Snail Hunter

You may have seen that recent movie Troll Hunter - I haven't - or played Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii?

Neither media experience comes close to the thrill of real life Snail Hunting.

My greenhouse has been decimated by four of the ravenous monsters over the course of the last two weeks. A whole tray of sunflowers & pertunia's, half a tray of french beans, and even a couple of tomato plants have been consumed by the slimy beasts.

Every time I locate one of the critters - by careful, quiet stalking - and pluck them from the greenhouse structure to met a deserved fate of becoming bird food on the back lawn, another ghastly pest takes its place.

It feels like one is battling the Seven Headed Hydra.

And here is some news to chill any gardener's blood:

Scientists have been experimenting with snails in an attempt to make them move faster! In a Phase 1 study, they have been surgically removing the snails shells. So far though, no success, they remain sluggish.

Lotty Totty

Three hours up the allotment represents a monster session, but that's actually what was achieved yesterday: 1.5 English seaside-esque hours in the morning with E, then another 1.5 hours after lunch with my mum (see photo attached)). She went well dressed for the blustery conditions, although the hat came off pretty quickly after a bout of digging.

The morning session consisted of E complaining about the cold breeze whilst helping me shovel manure and transport tree stakes & netting from its over-wintered site to where we shallow-drilled two lines of peas: Sugar Snaps, Kelvedon Wonder and, new for this year, Purple Podded. Another short row of Bunyards Exhibition broad beans went in alongside them. Last year our peas were rubbish, not helped by the dry weather and late-planting, so any improvement will we welcomed.

The afternoon session featured my mum and me clearing 2/3rds of the end bed (#1) - it was riddled with turf, couch grass and weeds - and planting up six different vegetables in a matrix. We stuck down three canes to created six little areas and then planted them up with alternating rows of seeds to hopefully create an unusual and decorative bed. A line of manure was left untouched, as my mum had a great idea: just clear of weeds and then 'mulch' with some black plastic sacking, then plant our courgettes and gourds through sacking. Bingo! No digging required!

The six vegetables were:

• Turnip - Purple Top Milan
• Turnip - Snowball
• Spring Onion -North Holland Blood Red
• Rainbow Chard
• Fennel - Finocchio Montebianco
• Kohl Rabi - Purple Delicacy

We recut the border of the plot and discovered that the asparagus bed is about 4 inches too far in from the border edge, so we took the opporunity to dig over the gap and scatter some Black Ball cornflower seeds to bring some colour, height and bee-friendly blooms to the corner.

In the mini greenhouse the flowers are starting to germinate, as are the assorted salad crops on the windowsill. Some scorching on the tomato plants however :(

New Season Kicks Off

My lack of blog activity might indicate to you that nothing has been happening on the allotment. Nothing could be further from the truth - it's been a busy time preparing beds and getting seeds either in the ground or in modules and pots.

Here's the summary of developments:

• I have a new helper called Daniel, who is participating in the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. He has elected to choose allomenteering as his new skill, so I get 13 hours of his time over the coming months. So far he has experienced the joys of digging for an hour and the brain zombification of repotting fifty tomato plants (we have gone with six outdoor varieties this season - Gardeners Delight, Ferline, Harbinger, Roma, Marmande and Ailsa Craig). I shall be getting him to rework the plot plan as his next project.
• My mum & dad have more time to spend assisting, with my mum enthusiastically tidying up the plot and getting seeds in. A good family session up the plot the weekend before last resulting in three rows of Pentland Javelin first earlies going in, plus two rows of Gladiator parsnips and two rows of beetroot (the traditional Italian Barabietola di Chioggia, that has concentric pink & white rings within - a first time grow for me resulting from the tip in River Cottage Handbook No. 4 Veg Patch).
• We have broad beans on the go in the ground and in pots at home.
• We have three varieties of French Bean growing in pots - Dwarf Sun Gold, Climbing Cobra and Cosse Violette. 24 plants in total at the moment. We have Barlotti to come too.
• My Cayenne chili peppers have so far failed to germinate, but the Hungarian Hot Wax have again done well.
• A tray of salad laves, lettuce, perpetual spinach and chard await germination. A scattering of salad seeds have gone in the plot cold frame. We have a tray of flowers also sat awaiting germination.
• We still have to get our onions and shallots in the ground - a priority task!
• The daffodil crop has been disappointing. No sign of any alliums either.
• I have an A4 page of seeds that need to go in over the next couple of weeks. Vic has already given the green light to a decent session up there this weekend, and if the rain stops this week I will be up there after work in this critical planting period - a period we missed to a large degree this year due to me getting very unwell with my chest.
• Growing fever is spreading at work. I have half a dozen guys ready to swap tomato plants, an IT manager who has bought himself a greenhouse and has gone seed crazy - I've just been offering a tray of Purple Sprouting - and Suzanne has just taken up the offer of a large plot in West London. As a newbie she's got that mix of excitement, hopes, expectations and fear that is magical. I've already given her a load of seeds that we don't need and plan to off-load any spare seedlings, etc. I can on to her.

I feel much more organised than last year and feel as if we could do really well this season.

Feels like the opening to a football blog...

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 :(

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

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.