heavier fruits. Tres simple mais ingenious, non?! To illustrate, I enclose a doodle:


Le Canny French Box Trick Blueprints

* See now restrained I was there not saying "amazing"?!
** One night I failed to get any sleep in our Villagrand hut as I genuinely thought the corrugated roof was about to blow off!

Sow By Packets

Finished stock-taking my seed packets last night - ahead of nailing down a shopping list with the new Kings seed catalogue - and managed to throw out 20 odd packets of seeds from my old biscuit tin. A few of them were unopened, but after experiencing some difficulties and frustration with low germination rates of 'close to their end of life' seeds this summer, I decided to clear things out and make sure next years plantings are from seeds that are as fresh as possible.

Although I do feel I bit wasteful, it is a timely reminder [to echo Eric's warning to me last year at seed catalogue time] "not to over-order on packets", but as a lot of the junked items were inherited from my father-in-law after one of his own biscuit tin clear-outs ["sow by 2009"!!!], I don't feel too bad about it.

Clean slate achieved, now I can concentrate on planning for next year and filling the gaps in my seed box with some different, but recommended, varieties - I'm looking to supplement the usual core crops with some exciting variety. For example, I've already highlighted Crystal Lemon cucumbers to grow alongside the usual Burpless and a couple of unusual, but apparently very tasty and flavoursome, squash: Uchiki Kuri & Crown Prince

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Hercules v Sturons

A slightly disappointing onion crop. Although they all looked great on the surface, a significant number of onions had rotted in the ground - 42 of the 200 (so 20% of the crop) have been chucked away. The vast majority of these are the Hercules variety, which although having produced some real monsters, have not matched the Sturon for reliability and quality. The Sturons, although not as good as last year's crop, look pretty uniform and solid.

So I declare Sturon the winner!

They will get grown for a third year running next season and go up against a different variety. If this was Onion Pop Idol, I'd be Simon Trowel.

Monday 15 August 2011

Thieving magpies

Popped up the allotment last night to deliver an old bookcase for storage use in the shed to discover some thieving **** has stolen a dozen brand new patio slabs that I had nestled against the shed. They were acting as weights to prevent said shed from taking off in the wind and the plan was to lay them as a path this Autumn. That's £40-50 worth shipped off-site I suspect, as my plot is right next to one of the carpark areas, meaning it would be very easy for somone to back their car up near my shed and quickly wang the slabs in the boot without too much attention.

The offenders were good enough though to leave one of the slabs behind to prop the shed door shut. How kind!

This week's top job is to harvest our white onion crop - I have about 200 Centurion and Sturon awaiting lifting. If it's not raining this evening I plan to get them up, out and drying.

Question: What can I pop in the gap they will leave? Anything that might still give me an Autumn crop? Chard? Beetroot? Turnips? Salad onions, radishes & leaves?

Wednesday 13 July 2011

It will all bee alright in the end

The absence of any allotment blog updates reflects the inactivity on the allotment – our June ‘jumbo month of planting’ was disrupted by two weeks of family holiday and then two weeks where I was good for nothing. What I thought was a recurring chest infection & asthma has been diagnosed as a hyper-sensitive allergic reaction to a fungus called Aspergillus… a fungus that is commonly found in soil, compost heaps and on rotting vegetation! During a two week period - when I thought I might expire – I had to rest up and recuperate and therefore weeding and sowing at the plot was out of the question. As a result of the sabbatical the plot was so overrun with weeds that my dad helpfully suggested that I give it up and we entered July well behind on our planting and sowing schedules.
The good news though is that I’m much improved health-wise and the surge of energy that oral steroids can provide a man have allowed me and my little band of allotmenteers swoop down upon the plot with gusto. Just cutting the grass and ripping up the weeds immediately made it look like a proper and respectable plot again. The gaps given up by the weeding then gobbled up the trays of unplanted leeks, purple sprouting, parsley, chives, sweetcorn, courgettes and squashes. Only the tray of rocket plants didn’t make it – the monkeys bolting a couple of days before our mass planting visit.
On top of the plant plugs we’ve managed to sow a host of last minute crops: carrots, a few peas for the kids, golden and bolthardy beetroots, fennel, little gem lettuces, spring onions, runner and bolotti beans, kohl rabi and turnips. Some further sowings of chard and bits & bobs is on the cards for this weekend.
Add all this to the bonus row of parsnips that successfully germinated at the second attempt, a full row of decent carrots, a mass of flatleaf giant Italian parsley, two rows of peas and sugarsnaps, a half sack of brilliant new potatoes, a bumper crop of garlic and 200+ white onions awaiting harvest, things aren’t half as bad as I thought when laying on my near-death bed!
The brilliant orange blooms of the marigolds, the sweetpeas and a surprise last hurrah of alliums have added some spectacular colour to the plot and cheered up not just me but the bees too.
There’s no way I’m giving the plot up dad!

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Snug as a bug in a rug

As UB40 might say:

There's a rat in my compost and I don't know what to do!
There's a rat in my compost and I don't know what to do!

Before planting a half row of baby and rainbow mixed Nantes carrots yesterday evening I was forced to investigate my compost heap, after my plot neighbour informed me that he had a rat in his compost bin. Said rat had apparently been attracted by the warmth offered by a piece of carpet he had placed over his bin (in order to promote decomposition). He spotted that my palette compost bin also had a cosy covering of carpet and suggested that I might want to take a peek under it.

He was right - a homely little rat bunker had been constructed, complete with half-eaten carrots and oranges. The critter would be as snug as a bug in a rug, nestled in there. A good forking has now rid the bin of Roland's safe house, but I'm concerned about him coming back and the associated risks of rat urine and excremant. I'm going to have to do some anti-rat research.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Monday 28 March 2011

Sproutlings Update

Finally, after pretty much giving up on the critters, we have some Hungarian Hot Wax sproutings: four of the seeds have germinated, with potentially a few more to follow. They are currently looking quite lonely on the windowsill as all of their tomato and parsley seedling mates - sown at the same time - were pricked, replanted  and relocated down to the greenhouse outside a couple of weeks ago.

Their only company in the house is a plate of sweetcorn kernals sat in damp kitchen in the airing cupboard.

Outside are the tomatoes - a dozen Gardeners Delight (100% germination rate), nine Ferline (75%), and a mere three Harbingers (25%) - and a dozen Giant Italian flat-leaf parsley plants. They are joined by four cucumbers, a load of leeks (the new plantings quickly germinated) and some Summer Purple sprouting (15 plants = 100% germination rate). A tray of Giant Prague celeriac promises seedling action over the coming days.

In an effort to prevent a repeat of the 'greenhouse blown over in the wind' disaster, I have pushed some of the larger pieces of garden furniture up against it for additional support.

Fresh as a daisy

The cliche - most heard down the pub when the topic of grow your own crops up - is "you can't beat the freshness of homegrown vegetables... they taste so much better than produce you buy in the supermarket".

Many people, suckered in by the supermarket promises that items have been quality-checked, vacuum-packed and air-freighted off in refridgerated boxes within minutes of being picked, will naturally be a little sceptical of the claims of plot holders and kitchen gardeners.

It can be difficult to demonstrate the benefits of growing your own green beans over buying in Kenyan farmed offerings - taste can be subjective and, at least over the first couple of days sitting in the bottom drawer of your fridge, the Kenyan beans will probably look 'better'.

It is a lot easier though to demonstrate the benefits of homegrown using daffodils. We have been amazed at how long our allotment grown daffodils have lasted indoors, despite being cut in full bloom. Their colour has remained strong and the blooms large and healthy for the whole week. Compare this to air-freighted daffs flown in from Holland and further field - that arrive completely closed and only last a couple of days in bloom before quickly going brown and dying - and the difference is shocking.

You then have to conclude that if the quality, nutrient levels and longevity of daffodils grown on the plot is so much better than those shop-bought, then the same must be true of fruits and vegetables.

No sign of the alliums blooming yet, so as things stand, our over-wintering bulbs experiment has a clear winner. I can see us planting up more daffodils next September as the colour they bring to both the bare Spring plot and the home is extraordinary.

Monday 14 March 2011

Sauce

Luke Skywalker is struggling to dig his allotment plot.
Obi Wan appears and tells him to "Use the forks, Luke! Use the forks!".

My kids obsession with Star Wars continues, so a run of silly made-up Star Wars jokes has been initiated, kicking off with:

Luke and Obi Wan are eating fish and chips.
Luke complains that his fish is dry.
Obi Wan says "Use the sauce, Luke! Use the sauce!".

Yesterday we managed to get up to the allotment as a family for a good hour or so. The sun made it a most pleasant experience. Our time was spent creating two raised beds for the kids: one 2' x 2' and the other 4' x 2'. Last year the kids missed having plots of their own, so these two little beds will become their focus for the growing seasons. The beds were populated with a couple of strawberry plants, some early sweetpeas, a rogue pea and a few lettuce plants. A sprinkling of a wide variety of quick-growing vegetables will soon follow over the coming weeks. Ever the optimist, my daughter expects to fit potatoes as well as *every* thing else in her 2' by 2'!

The harvest of the day was a bunch of daffodils.


Homegrown daffs - a mixed bunch

Friday 11 March 2011

Busted

There's not been much allotment activity over the last couple of weeks due to a combination of bitterly cold winter and a Star Wars Jedi Academy birthday party for my now five year old son. Creating a life-sized Jabba the Hutt head and a Pin the Lightsaber on Yoda game took preference over digging and planting. So except for a tray of tomatoes, cucumbers and flat-leaf parsley being seeded & sprouting*, it's been very quiet.

I'd almost given up on the 5 pots of leek seeds that I'd planted on the 17th and 20th of February, but on Tuesday I came home to find a wealth of tiny seedlings pushing their weenie green heads through the compost. Nestled snugly in my four tier plastic greenhouse the little chaps looked in good health and I was felling warm, excited and quite pleased with myself in equal measures. The prospect of 3 or 4 rows of leeks would quicken the heart of any allotmenteer.

So coming home last night to find that a malicious supernatural wind had blown over my greenhouse** - not only crippling a tray of 5" tall sweetpeas, but decimating the whole collection of 60+ leek seedlings - was a cruel and heavy blow.


I tried in vain to save some - I have about 8 left in a pot and they look worse for wear.

So we start again from scratch... I've planted some more up in a few pots and now plan to plant some more in the coldframe up at the allotment in order to give them a headstart and attempt to play catch-up.


* My Hungerian Hotwax chilli peppers have so far failed to germinate :(
** Considering the greenhouse was weighed down at the bottom with some big heavy pots and a bag of compost I can only conclude it was a gust born of supernatural forces!

Thursday 17 February 2011

Busting for a leek

I left the office 20 minutes early last night in order to pot up some leek seeds. By the time I got home though it was pretty much pitch black so my pottering about had to be in the fluorescent glow of the garage light. The plan to pot up both early and later varieties was curtailed, so only the late Blue Solaise variety got seeded. Three good sized pots were impregnated with 10 to 11 seeds each, a couple of cm apart. As my rows are 4.5m long, if all germinate that should just me a decent row with a few extras to dot in here and there over the plot. The pots were popped into the unheated mini greenhouse.

I've almost finished my allotment excel plan, and depending on the final outcome I may well look to add a second row of these leeks, so another batch of seeds might go in over the weekend, together with the early Jolants.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Rooney

My parents bought me a scarecrow for my birthday last year. My kids named him Rooney. A little harsh on the scarecrow as he has more brains than that. After spending the winter months gazing out of the shed window, Rooney is now back in action, standing guard over the sprouting over-wintered red onions and garlic. Having taken a battering in the wind and rain, and seeing how his original clothes were sun-bleached, Rooney has had a change in outfit: I've dressed him up in one of my old work shirts and a broken belt. All he needs now is new hat.

I'm like an allotment Gok Wan.

Monday 14 February 2011

Q: What are long, green, scaly, have lots of teeth and used on stage by actors?

A: Propagators


The seeds we planted a fortnight ago - Witkiem Manita broad beans, Kelvedon Wonder peas, Percy Thrower and Spencer Special Mix sweetpeas, Little Gem, Saladin and Marvel of Four Season lettuces - have been doing great guns in our windowsill propagators. Photo of the peas and Little Gems shows the progress they've made.

Thing is, I don't really know what to do next and when. Is it safe for me to put some of these little chaps outside in my unheated mini greenhouse? Do I leave them in the propagator with or without the lid on? How big do the plants need to get before I get start transferring them elsewhere or putting them in the ground?

This is the problem with being a novice...

Where you bin?

There have been casualties of the recent winds, most notably the black compost bin that got picked up and blown 200 yards across the site. The top and door are still MIA and now presumed dead. Thankfully the shed, secured only by the weight of a couple of slabs, survived the stormy weather. Strawberry plants in our raised bed have now been protected by mini cloches made from cut down plastic lemonade bottles.

Friday 11 February 2011

That's Life!

Nothing beats a picture of a parsnip that looks like a pair of legs and a willy. This fine Gladiator specimen* is either due to the fact that I failed to thin out the seedlings at the planting site or our plot is very stoney...

* Maximus by name, maximus by nature!

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Know your onions

Onion 1: "Hello, I'm Hercules!"
Onion 2: "Hello, I'm Sturon!"
Onion 1: "Where's Centurion?"
Onion 2: "He didn't make it."

The postman delivered my 2nd seed order from E.W.King & Co. Ltd yesterday. The centrepiece of the bulging jiffy was a pair of 500g white onion set bags. One Sturon bag, one Hercules F1 bag. Last year we grew Sturons and they were magnificent - the envy of my allotment neighbours. Medium sized bulbs, excellent quality globe-shaped, clear white flesh, strong flavour and a low attrition rate is terms of both losses in the ground and post-lifting storage in the garage. After asking the advice of Barry The New Head Of Our Allotment Society and a couple of allotment-focused tweeters, I've gone with them again this year. This ticks the allotment rule box of "if it grows well on your plot one year, then it probably loves your soil type and you should grow it again".

But there is a second allotment rule box that must be ticked: "in your first few years you should experiment with different varieties to see which does best on your plot". After a careful selection policy of eeny-meany-minee-mo, I've gone with Hercules F1 over Centurion F1. The deciding factor was the internet blurb on the Dobies of Devon site that Hercules put down their roots fast - something that didn't happen with our red onions last year and that ultimately stunted the crop. Hercules apparently offer an earlier yield than Sturon and have a yellow and mild flesh.

E.W. King offer both varieties at a bargain £2.45 per 500g bag and the two bags together should give at least 25m worth of onion rows. We'll be looking to get all the sets in the ground this weekend, weather permitting.

Centurion will rotate in next year, replacing the weaker of this years performers.

Onion 1: "Did you hear that?! If we don't perform we're in for the chop!"
Onion 2: "The way I understand it, if we DO perform we'll still be in for the chop... and the slice!"

The rest of the jiffy bag featured:

Tomatoes = Ferline, Harbinger and Gardener's Delight (all of which should do well outside)

Leeks = Jolant and Blue Solaise (my Christmas present book The River Cottage 4 - Veg Patch reckons that growing leeks from seed is dead easy, so we're going to give it a go with these early and late varieties)

Sweetcorn = Early Extra Sweet F1 (last year these failed but that was due to them not going in early enough, so I've changed my mind since November and decided to try again)

Celeriac = Giant Prague (some books say these are difficult to grow, others say easy, so we'll roll the dice on these this Summer and see what happens)

Pepper = Hungarian Wax (I'm hoping this is a the Hot Wax variety - for growing indoors rather than on the plot)

Calendula = Orange King (aka Marigold - the classic companion flower and a deliberate attempt to increase the interest of my daughter in the plot)

All of these are of course on top of my order made at the end of last year, which means I have way too much seed.

Onion 1 & 2: "A lot of it will keep for next year too!"

Tuesday 8 February 2011

Dig for victory

I took the day off work yesterday in order to dig over the allotment.

Last year we were given the allotment in April. It was covered in grass and the remnants of brambles. The topsoil was thick with couch grass, bramble roots and general rubbish. By the time we got ourselves in a position to dig the plot over the unseasonaly hot and sunny May had baked the ground rock hard, making the chore of digging back and spade-breaking work. Our 2010 crops were hampered by the late hand-over: less than two-thirds of the plot was usable and so much of the seed that was planted either failed due to the enforced short-season or glutted us with produce as successional-planting was impossible. We did have success with robust broad beans, French climbing Cobra beans and most notably an envious crop of flavourful, juicy and storage-hardy Sturon white onions. Failures included red onions that failed to properly root before the dry summer and sweetcorn that just went in the ground too late - I've since learnt that this is a notoriously difficult plant to grow and to give it the best chance of success it needs to be grown early so it has the whole of the Summer to develop and ripen.

The aim of taking a day's holiday was to dig over the outstanding 30% of 'virgin' undug plot, turn the earth of those beds that we did manage to create last year, construct a raised bed for strawberries, salad and young plants, weed and generally tidy things up.

Digging in February - when the ground is relatively frost-free and softened by ample rain - is considerably easier than digging in May. Even in gusting 25 mph winds - our site is open to the elements - the spade and fork work was far more bearable than when sweating under the late Spring and early Summer sunshine of last year. Soft earth equals rapid progress - the only challenges to completing the digging being a distinct lack of strength and stamina in our muscles and bramble roots up to six feet long and two inches in diameter! In the end - before tiring and dreaming of a hot bath - we managed to virgin dig a 5m x 4.5m area (that's a decent 22% of the total plot and well on the way to clearing that 30%), clear and edge the existing beds (bringing them out to the edge of the plot boundaries), create a 1.8m x 0.9m 10cm deep raised bed for the strawberries (8 plants put in), hand-weed the allium and daffodil beds, check the garlic and red onions (doing well especially the purple wight garlic) and plant a few early broad beans under cloches.

But the digging and progress on opening up the plot ready for planting the mountain of seeds and sets that I've (over) ordered from E.W.Kings is almost secondary to the shear pleasure of just being outside in the fresh air, working on a plot of your own land, which you hope and dream will bring tasty bounties to your dinner table later in the year. The rich promise of harvest rings out, even at this bleak and grey time of year, through the green sproutings of garlic and onion, the sound of birdsong, the dull thud of steel against earth and the rhythmic beatings and rustlings of assorted scarecrows, sheds and strcutures in the wind.


What a great way to spend a day off from work.