From Weeds to Seeds

2011 season kicks off

2011-02-24T22:18:00.000Z

After one of the coldest winters in living memory, this year's growing season is finally kicking off and I've started work down the allotment, but it seems all I am currently growing there is cats:

"Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We think About Nature" by Richard Mabey

2010-10-28T18:42:00.001+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post, on 6 October, I was approached by a publishing company PR and asked if I would be interested in reviewing a book entitled "Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way we Think about Nature" written by Richard Mabey. I was, to tell you the truth, flattered almost beyond belief but couldn't help thinking that the PR lady was, perhaps, labouring under the misapprehension that my opinion counts for anything at all when, in reality, I can't even get the cats to listen to me. But, as gifts are generally a bit thin on the ground at the best of times, I nearly bit her hand off to say "YES! Absolutely! How lovely! etc., etc." the subtext, of course, being that validation from complete strangers is the best kind - they're not doing it just to be nice, unlike your relatives (who have to do it), therefore it has more value (go on - I challenge you to disagree.....)

At the very least, I get a free book out of it.

A few days later, the lovely hardback arrived. Now, first of all, when she mentioned the name 'Richard Mabey', I had no idea who he was - someone left a comment saying he was a rather well-known author so I felt a bit dim that I'd never heard of him. Googling his image (that's him, up at the top there), though, produced a reaction of "Oh, it's him!" as I recognised his face. God knows from where, although I've seen enough gardening shows on the telly over the years and I suspect he must crop up on them regularly. Therefore, from the fact that he's a telly-bod and has written [checks Wikipedia] or co-authored at least 66 books, I think it's fairly safe to assume he knows what he's talking about. Let's have a look at this one, then, shall we?

I immediately liked the drawing on the front cover (see above); in shades of grey and taupe it shows a plant (presumably a weed) growing in front of St Paul's Cathedral and instantly tells you that this is not going to be a scientific book but something more aesthetic.

I should own up here to the fact that I don't tend to read natural history books, I'm much more of a non-fiction and novel sort of reader so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. In my past life I was an academic and the first thing I did on opening this book was to check at the back, and I was most pleased to see that there were eight pages of references and 10 pages of index. I like a book that purports to be imparting factual information to have a comprehensive reference section - to me it shows a decent amount of checkable research has been undertaken. So far, then, without having read a single word, I'm liking this book already.

The subject of weeds is so vast that it must have been quite tricky to decide how to structure the book and Mabey decided to go for an historical approach, starting with the Garden of Eden (he points out, for example, how often weeds/gardens appear in the creation myths of various religions) and finishing in the modern era, threading his narrative through with interesting bits of information.

Poppies appear throughout the text and, indeed, the historical timeline, and I, for one, didn't know that the ancient Sumerian word for the flower was 'pa pa', a name basically unaltered for 6000 years. Mabey's writing is very easy to read and he does have a lovely turn of phrase, for example, "Europe's earth is full of poppies and bleeds with them when it's cut" and when he describes poppies in full bloom as "...a grounded sunrise". Lovely.

Moving on into the medieval period, Mabey discusses the rise of herbalism and the fact that the medieval world viewed weeds as both a curse and a benediction - they were trouble in the soil but a cure in the sickroom. It was during this period that at least 20 different species of weed were renamed as belonging to the Devil, such as Devil's rhubarb (Deadly Nightshade), Devil's fingers (Bird's-foot trefoil), Devil's leaf (Nettle), Devil's eye (Henbane), and so on. The 'Doctrine of Signatures' was also invented, being a form of intelligent design made manifest by God making plants to look like parts of the body. In other words, humans can 'read' the plants to see which illnesses they would cure.

Moving onto the late medieval/Tudor period, Mabey writes quite a lot about the extraordinary Nicholas Culpeper, the renowned herbalist, which I found very interesting as I knew nothing about him other than he has a small shop in Guildford town centre that sells herb plants and soaps made of lavender but it turns out he was a radical thinker who upset the Establishment by writing a best-seller on how to self-medicate using plants and thereby giving away trade secrets.

As you might expect, Mabey picks up on Shakespeare's extensive use of floral imagery, much of it weeds but here I noticed one of the few mistakes that could have been picked up with more thorough proofreading - 'luscious woodbine' on p112 becomes 'luscious eglantine' on p113 - which is it? (While I'm at it, the other mistakes I found were a few repetitions of 'the the' and 'that that'. On p215 there's an incorrect "it's" and on p46 you find 'Bablylonia'. Also on that page, Mabey claims that monotheism was invented by the Jews when I would argue that the Pharaoh Akhenaten did that in about 1355BC, but then I do freelance proofreading and have a couple of degrees in Archaeology so stuff like that would bother me, wouldn't it?)

Moving on in time, the chapter 'Gallant Soldier' discusses how plant seeds escape from botanical gardens and colonise their way across the country, often utilising rail networks and shipping to do so, and I learnt another interesting snippet here - Thanet Cress is reputed to have reached Britain in the hay mattresses of Dutch POWs captured during the Napoleonic wars. The hay was then given to farmers who spread it on fields, hastening germination. Plant seeds are, indeed, bold opportunists.

In covering Victorian attitudes to plants and weeds, Mabey discusses John Ruskin a lot. Undoubtedly extraordinarily talented, his aesthetical snobbery must have made him a real pain in the arse to be around (after all, this is the man who, it is said, on his wedding night fainted at the sight of his wife's pubes since, naturally, all those nude Greek and Roman statutes were hairless there). However, Ruskin possibly provides the most accurate criterion by which to identify a weed - its 'impertinence', i.e., its ambition. Note - this is a book that by the very nature of its discussion cannot avoid anthropomorphism and that takes the text from 'scientific' into the realms of 'philosophical'.

Mabey agrees Ruskin was a nutter by the late Victorian period but what Ruskin writes encapsulates human attitudes to weeds, that they are judged by our, human, standards and not their own (Ruskin was outraged and offended by what he saw as the moral decrepitude displayed by weeds). Although, again, this is anthropomorphism raising its head - plants have different needs (rather than 'standards' per se) to human requirements. 'Standards' implies some kind of emotional involvement - a human characteristic.

Mabey writes of William Robinson, a Victorian gardener who felt stifled by formal garden design and tried to introduce a more casual style. He developed gardens based on the way plants grew together in the wild, a very modern approach but, unfortunately he also popularised Japanese Knotweed!

Onto the twentieth century and Mabey covers plants during both wartimes. Until this book I was unaware of the heartbreakingly poignant 'trench gardening' undertaken during the First World War where soldiers would try to beautify the horrors of the trenches by transplanting weeds such as celandine and cuckoo-pint from the surrounding fields and ditches into little plots alongside the trenches. Apparently, one particular 47 yard long trench had been fitted with "basketwork and trellis ... bottlenecks and junctions had a homely atmosphere with nasturtiums climbing the trellises". And, of course, there are the poppies.

The weed that most typified the Second World War - at least in London - according to Mabey was Rosebay Willowherb, also known as bombweed or fireweed, whose pink spires and fluffy seeds soared above the bombsites, where they took advantage of the disturbed ground.

I very much enjoyed the section about the Cold War and science fiction. It seems that plants that appeared after the Second World War that were not common to a particular area - such as the Rosebay Willowherb - were often viewed as "alien" plants by the local inhabitants, with some people even going so far as to consider them to be invading enemy agents seeded by the Germans or the Japanese! This is an apocalyptic view of weeds and it wasn't until Mabey pointed it out that you realise, during the Cold War, just how much of popular culture conflates communist infiltration with plants - see, for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (plant pods grow clones of humans), The Quatermass Experiment (astronaut returns to Earth and basically turns into a cactus) and the most well-known of all, The Day of The Triffids. He spends a long time telling the plot of the novel which is informative especially if, like me, you've only seen the film, and he decides that John Wyndham has, in fact, created the first Superweed. And in the real world, the nearest thing we have to a Triffid is the Giant Hogweed which is tall, vigorous and has photodermatitic effects (its sap will cause skin to blister) - we should be grateful, I suppose, that it doesn't actually get up and walk around.

It seems we do, actually, have alien plant invasions for real; Mabey talks of the kudzu vine in the States (which grows so fast that people suggest shutting their bedroom windows at night to stop the vine getting in) and of the 2,500+ alien species in Australia (plants such as St John's Wort, mimosa, olive trees, blackberries, capeweed and buffel grass, all introduced by man and all going beserk). I am in agreement with Mabey here when he says we have to "find ways of incorporating these alien invaders into our lives and ecosystems" and not try to wipe them off the face of the earth in "a fit of pique or burst of herbicide".

I have no argument at all with Mabey's claim that the purpose of weeds is to "fill the empty spaces of the earth - they stabilise the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter and begin the process of succession to more complex and stable plant systems" and I love the fact that this is beautifully illustrated by the greening of Detroit. Once the motoring industry left the city, 66,000 vacant lots (and 40 of the 139 square miles of the inner city) became overgrown as weeds took control and started to grow through brick and tarmac, rotted down and started returning everything to soil. Enterprising human inhabitants that have remained have now begun farming these lots - there's been no horrified backlash against the invasion "instead the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the 21st century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities - families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks". There genuinely could be hope for our future, and it's right there in Detroit.

My one real criticism is the complete lack of pictures. Apart from the gorgeous pen and ink drawings at the beginning of each chapter, there is not one illustration of any of the hundreds of plants mentioned in the book. I found I had to keep Googling the names to see if I recognised the plants under discussion. I understand the inclusion of photos can increase production costs enormously but it is deeply frustrating unless you already know what Danish Scurvy Grass or Celandine looks like, however that's my only real, genuine complaint.

The purpose of this book is to look at immensely varied motives for the control of weeds and the impact this has had on our relationships with the plant world and nature in general. This is an enormous subject area and I really think that Richard Mabey has had a good go at doing this in 292 pages. I enjoyed reading it much more than I thought I would, and I learnt some very interesting stuff on the way. If you know someone who enjoys natural history and is a keen gardener, you could do worse than get them a copy of this for Christmas.

Oh dear....

2010-10-06T16:09:00.000+01:00

Yes, I know it's been 4 months since I last posted but I have to admit I kinda fell out of love with the allotment this year. Not sure why, really. I think I just got a bit fed up with the sheer graft and unending hard work involved, so a big part of me just thought 'bugger it' and I left it alone over the summer. Of course now the grass is knee-high and the weeds are rampant and I've got no-one to blame but myself *sigh*.

I didn't entirely abandon it over the summer, I worked like a demon to get it in shape for the mid-June inspection but after that just did the minimum, really. Produce was still grown and harvested - this year, for example, my pattypan squash (white scalloped bush squash, or whatever it's called - looks like flying saucers) were far more prolific than last year and I was giving them away. But sadly no-one else seemed to like them as much as me and The Lovely Husband did - sliced and fried in butter and olive oil with garlic and chilli - yum!

My carrots this year - the handful of them I got - were a roaring success. I sowed one of the anti-carrot fly variety - either Resistafly or Flyaway, can't remember which (sorry, that's a bit rubbish, isn't it?) - and the carrots were magnificent; big, straight with practically no tunnels to speak of. Just a shame that germination was appalling. Oh well, I'll try again next year.

This year's Sweetcorn was a massive disappointment - out of 12 plants I think we only got 4 decent cobs and half the plants never grew taller than my knees.

Beetroot did pretty well, though, and I'm still harvesting them and pickling them.

I grew less Cobra French Climbing Beans this year and consequently didn't have enough to put in the freezer (last year I got 40 lbs of the buggers which was waaaay too much - people got fed up with me begging them to take some, hence the decision to grow less this year).

My Butternut Squash has been good this year - I've got 9 squashes so far, of a decent size, waiting to be harvested and the Courgettes have been good as well.

Onions were disappointing - as it was a remarkably dry summer I made the effort to do a lot of watering in the hope that (a) they'd survive and (b) get big. They accomplished (a) but not (b). I've left them in the ground to overwinter and see what happens next year, just as an experiment.

Likewise with my potatoes. I grew one row of red Desiree and one row of white International Kidney. I've dug up a few of the plants but the spuds themselves are not that big yet, so I'll leave them.

I'm a little concerned about my brassicas as well. My brussels sprouts (which we love in this house and which have been very successful in previous years) are alarmingly short - I'm hoping they'll grow a bit more yet. Ditto my Dwarf Curly Green Kale - I don't think they're meant to be quite as dwarf as they currently are...

I'm not even going to tell you about the soft fruit this year - hardly any strawberries from about 65 plants, barely a handful of blueberries and just the one punnet from my many raspberries. Very sad indeed. No loganberries to speak of this year (compared to loads last year) but at least one of my three gooseberry bushes was fairly prolific.

As for the 'orchard' end of the allotment, as this was the first year for the apples, pear and plum trees, I was advised to remove all the blossoms so that subsequent fruit harvests would be prolific, so I've got that to be disappointed with next year.

So, as you can see, it's not really been terribly good this year and I'm not sure why. Ho hum. There's always next year, I suppose.

The one interesting thing that has happened, though, is that, based on this particular blog of mine, I've been asked to review a book called "Weeds" by Richard Mabey. I'm not one of those people who will umm and ahh about the 'integrity' of their website and whether or not they should allow themselves to be used as free publicity - hell, no-one ever offers me free stuff so I say 'bring it on'! I'll post an honest review of it when I've read it. How exciting!

Mid-June Catchup

2010-06-20T16:33:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I went down to the allotment and finally remembered to take my camera. What I didn't do was take any photographs. I've absolutely no idea why. I did, though, go to a nearby field which was full of poppies and looked absolutely stunning and took these pictures:

Gorgeous, non?

And, of course, I managed to forget to take my camera again when I went to the plot this morning! Good Grief! However, I did have my iPhone with me which has, I think, a pretty good camera (I've used pictures on here before that I've taken with it) so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with those for now.

So, I have finally, I think, finished planting out everything that I'm going to hopefully grow at the plot this year. As I'm sure you're all aware, we seem to be having a bit of drought in the UK this summer - well, down in the south we are, I can't comment for those further afield, but we're having weeks going by without a drop of rain falling. Then we might get a few hours - barely enough to dampen the earth - and it goes away again for a few more weeks. The earth at my site is very fine and free-draining and, in these conditions, is effectively barely anything more than dust. The one good thing about it being so dry is that it makes weeding and hoeing very easy indeed. Watering is an absolute must, obviously. Sadly, even with daily watering, this year some of my plants have just given up the ghost. I've lost 3 out of the 4 cucumbers I planted, 2 out of the 5 butternut squashes and one of my precious pattypan squashes. It's too late to sow more butternut squash but I managed to find a supply of plants on sale at Secretts Garden Centre in Milford so I bought 3 to replace the lost ones. Fortunately I have some spare cucumber plants that were going to go to a friend but will have to go to the allotment now. Sadly, I'll have to hope the 3 surviving pattypan squashes continue to do so.

When I was at Secretts I had a look at the other vegetable plants they had on sale and I picked up a couple of bargains. They had trays of Mange Tout reduced from £3.49 to £2.49 so I picked up a couple of those as I'd not sown any Mange Tout this year, and even though I don't usually grow runner beans, they had trays of White Lady runner beans (which I believe are stringless and, hence, more appealing to me) that had grown big and sprawling for some stupidly cheap price, so I took a tray of those as well.

All the allotments in Waverley (or at least in Godalming and Farncombe) are being judged by the council over the next 2 days. There is more weeding and grass cutting that I could do but I really think I've done as much as I can so I'm just going to hope that they're kind to me - they have been the last 2 years so I'm hoping I'll be okay this year.

So, then, onto the pictures. Bear in mind what I've said about it being dry and things dying on me, and perhaps you won't notice that it's not nearly as lush as I'd like:

Beetroot - I'm adding to this as the seedlings get bigger. Hopefully there'll be about 60 of them all told.

Butternut Squash - planted 5 in a circle with one in the middle. The three greenest are the shop-bought replacement ones. Remains to see if the two original ones survive.

Climbing French Beans 'Cobra' variety - there are 3 plants around each bamboo pole. They're all doing fine so far and have established themselves.

The 4 plants at the bottom of this picture are Courgettes 'Defender'. They're all putting out little courgettes. I may well have planted too many for just the 2 of us at home, but hey ho....!

Courgette flower

Dwarf Yellow French Beans - a small patch of about 11 of them. The little sticks with silver discs are flattened mince pie cases saved over from Christmas. Pigeons are a big problem on the site but they hate shiny things that rattle in the wind. You might notice I've also tied them to the bamboo poles supporting the climbing french beans.

Leeks 'Musselburgh' - doing their thing. They seem happy enough.

Various lettuces - the red is Lollo Rossa, the pale green is Salad Bowl, the darker green is Little Gem. There's also some Wild Rocket in there too. I'm adding more as I'm sowing successionally.

Mange Tout - I threaded bamboo poles through green netting and then planted a couple of mange tout plants at the base of each pole. Our site can be very windy so I decided to add poles at an angle for support.

Pattypan Squash - I've lost one of them (you can see it's withered carcass just at the bottom left) but hopefully the other 3 will survive. Their fruits look like white UFOs and you cook them like courgettes.

Two rows of potatoes - International Kidney and Desiree - and one row of onions. There are carrots tucked in here too but they're too small to see just yet.

Cherries 'Maynard' developing on our little tree. I'm not sure if I'll get any more than these two off it this year, but it's two more than we had last year!

Red Hinnomaki Gooseberries - no fruit at all last year as it was newly planted, but look at it this year!

Inside the brassica cage - there's two kinds of kale - the dwarf green curled (pictured) and Cavallo Nero (not pictured), Brussels Sprouts 'Brigitte' in the middle of the picture and at the far end there's Calabrese Broccoli.

See the calabrese broccoli that's flowering? After taking this shot I cut that off with a view to forcing the remainder of the plant to put out more heads. As I was looking at the flowers, I remembered how tasty last year's Rocket flowers had been, so I ate one. What a revelation! It was sweet and tasty. I decided I wouldn't chuck the cut off bit into the compost bin, I would take it home, steam it with some new potatoes, season it with lemon juice and black pepper and slather butter over it to melt. And I did, and it was bloody fantastic!

There's other stuff I'm growing there that I didn't picture because there's not that much to see - raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, blackberries - but if they do well this year, I'll keep you posted.

Blatant laziness - I admit it....

2010-06-07T19:55:00.001+01:00

*I originally posted this over on my other blog - Mrs Jones' Home Thoughts From Home - on 30 May 2010 but decided that, as it is actually about something that happened on my allotment (and my postings here have been a bit thin on the ground lately), I would post it here as well. Some of you lovely readers peruse both blogs, but others won't have seen this. And yes, I know. I'm very lazy about posting. I promise I'll do a proper post soon. In the meantime, you can read below about My Message From God*

I'm not a believer. In fact I'm what you would call more of a militant atheist. I do not believe in any form of religion whatsoever and, in fact, the thought of organised religion enrages me disproportionately. The fact that a mere superstition can hold such power in an otherwise sensible country like the USA, for example (although there are other countries to choose from, including most of Africa), just beggars belief. To me, such blind devotion to something that doesn't exist is nothing short of mental illness.

To be honest, I really don't care if this offends any of my readers because - frankly? You can do better than this. The Enlightenment freed our minds from the straitjacket trappings of the Church and showed us all the wonders of the Universe through the eyes of science. So why voluntarily choose to live in the Middle Ages?

But, today, something happened. Something weird.

As you probably know, I have an allotment, about which I blog separately (read it here). The Lovely Husband is away this weekend so I decided that I would spend a decent amount of time there trying to catch up with the weeding and stuff that I couldn't do when I had a god-awful cold earlier in the month. It's a weird thing, this gardening/allotment lark - you can spend every daylight hour breaking your back digging, bending, weeding, hoeing, watering and it always looks like you've done bugger all. To say it's frequently disheartening is an understatement. But I have faith that it will all come together, as it usually does.

One of the jobs I had to do today was to earth up my spuds - it involves heaping up extra soil to cover the leaves of the plants as they break through the ground surface. While I was doing this, my trowel caught on something. I scraped the earth away and saw something shiny and, sort of, layered. It was a similar size and shape to those cloth books they make for kids, which is what I first of all thought it was.

Finding a kid's cloth book buried in my potato patch would be weird enough.

But this was way weirder.....

It was a whole bunch of religious photographs. What the ......?

Yep, a load of photos, in a pile, buried in the middle of my potato patch.

I KNEW it - I knew I was different to all the other kids at school and this was it, this was my message from God. I'm obviously a modern-day Joan of Arc. Obviously. Why did I ever doubt?

The message would be in the photographs (click on them to make them bigger).

There was a crucifix:

I'm not about to nail myself to a cross for anyone, so we'll just ignore that one....

There was the Blessed Virgin Mary balancing atop a big vase of flowers:

A neat trick, to be sure, but one I'm not going to be able to master. That or Immaculate Conception, which I have tried. True story.

There was Jesus who was also doing an impressive flower-balancing act:

And then I found The One:

Stands to reason I'm being told that I need to go out and burn some priests. Father Asbestos you ain't. Right, that's it. Enough of this banter, I've got God's Work to do - anyone got any matches?

Cage Fighting

2010-05-16T13:11:00.002+01:00

I've finally started putting some time in down the allotment but I really need to do more. I've had a spate of illness lately (bad cold, followed by a dodgy back) which has made the grime and toil of endless weeding somewhat less than enticing, so I'm really behind.

However, this has actually played to my advantage (for once!). Because I've been late getting my potatoes into the ground and haven't yet planted out my climbing French Bean seedlings, it means they've not been hit by the late frosts that have occurred lately. So score one for Team Jones!!

There is, sadly, no getting away from the fact that the weeds won't stop growing merely because I'm not there to rip them from the ground (and who can blame them?) so last week The Lovely Husband came along to do the strimming of the knee-high grass for me. I can't get him to come along and do ordinary hoeing, or hand weeding, or watering, but the moment there's a whiff of petrol and a bit of manly machinery, you can't see him for dust!! I am, though, very grateful.

So, the strimming has been done, in time for the annual inspection by the committee sometime in June. This is where your plot is judged and if it's found wanting, you'll be escorted off the premises (sort of). The arrival of the email reminding plotholders of the inspection usually triggers off a mass, slightly panicky, tidy up by everyone, and I'm just grateful I covered about a third of my plot with black material last winter so minimum weeding will be required.

I managed a few hours this week (but will have to put in more next week) during which time I, rather sadly, had to remove all the gorgeous blossom from the fruit trees that I planted last autumn. This is, apparently, necessary so that that the trees can concentrate on putting all their energy into growing a decent root structure rather than into fruit in their first year. Doing this means you get better, stronger trees and an improved crop in subsequent years.

Last autumn I planted a Victoria Plum, a Concorde Pear, an Egremont Russet eating apple and a Cooking apple (the variety of which I've forgotten). The plum and pear didn't have any blossoms, but the two apples were covered in them and it seemed such a pity to remove them.

Blossoms in the bottom of the bucket

In autumn 2008 I planted an Apricot (which was a birthday gift from friends), which didn't produce any fruit last year and has no blossoms at present, so it remains to be seen if I get anything off it this year. I also planted a Maynard Cherry which has been encrusted with flowers. I left them all on and it looks like there'll be at least a few cherries this year - hooray!

Cherries forming, hopefully!

The rest of the fruit patch looks like it might be quite good this year:

Gooseberries forming - I think this is a Red variety

Raspberries - hard to make out, but all the pale grey blobs amongst the leaves are flower buds that, hopefully, will turn into fruit.

Blackcurrants just starting to form.

The strawberries are flowering like billy-o but I've not taken a picture of them because, frankly, I'm quite embarrassed about the VAST quantity of weeds growing there. Ditto the blueberries. The Loganberries, which were a monumental success last year, have been putting out runners like they want to take over the world, so I'm hoping for a bumper crop this year.

As for the veg side of things, I've taken the risk of planting out a handful of lettuce plants, covering them with a cloche as the nights are still cold. They do look a bit sad but I have other seedlings coming along in the plastic-houses at home so if these don't make it, there will be others:

Some sad lettuce - Little Gem, Salad Bowl and Lollo Rossa

I've also put up my brassica cage. At the end of last year, the very lovely Grace (who lives in my street, grows magnificent cottage garden plants for sale in her back garden and has 5 cats) was given a Build-A-Ball cage system by a friend. She tried it out, decided it wasn't for her and very kindly offered it to me.

Last year I was using bamboo canes with plastic bottles on top, with very fine mesh netting draped over the top to keep the blasted Cabbage White butterflies out. This worked reasonably well but the canes tend to rot quickly or break easily in high winds or when the resident foxes jump on them(!), so this wasn't ideal. I was aware of the Build-A-Ball system and thought it looked interesting but a bit pricey, so to be offered one for free.......

Not only did Grace give me the dark green balls with the holes in, but there was also the requisite aluminium poles to go with it that you normally have to buy separately. I wanted to use last year's very fine mesh again and knew that it was a long thin shape, so had to build the cage to match (I could have made it squarer), and I was thrilled to discover that the finished cage size matched the mesh size exactly!! Brilliant! It went together fairly easily, some of the posts had to be cajoled into going into the holes and I had to fight to get them into the ground (it's dry as a bone at the moment so rock hard not far below the surface) but it's a fight I won, although not without bruises on my chin (don't ask....).

Brassica cage without mesh...

...and with!

I then weeded it and planted into it the Calabrese seedlings you can see in the polystyrene tray in front of it. (My germination rate with Calabrese seeds has been lamentable, but a local Garden Centre were selling trays of good sized seedlings half-price, so I bought one.) But I'm thrilled with the cage. I shall have to let Grace have some of my produce from it as she didn't want anything for the cage itself.

That's all for now. So, until next time, I'll be continuing to sow seeds in my plastic-houses, pampering my cucumber seeds in the hope they'll germinate (picky blighters, they are) and weeding the plot.

Happy gardening!!

Don't Panic!!!

2010-04-30T15:34:00.000+01:00

Two days after my last posting it was my birthday (I've posted about it in detail on my other, Mrs Jones, blog) and I had a very jolly time indeed, even though I had a slightly scratchy throat all day.

The next morning I woke up with a positively itchy throat and feeling like I was wearing an internal balaclava that weighed a ton. "Dammit," I thought, "A cold". But this, my friends, is no ordinary cold, this is the M&S of colds. It's been going on a week, I've been coughing up my lungs all day every day until I have no lungs left. I've been incredibly tired. I must be so dehydrated from the amount of gunk pouring out of my nose (sorry to be so graphic, but there you are....). Everything is completely exhausting. Hanging out the laundry requires me to have a sit down to recover for about half an hour, and going shopping will knock me back for half a day.

The bottom line is that I'm trying not to panic about the allotment. I've still not managed to get my spuds in yet, and the grass will be knee-high by now and in desperate need of a good strimming. I despair when I see how beautiful other people's plots are looking (like Ali's, for instance) when mine just looks, to all intents and purposes, abandoned.

Trouble is I'm just not well enough at the moment to do anything about it. I could probably get down there and do a bit of light weeding but then I'd have to plonk myself down in my chair there to recover for twice as long as it took me to do the work. And it needs so much more than 'light weeding', now that the weather's warmed up and we've had a small amount of rain. I've told myself that when I'm up to it I'm just going to have to invest a decent amount of time into knocking the plot into shape, but even if I'm feeling better soon, I'm not going to be able to get there until the end of next week as I'm off to visit the in-laws in South Wales from Sunday......

My stepdad has very kind said recently that he would give me a hand at the plot and I may just have to take him up on his offer.

A tail of three piggies....

2010-04-21T12:37:00.000+01:00

P is for piggie

Digging the trenches for the potatoes is coming along quite shamefully slowly. I manage to inveigle The Lovely Husband to come down to the allotment after lunch on Monday this week to help with some digging, with the proviso that we went to the pub afterwards - a plan!!

It was a beautiful day (as they have all been this week), and 2 hours of digging in the sunshine was rewarded with another couple of hours in a pub garden where I was eventually joined by my good friend C who brought her three kids with her - nothing like training them up from an early age! All five of us then decided to head off to a local curry house for our evening meal. I think we eventually rolled home at about 10.30pm. Now THAT'S how a day should be spent. I'm not sure why I'm sharing this on my allotment blog when it really belongs on my other, blathery, blog but they're both mine and I'll write about what I want. See if I don't.

But at least the piggies had come out to lounge in the sun and rootle around in their enclosure, so I took the requisite photos:

Their enclosure

We stood there just watching them going about their snuffly, grunty business for ages - they were absolutely adorable. I didn't like to think of their eventual fate.

Mid-April update

2010-04-16T15:11:00.003+01:00

Because I start off all my seedlings in the plastic-houses at home, I don't spend much time down at the allotment at this time of year, so that's why there's not been much in the way of updates. All the work's happening at the end of my garden at home and, frankly, the allotment can just get on with it until I'm ready to start transplanting stuff down there.

I realise I'm making work for myself because, if I was sensible, I'd do a few hours per week just to keep the weeds down but, let's face it, I'm lazy as hell. Which is a bit weird really, because I genuinely love it when I'm down there - it's just getting there in the first place that I find a bit tricky. A bit like going swimming. Sort of.

Anyway, I went down yesterday, just to see what was going on but mostly because the PIGGIES HAVE ARRIVED!!! Eli, our Steward, sent an email out saying that 3 piglets were now on one of the plots and we were all to be careful of the electric fence, etc. This, of course, was enough to get me down there to check them out - I mean, who doesn't adore baby animals?

Sadly, though, they were hiding in their shelter when I turned up, camera in hand, so I'm afraid there's no pictures just yet, but don't despair, I won't be denied!

I had a quick chat with Eli about them as she was digging at the end of her plot. She said that she had effectively knocked the community pig project on the head because there were too many objections from a handful of plotholders, but as the keeping of small livestock was allowed in the allotment regulations, one of the pro-pig plotholders had decided to go ahead and put some on his plot instead, as his own project. Feathers have already been ruffled by this so it will be interesting to see how it pans out. I have to say I don't object to anyone keeping or growing anything on their plot as long as it's within the regulations, so all power to Gary and his piggies.

My plot is looking very sorry for itself:

Very post-winter. The half nearest the shed is semi-covered with black weed suppressant fabric, the uncovered side (nearest the greenhouse) is where the last of the cabbages and kale were, which got dug up as they had bolted.

The horizontal strip of black weed suppressant fabric (going across the middle of the picture) is where I've decided the potatoes are going to go this year, so after the picture was taken, I removed the fabric and used it to cover more of the ground near the shed. I'm hoping The Lovely Husband will come and dig the trenches for me, like last year, as it's so much quicker. This year I'm just growing maincrops - Desiree and International Kidney (aka Jersey Royals). I've also got Sturon Giant onion sets to go in but I'm not sure where. I'm sure I'll find a home for them.

The raspberries are putting out runners like billy-o, so I spent a good half an hour digging most of them up, and then decided it was time the last of my root crops should come out of the ground.

There were 2 medium sized and 2 giant parsnips:

I know from experience that the 2 largest would be very woody and unusable, so into the black dalek they went - the other 2 came home and will be going into Parsnip and Carrot Soup. I also dug up some baby carrots that I sowed as late as I could last autumn, as an experiment, none of them are bigger than your thumb but I forgot to get a picture. They're going into the soup as well.

Finally, there was the last of my Leeks:

I can't seem to get my leeks to grow very large. This variety is Musselburgh which, as far as I know, is your bog-standard leek, but none of mine have ever grown thicker than my thumb (lots of thumbs in this post, for some reason....). Still, they made a delicious Leek, Potato and Bacon Soup for lunch today.

Next post I promise I'll put up a picture of the seedlings in the plastic-houses, and give you a list of what they are, but everything (apart from the various lettuces) is a bit wee at the moment.

I'm cautiously optimistic that I might actually get some decent soft fruit this year. Last year I put in about nine raspberries, a loganberry, a tayberry, three blackcurrants, 3 different varieties of gooseberry, 3 different varieties of blueberry and about 70 strawberry plants. We had a lot of loganberries, quite a lot of strawberries and a handful of blueberries and raspberries. The tayberry was a disaster and I'll probably dig it up this year. Because you prune the blackcurrants, raspberries and gooseberries hard when you first plant them (to force them to put their energy into making roots rather than fruit), you don't get much, if anything at all, the first year.

This is now the second year and the blackcurrants are covered in little flower buds, each of which will, hopefully, turn into a blackcurrant:

If you click on the picture to make it bigger, you might be able to make them out. All three plants look like this, and when I pruned them hard last year, I plunged the cuttings into pots and they've all taken as well, so I have an additional 8 plants to go in this autumn.

The loganberry, which was a surprise hit last year and highly prolific, is sprouting out all over the place and also putting out runners underground, in the manner of raspberries. But I'm leaving these to grow as the berries were so fantastic last year I want as many as possible this year.

The gooseberries also have little flower buds starting - I did take a picture but it was horribly out of focus so I'm not showing you that. Fingers crossed I actually get some berries later in the year and, if I do, I'll show you them then.

Last autumn I planted a small orchard at the top of my plot and I'm thrilled to say that they've all taken and are all starting to put out leaves. Rather sadly though, come mid-May I have to remove all the blossoms from the apples, plum and pear trees so that, as with the berries, they can concentrate on growing roots rather than fruit, so 2011 will be the soonest I can hope to have those.

But I did put a cherry in a couple of years ago and that, I'm thrilled to say, is absolutely encrusted with little flower buds, hopefully each of which will turn into a cherry:

Cherry Tree flower buds close up.

Pear, var. 'Concorde'.

Apple - I forget which of the two this is. It's either the Egremont Russet eater or the Bountiful cooker. Sorry, that's a bit rubbish, isn't it? Must try harder...

I did take a picture of the Victoria Plum but, again, it was out of focus, so next time.

Anyway, that's the update for the moment - it's all go out there, isn't it?

Quick catch up

2010-03-24T17:20:00.002Z

Oh, look, I know I'm slack at doing updates here but, you know, that's the way I roll sometimes, homies....

I have, actually, managed to, like, do a few hours down the allotment over the last few days, yeah? *flicks hair in desultory manner* so you can stop getting all judgey on me 'cos stuff is being done although painfully slowly.

Mind you (serious point here), it's the start of the new digging season and having spent the last few months sat on our fat arses watching telly and eating chocolates in the warm (if we're sensible, that is), the last thing you want to do is rush outside, dig frantically for several hours, put your back out, swear a lot and vow never to go down the allotment again. Take it easy, people. An hour here, an hour there, build up to it. Let's face it, you're never going to get the upper hand with the weeds, the buggers will always come back, unless you napalm them and the committee's not going to like that now, are they?

So I'm easing myself into it, and am concentrating on my fruit patch which has got very weedy indeed over the winter, and because I hadn't covered it with weed suppressing fabric, I've got a bit of a job on my hands. I find the easiest way for me to dig and weed is actually to sit down on the ground - I don't get on with bending over all the time - and this works for me. It also gets me very close to the earth (I mean physically, not in some dippy spiritual manner - I'm not a hippy, you know!) which means I was able to spot that my rather fabulously prolific Loganberry has put out runners underground that are just breaking through. Loganberries were a complete revelation last year - a cross between blackberries and raspberries, I had about 5 times more fruit from a single Loganberry bush than the 8 or so raspberry bushes that it's growing beside. Brilliant!

I've also planted a small rhubarb crown earlier this week, can't remember the variety, something-or-other Champagne. The Lovely Husband is partial to rhubarb, and I don't mind it so am happy to find space for it.

That's the only thing I've planted out so far, but seedlings are starting to emerge in the plastic-houses at home. So far there's leeks, spring onions, brussels sprouts, green curly kale, that black kale (cavallo nero? is that it? You know the one I mean, the one that grows more like an aspidistra and less like Side Show Bob), Little Gem, Salad Bowl and Lollo Rossa lettuce that have all come up. Sown but yet to appear are beetroot and red cabbage. I've also sown basil and coriander but it might be a bit early for them. Oh yes, a couple of courgette seeds got sown this morning as well. I've got onion sets waiting to go in and the potatoes will go in very shortly. I'm only growing two varieties of maincrop this year - red Desirees and the delightfully named International Kidney (which, if they were grown on Jersey would be Jersey Royals) - which don't need chitting (which only benefits first and second earlies).

I had a chat with the lovely Eli who has bravely taken on the mantle of site steward and she said that it's not been finalised about having pigs on the site yet and people have raised questions, such as what would happen if foot and mouth erupted again, and so on. I must admit I'd completely forgotten about there being pigs on the site. I will probably not take part, for the same reasons that I decided not to take part in the chicken project. I think sharing responsibility for looking after animals has the potential for being quite stressful, so I'd rather not get involved. Plus I'm sure I'd get too fond of them to want to eat them at the end of the day. But I'll go and make friendly oinking noises at them as I'm passing.

That's it for now, sorry for the lack of pictures, I forgot to take my camera but, frankly, there's not that much to see down there just now.

Hope you've all managed to get out now it seems the weather's cheering up a bit....

Spring is definitely on its way....

2010-03-05T17:38:00.001Z

Today was sublimely gorgeous. More than a little chilly in the shade but the sunshine was really warm and the sky was as blue as blue can be. So I did what any sensible person would do and spent an hour down at the allotment.

Our allotment steward sends out a monthly email newsletter and March's edition arrived yesterday. It seems, rather sadly, that the local yoof have been entering the site in the wee hours and doing whatever it is you would do at that time in the pitch black in the middle of winter (or, rather, early Spring). The newsletter said some plots had been damaged so I thought I might as well trot along and just see if everything was hunky dory.

I was the only person there and the chickens were very excited to see me - they all rushed up to the fence of their enclosure in a great clucking flurry (be careful how you say that....) and I was rather saddened to have to tell them that I couldn't do anything for them. They watched me with their accusatory beady eyes as I passed by and then they scuttled off when they realised I wasn't going to give them any food. Rather excitingly, it seems that because the chicken project has gone so well, there's talk of having pigs on site now as well!!

There has been a lot of activity at the site over the last few weeks. The newbies have got all enthusiastic and come and dug everything over, and it all looks well-worked and anticipatory. I couldn't see any obvious damage to anyone's plot and I was relieved, but not too surprised, to see that mine was untouched. I don't have a padlock on my shed so that no-one has to break anything to get into it to see there's nothing to nick from it anyway. I keep all my 'good' stuff (petrol-strimmer and petrol) at home and bring it when I need it.

Everything is still mostly dormant but there are some signs of emergence - my cherry tree has new buds on it:

Cherry Tree buds (it's a bit out of focus but I was having a few problems with the camera this morning - or it might have been my eyes!)

And as I was wandering around the site, I spotted this emerging rhubarb which looked like a heart:

The black weed suppressant fabric that I use a lot of had been blown around a bit so that took some straightening out and pinning down, and then I decided to tackle the Moving Of The Dalek.

The black Dalek compost maker bin thing is very slightly cone-shaped and has no base on it, so once it's filled to your satisfaction and the compost has started to be made at the bottom, there comes a time when you have to lift off the whole thing so that you can get to the compost more easily. The little doors at the bottom don't really work very well - it's easier to shift the whole thing. You then have to fork the top layer of stuff (which is the newest and unlikely to be rotted down very much) back into the dalek to form the new base layer. You can then use the compost on the soil. I forked a load into a trub and used it as a mulch on my raspberries, blackcurrants and loganberries.

That was about it down there for today. I was out in the brilliant sunshine and sharp, fresh air for an hour and it felt fabulous. More seeds got sown at home later on in the afternoon but before I left, I decided I had to take a picture of this particularly atmospheric shed on the site:

The sowing has started

2010-02-24T11:07:00.001Z

Just a very brief update on the allotment scenario:

It's still too damn wet to do anything there properly so I've gone through my seed stash and decided what to grow this year, what I'm abivalent about and what not to bother with. The 'not bothering with' list is the shortest -

swede (just won't grow in the soil properly),
tomatoes (blight every time so not bothering again),
sweetpeas (too many greenfly),
broad beans (ditto),
Swiss chard (grows well but pretty underwhelming flavour - pretty colours though, but no),
sweet peppers (until I get a proper glass greenhouse, these just don't work for me).

Ambivalent -

Dwarf Yellow Beans (prolific but got dry and leathery very quickly),
Mange Tout/Sugar Snap Peas (I grew both intermingled but only liked the flavour of one - seemed a lot of effort for not too much reward),
Red Cabbage (rubbish yield this past season, not much better season before),
Garlic (grows well but we just don't use that much in cooking),
Onions (don't grow very large and cheap as chips in the shops - I know that's not the point but sometimes it's best to be realistic),
Broccoli (big plants for not many spears, plus mine flowered extremely quickly).

Chances are I'll probably still grow all these anyway, as I have the space and the seeds so might as well....

Checking the packets to see what can be sown now, I've taken the risk and sown half a dozen little pots each with Leeks (Musselburgh), Spring Onions (White Lisbon), and three kinds of lettuce - red Lollo Rossa, green Salad Bowl and green Little Gem. You're not supposed to sow any of these until March but I thought I'd experiment with them a bit early and pop them into one of the plastic-houses at the end of the garden. No pictures I'm afraid as they're just too dull. Some dark brown earth in paler brown pots stuck on a gently rusing shelf in a dilapidated plastic-house whose cover has gone brittle in the UV light over winter and split, now held together with brown plastic parcel tape. Not very Cath Kidston, I know, but at least it works!!!

And so another year begins....

2010-02-07T15:48:00.000Z

It's probably time to start paying attention to the allotment again. The sun was out yesterday but I was selling my jewellery at a craft fair in Alresford, Hampshire, so couldn't get there. But this morning wasn't too bad - the sun was going in and out and it wasn't icy cold, so I thought I'd ease myself into the 2010 season with a little light digging and seeing what's what.

First thing I noticed was that the plot next door to mine has been taken over. Another older chap on the site, Henry, had been sort of semi-using it (he also has two full plots opposite) and was basically using the lower half of this particular plot as somewhere to park his car, and the top part as a sort of overflow potato site.

From the top edge of the potato beds to the boundary with the house behind was a massive tangle of brambles from which we picked pounds and pounds of blackberries over the last couple of years - Henry's wife made blackberry crumbles and pies and I made jars of blackberry and apple jam and, perhaps more practically, bottles of blackberry vodka. These brambles have now been totally cleared away and new beds dug in their place. While I can appreciate that the new tenant will want to have as much growing space as possible and what they've done is very sensible, it is a bit of a sadness to me as I will now have to go farther afield to find my blackberries - although I suppose I could always grow some large, thornless variety on my own plot *ponders*...

The 'new' plot next door. From where the white square is at the top of the picture to the hedge behind and right across the width used to be all brambles.

The new people weren't there but it looked freshly dug so I'm assuming they came in yesterday when the weather was nice.

My plot looks as if it's come through this past extreme winter remarkably well - the fruit trees are still standing, as is the shed, and the black weed suppressing fabric is still more or less in place. I'd gone there today with the intention of just having a bit of a look round and perhaps picking some brussels sprouts if there were any to be had. There were. And what's more surprising, I harvested quite a lot of other stuff:

Leeks - there are about 10 more still in the ground, thinner than these guys. I didn't grow very many last season as they weren't too successful the season before, but these don't look too bad, do they?

Ridiculous monster parsnip. I take a size 6/39 (European) size shoe [I change into wellies on site, in case you were thinking I was wandering around barefoot - I'm not that much of an Earth Mother!]. Remains to be seen if this is at all edible.

There were about 4 Desiree potato plants that I hadn't managed to get round to digging up before the snows arrived, so they had to take their chances. I dug them up today and was astonished to find some spuds that weren't rotten from the ice. There was, though, about an equal amount that were and they got lobbed into the black dalek compost bin. But, hey, usable spuds!

The Savoy Cabbages that I planted seem to be a bit like a Curate's Egg - good in parts. This is the largest of the dozen or so I have and this is after I've removed the rubbish outer leaves. You'll see the frost has blackened the tips of the leaves but I'm hoping that the heart will be okay once I get in there. I love eating steamed and buttered Savoy Cabbage with bacon and onion herby suet roll - yum!

I was completely astonished to find some small but hopefully usable carrots. They'll have to be steamed or roasted whole because they're too small to do anything else with.

I also got a coupla handfuls of pretty small brussel sprouts (the whole reason I went to the site in the first place today!) and picked some curly kale but forgot to take pictures of those.

I now have all these veggies sitting in my kitchen waiting for me to wash them and decide their fate. I am amazed that there was so much to be harvested - my flabber has rarely been quite so gasted....

Before I left the site this afternoon I thought perhaps I ought to do a bit of digging and make it look like I've been working the plot a bit - the obvious work that's been done on almost all the other plots on site has rather put mine to shame, so perhaps it's time to start this season in earnest.

The wee spot of digging over I did around what's left of the brassicas. I don't feel quite so bad about the state of the plot now!

My next task, I think, apart from the never-ended digging and weeding, is deciding on the layout and plan for this coming season, and starting to get my head round what I can and can't start sowing.

And so (sow) it begins.

Belated Happy New Year!

2010-01-17T12:10:00.000Z

I know, I know - how slack am I? Well, there was a perfectly reasonably excuse and one I suspect will have affected all the allotmenteers and gardeners out there - the weather! It seemed like there was snow and ice for almost the whole of December and it's only now, 17 January, following a rise in temperature and a night of torrential rain, that the snow has finally (more or less) disappeared. And as the weatherpeople are apparently predicting yet another drop in temperature and potentially more snow towards the end of this week, I thought I'd better get down to the plopment to see what has survived the snow.

I was most concerned about the new fruit trees that I planted towards the end of last year - they're only babies and I was a bit worried that the weight of the snow might have brought them down, as it did to my Forsythia at home, but no, they were absolutely fine and, what's more, showing actual signs of growth. These are the little buds that are forming on the cherry tree:

So fingers crossed that I'll actually get some fruit this year.

The view from one end of the plopment (where the fruit trees are) looking down is this rather unedifying spectacle:

But then, allotments are never at their prettiest during the winter. The black fabric is covering areas that I'll hope to plant up next season. The large green weedy square in the centre of the picture is where all my soft fruit is currently - there are about 50 strawberry plants hidden away in there as well as a couple of rows of raspberry canes. Oh well, I'm not about to start weeding it all now, it can wait until springtime.

The view from beside the shed looking down sort of towards the fruit trees is equally unaesthetically pleasing:

But - look - lovely blue sky and sunshine! It was also pretty warm, a balmy 6 or 7 degrees!

At this time of year about the only thing that the allotment produces is cabbages and brussels sprouts. My Husband picked most of the sprouts for Christmas lunch (and very lovely they were too) but I have a few Savoy Cabbages which are looking quite splendid. This one, in particular, is a good healthy size (I've placed a cane top next to it for scale):

Everyone else's plots seems to be just fine - there's no obvious signs of any damage except that a large polytunnel on a plot diagonally opposite mine has gone (or is in the process of going). I don't know whether the weight of snow has pulled it down or whether the guy who works it has given up (he was suffering from ill health so wouldn't be surprised if he decided to take it easy) and the site is now being cleared. Time will tell.

So, to finish, here's some arty shots of dead plants and bubbles frozen in ice in the water troughs:

Last, but by no means least, my holographic wellies:

Happy Belated Christmas!

2009-12-27T10:54:00.002Z

Just a quick posting to wish everyone a belated Happy Christmas - I managed to pick up a tummy bug on (probably) 22 December which is still rumbling (literally!) around now. Frankly it pretty much ruined Christmas Day for me and meant that I didn't manage to get down to the allotment to pick the veg. Luckily, The Husband volunteered and came back with a carrier bag full of brussel sprouts. I managed a couple of them on the day itself (along with a single potato, one slice of turkey, a spoonful of mashed swede & carrot and a couple of slices of parsnip!) and they were, as last year, fantastic. The variety is F1 Brigitte and the buttons are medium sized and firm. You only need to steam them for 4-5 minutes and they come out sweet and nutty. So that's my tip to you all for 2010 - grow F1 Brigitte sprouts and you'll be happily trouser-trumpeting all Boxing Day!!

Right, that's it from me until the New Year when it'll be time to start planning where to grow stuff.

I now have an orchard!

2009-12-04T16:13:00.003Z

I know I've been dreadfully slack with the allotment blog lately but, well, October was full of lousy weather so I barely went and then I was out of the country for almost all of November. The weather turned particularly shiteous while I was away - I was reading about all the storms with gale force winds and torrential rain that were battering the country while I was enjoying extremely pleasant and balmy sunshine (albeit from Eastern Europe, which was a surprise), so I asked The Husband to pop down and just check that the shed was still in one piece. He took a short video to post to me so I could see for myself and, yes, everything was there but the black fabric that I put down to suppress weeds over the forthcoming winter had been blown around. He kindly straightened it back for me.

A few months ago I ordered some fruit trees from Blackm oor Nurseries who are fairly close to me, and these arrived a couple of days ago, with strict written instructions that they had to be planted WITHIN 48 HOURS OF DELIVERY!!!!!!! or, I dunno, hellfire and damnation would rain down upon my head or summink. But the rain wouldn't let me, so they had to stay outside in their cardboard box until I got the chance.

Anyway, I woke up this morning and - be still my beating heart - it wasn't actually raining! There was blue sky! There was sunshine!

I inveigled The Husband into carrying the trees while I took the stakes (which, although heavy, made me feel rather pleasingly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), with the proviso that he wouldn't be expected to actually stay and help at all.

Needless to say, the wind and/or the foxes had been having a rare old time with the black fabric again and it was all over the place but, luckily, still actually on my plot:

As I'd not set foot on the plopment for the best part of two months, I thought I'd best have a look round to see what's what. The brassica patch is the only thing that's still going strong at this time of year and here the Savoy Cabbages are a bit inconsistent in size with none of them very large, but I may get some usage. The red cabbages have been a disaster this year with not one any larger than a golf ball. The curly Kale is fairly happy in that they all currently look like Sideshow Bob (except they're obviously green, not red):

But, as last year, my brussels sprouts are looking utterly fabulous:

This the Brigitte F1 variety that I've now grown two years running. The buttons are hard, sweet and very tasty.

This year I've grown a variety of carrot called Resistafly and it's been very successful, barely any tunnels at all. I knew there were a few rows left in the ground that I'd planted as late as I could in the season so I knew that, if any had grown, they would be quite small but could be nice to roast whole, so I dug them up, and they were all perfect, not a mark on them although, as suspected, they were quite wee:

And it was time to discover just how mutant the parsnips had got this year. Answer - pretty damn mutant:

I've not yet peeled this but I suspect it will be too woody to be any use. Can't remember what variety this is, possibly Gladiator, but next year I'll have a go at Tender and True which is supposed to be one of the least woody varieties.

So after straightening out the fabric yet again, it was time to get on with the job in hand which was planting out the four new fruit trees. The sun had now gone in and the wind was picking up, so it was getting pretty chilly but I knew that if I didn't do it now, I didn't know when I'd be able to do it as the weather forecast is pretty dire for the next week or so.

I chose their locations at the end of the plot, just beyond the soft fruit section. This is the view from there looking down towards the shed. You'll note the plot now has that proper Winter fallow (i.e., weedy beyond belief) look about it:

I've already got a Maynard Cherry and an apricot in here so, to that, I've now added one each of Egremont Russet eating apple, Bountiful cooking apple, Victoria plum and Concorde Pear. The apples are on M27 rooting stock which means they shouldn't grow to more than 2 metres high, the plum is on Pixy rooting stock (which is also a small growing kind) and the pear is on Quince A rooting stock which was the smallest I could find but will still probably get to around 3 metres or so - I may have to keep that one especially pruned. I didn't have any Growmore left but I stuck in a good handful of Epsom Salts (for leaf growth) into the holes before planting them, so fingers crossed. I have to remove all the blossoms in mid-May next year to prevent fruiting so the trees can get a really good start and grow extra strong for 2011. It seems a long time to wait but the trees weren't especially cheap so I think it's best to do it properly.

This is what they looked like at the end:

I just hope they like it there!

Harvest Roundup

2009-09-28T16:34:00.004+01:00

This year I have been weighing and recording every time I picked anything off the allotment with a view to doing a roundup together with a price list showing how much the same quantity would have cost me from a supermarket.

I've decided to post the results now because, although I still have some Desiree spuds, carrots, beetroot and all the brassicas still in the ground, I can't be arsed to keep writing it all down (plus I keep forgetting to do it), so it seems that now is as good a time as any.

I can't seem to work out how to add a table or spreadsheet to this - at least, not easily, I think I have to get involved with coding which is a huge pain, so I'll just have to do a list. There are some things I've grown but haven't bothered weighing, or I've not finished harvesting them yet, so they won't appear - things like most of the brassicas and the Desiree Maincrop potatoes. Other things, like Pattypan Squash and Crystal Lemon Cucumbers you can't buy in the shops so I couldn't get a comparable retail price for them. Also some things are sold on a price-per-item basis (i.e., organic cucumbers at £1 each) which doesn't work for me as I've just weighed them in bulk rather than as individual items. So I've mainly gone for the bog-standard veggies that you can get from a shop here.

I've taken today's prices from Sainsbury's Organic range where possible (as I grow as organically as I can) or, if there isn't an organic option, their 'Taste the Difference' range. And, remember, this is the total amount picked over several months:

Maris Peer Potatoes - 4.141kg x £0.86/kg = £3.56

Climbing French Beans - 11.56kg x £5.96/kg = £68.91 (!)

Courgettes - 6.66kg x £1.84/kg = £12.26

Strawberries - 2.77kg x £9.97/kg= £27.69

Blueberries - 114g x £9.95/kg= £1.13

Mange Tout - 646g x £7.50/kg = £4.84

Carrots - 1.016kg (so far) x £1.28/kg = £1.30 [still harvesting]

Kale - 329g (so far) x £4.95/kg = £1.62 [still harvesting]

Onions - 4.32kg (at least) x £1/kg = £4.32

Broccoli - 169g x £3.50/kg = £0.59

This all totals £132.48, a not insignificant sum. And this list doesn't include sweetcorn, dwarf yellow beans, pattypan squash, cucumbers, gherkins, garlic, savoy cabbage, red cabbage, brussel sprouts or Desiree potatoes, so I think I can confidently say that, if they were all included, I'd probably be looking at something nearer £200!

Some of the figures are laughably low - in the case of the blueberries, the plants had only been in the ground for a few months so this was their first season. I'm expecting them to do better next year. But broccoli was disappointing - I'm not sure I'll bother again next year. Last year I grew purple sprouting which was okay but nothing to write home about and not especially prolific, so this year I grew Calabrese, which is what is labelled as broccoli in the shops. Mine matured early, bolted and flowered all before I could get to it. But just compare it with the Cobra Climbing French Beans!

This has definitely been a worthwhile experiment and for those of you reading this who grow your own, I would recommend you have a go yourself next year and see how much it would have cost you to buy in the shops what you can grow yourself.

Pictures, as promised, again

2009-09-14T22:17:00.009+01:00

So before the sad pictures of the allotment, I thought I'd show you the fruits of my labours:

Onions in a net, hopefully they'll last several months. I still have about another 100 drying in the shed at the allotment but they are really quite weeny, not much bigger than pickled onion size but, hey, they're better than nothing.

These are the jars of sweet pickled beetroot, sweet pickled dill pickles and jam.

Blackberry Vodka

I am, though, really looking forward to sampling some of these but, unfortunately, not for at least another year. Blackberry vodka is pathetically easy to make but you have to remember to shake the bottles once a week to ensure something-or-other (that the sugar's dissolved properly or summink...) and after three months you have to filter out the blackberries. Apparently they develop a woody taste if you leave them in whereas raspberries can be left in. Whatever. The worst part is that you then have to leave it for a further year to mature! What torture!

So, then, now let's head off to the allotment - I'll warn you, it's not a pretty sight. Everything's now gone over and is looking very shabby indeed.

Cucumber/Gherkin Wigwam

This is one of my three cucumber/gherkin wigwams. I am now totally cucumber/gherkinned out, we've eaten as much as we want and I've preserved all that I'm going to so these are just going to go into the compost bin. I've had absolutely no problem growing them outside so will continue to do so.

Crystal Lemon Cucumber

This year I tried growing Crystal Lemon cucumbers. They were difficult to germinate and I only managed to get about 3 plants after planting many more seeds. So far the three plants have only produced one round yellow cucumber (see above). It's now in my fridge waiting to be consumed. Whether I grow any next year will depend on what it tastes like, but I'll keep you posted on that.

Butternut Squash

These are my two sole Butternut Squashes. I bought two plants at Chiddingfold Festival earlier this year (because I couldn't germinate any of the seeds I bought) and they've grown reasonably well, put out quite a lot of flowers but only two of them developed any further. No matter, it was an experiment - two squashes is enough for us this time round.

Patty Pan Squash

The White Scalloped Summer Squash (a.k.a. Patty Pan Squash) have been really quite successful. We've had about half a dozen from the three plants that I grew from seed. They can grow as large as a dinner plate if you leave them, but this one is about 5 inches/13 cms across so we'll eat it quite soon, stuffed with fried bacon, onions and parmesan, served with baked beans - yummy! There are two more little ones still developing:

There are plenty more flowers still there so I think I'll leave the plants there to keep producing for as long as they want.

The courgettes have, of course, been prolific and we've had plenty of them of various sizes during the summer. There are a couple that I'm leaving to grow into marrows as I'm going to have a go at making Marrow Rum as it sounds quite interesting. Might be disgusting though, but let's experiment, shall we?!?

A very large courgette/small marrow

The Sweetcorn is now looking very sad indeed and I really should do a proper harvest. I didn't grow quite as many plants this year as last as last year I was getting 2 good-sized cobs per plant and we didn't eat them all. Of course, typically enough, this year I grew less but I'm only getting 1 decent cob per plant! Oh well, that's the mystery of Mother Nature....

Sad looking Sweetcorn plants

I'm still digging up Desiree maincrop potatoes. The ones I dug earlier were quite small and pretty badly hit by scab which looks nasty but doesn't affect the eating quality once you've peeled them. The ones I'm harvesting now aren't so badly scabbed and are really big, so I'm quite thrilled. I've still got half a row left in the ground, storing there until I'm ready to use them.

Desiree spuds - these came from just one plant

There are still carrots, beetroot, chard and parsnips in the ground, so there's plenty of stuff still about.

This year I also planted a nectar bar of flowers for the bees in front of the shed. There are lavender, sedum, foxgloves, geranium, asters and cosmos.

But down the side of the shed there grew a self-seeded Thistle plant which I decided to leave for the benefit of the bees:

Apologies....

2009-09-13T16:25:00.004+01:00

Whoops, another month has just slipped through my fingers - admittedly there's been quite a lot going on in my non-allotment life (decorating, illness, The Husband heading off to Rome on business - see here) but mostly bad weather has prevented me from doing much down at the allotment. But that's okay, most of the harvesting has been done and ... tell you what, I'll go take pictures this week and do a proper posting but here's what's been happening with the veggies at home.

The last couple of years I've lost all my tomatoes to blight (as has everyone else) so this year I thought I'd have a go at growing some from seeds taken from a favourite shop-bought tomato variety (Vittoria from the Taste The Difference range at Sainsbury's) in the plastic-house, the idea being that I can at least try and give them some protection from the airborne spores.

And it seems to have worked! I've not eaten any of them yet (is this okay? Is it not a bit late?) but I do have several vines that are now very slowly going red in the sun (once I'd stripped off most of the foliage last week so the rays could hit the fruits and also pulled back the plastic overcoat-thingy that covers the frame).

I'm undecided whether or not to pursue this approach next year - depends on what the tomatoes taste like, I 'spose.

I have two plastic-houses next to each other. The tomatoes are in the left hand one, and the right hand one has my chillies and sweet peppers, which are also coming along very nicely indeed.

Peppers

Chillies

Oh, I've also been preserving and bottling like fury and meant to take a picture of my stack of jars in the garage as it's quite impressive (well, for me it is!). There's jars of sweet pickled beetroot; sweet pickled gherkins/cucumbers; Blackberry & Apple Jam; Blackberry, Apple & Vanilla Jam; and four bottles of Blackberry Vodka. The freezer also now has portions of French Climbing Beans, some Sweetcorn still on the cob, bags of ready-made Ratatouille that can be turned into other stuff such as veggie lasagne, spag bol, soup, veg stew, and a large bag of Borscht which was absolutely delicious and made 3 tennis ball sized beetroots, 3 medium sized spuds, a large onion, some crushed garlic, juice of 1 lemon, sugar to taste and 3 pints of water go an extraordinarily long way (it's basically sweet 'n' sour beetroot soup - hence the sugar - and very, very yumksi).

There's potatoes still in the ground and I've got all the winter brassicas to deal with yet, so this year's harvest is far from over (not to forget my autumn fruiting raspberries and loganberries) but I'm pleased to say I've got my act together on the storage and preserving front much more this year than last. Next year we're going to look into home brewing!

Positively Cornucopian

2009-08-02T18:26:00.008+01:00

The weather has been particularly vile this week so I took the opportunity of it being dry to head off to the plopment in trepidation at the jungle I would find.

As expected, the courgettes are getting ideas above their station and straying dangerously close to the realm of the marrow. Nevertheless, I've found a fab-sounding recipe for Maltese Stuffed Marrow (thanks, Ali!) which I shall be attempting next week.

No more pattypan squash since the first one last week but there are more forming and the flowers are huge - the bees are queuing up to dive headfirst into them so I'm hoping for good things here. The plants themselves are really big so if leaf growth is anything to go by then a bumper crop (or at least more than one!) is to be expected.

I also harvested my first Beetroot, and it was perfect! Also perfect was the Resistafly carrot that I pulled up today. Last year's carrot crop was a total crushing disappointment on practically all fronts (too many legs, carrot fly tunnels). So I'm hoping I may have cracked it!

I also picked 1.7 kilos of Climbing French Beans. And half a kilo of Yellow French Beans. Good job we like beans in our house, then. I also picked Kale, a good coupla handfuls of sugar snap peas, a small amount of calabrese, a Little Gem lettuce and about half a kilo of blackberries, so quite a haul in total!

(The photos were taken on my phone so I'm hoping the quality is okay.)

Normal Service Has Been Restored

2009-07-25T17:52:00.009+01:00

Enough of my trials with the red ants (the bites are much better, thanks for asking....), let's get back to matters vegetabular (have I just coined a new word?)

It's been chucking it down here since I last went (and got all bitten) so as there were some bits of blue in the sky today I thought I'd best grab the opportunity to get down the road to do some weeding and harvest some stuff. The last pictures of the plopment proper were on 8 July which is some time ago now. So, behold the jungle that has appeared since last you looked:

All the new potatoes have been dug up now and, delicious though they were, the yield was quite staggeringly poor. In the vast majority of cases, I only got 2, maybe 3, spuds per plant! Barely worth it. I'm hoping for much better things from my Desiree main crops.

I'm growing quite a few new things this year that I've not tried before - Butternut Squash is one. You grow them like cucumbers, up poles, but I believe pollination is a bit tricky - it says on the packet that you can aid pollination by using a paintbrush or just sticking your finger into one flower and then into another to act as a surrogate bee or bug or whatever. I've found, though, that I've only so far had one flower open at a time! This is just an experiment, though. We'll see what happens.

Another veg I'm growing this year for the first time is the Pattypan Squash or, to give it its more formal title, "Early White Bush Scallop Summer Squash". Originally grown by native Americans for hundreds of years, it's now very popular in modern American vegetable patches but little grown over here. You grow them just like courgettes and I started by sowing just three seeds but all three germinated so I didn't bother sowing any more (I only need to grow enough to feed the 2 of us and if it's anything like courgettes....need I say more?)

But, look, I harvested my first squash today! Well, okay, so it was the only one on the 3 plants but I'm hopeful there'll be more! In the picture the squash is next to (some of) today's harvest of Cobra Climbing French Beans and another new arrival, Yellow French Beans.

My courgettes are coming along:

As are the cucumbers:

The Calabrese/broccoli:

And the Sweetcorn is starting to develop its flowers (or what passes for flowers in sweetcorn-world):

The two rows of Resistafly Carrots seem happy enough, but it's hard to tell until you dig some up, so we'll see later if they stand up to their billing:

The lettuce hedge is as succulent as ever. One thing I can say for my plopment is that it grows terrific lettuces. Just after I took this picture I tasted a few of the leaves from the salad bowls (frilly bright green plants in the picture) and, sadly, they were starting to bolt (I'd suspected as much) and the leaves were so bitter I had to spit them out, so I removed them. Fortunately I'd brought with me half a dozen new lettuce seedlings so they got popped into the vacant space.

The fox trampoline was starting to look a bit full and as I'd not weeded underneath the mesh since planting the brassicas in there, I figured it was time to do it.

And this is showing just how big the brassicas have got (I think we're looking at mainly Savoy Cabbage here and possibly some Brussels Sprouts):

The Cosmos that Sylvia planted when she had the top of my plot has flowered beautifully this year. I decided to leave them as the colours are so vivid.

And, finally, this year's competition on the site is for the best scarecrow (last year was tallest sunflower and the year before that was something to do with sweetpeas, I think). Anyway, I have enough to be getting on with without having to think about designing and constructing a scarecrow so won't be entering, but other people on site are and scarecrows are gradually appearing. The competition is going to be judged sometime during the week of 10-16 August (which is, apparently, National Allotment Week) but this one went up this afternoon (all 10ft of it!) and I think it's fabulous - such an easy design and so effective! Bit early for Hallowe'en but what the heck, I wish I'd thought of it now!!

Evolution of the Lumps - Day 3

2009-07-23T22:55:00.004+01:00

And so we come to Day 3. It transpires there are actually 7 bites, the cluster nearest the ankle is formed of 3 separate bites, not 2, as I originally thought. This little group is also going beetroot red and feels hot but is not particularly inflamed. Today's picture's been taken outside in the sunshine (we had some, for a bit of a change). The itching hasn't been nearly so bad today but I did, finally, remember to get some Anthisan cream from the chemists in readiness for the next occasion because, oh yes, it will happen again although, hopefully, not quite on this scale.

The pustule is still there, as you can see but, for some reason, it's the only one. The temptation to pop it has been quite strong but I managed to restrain myself.

I think this will be the last posting about the Evolution of the Lumps as they'll start to go down and become less red from now on and I really should return this blog to its original intention, which is pictures of the allotment and, anyway, I think that's quite enough of my afflictions for the time being.

Evolution of the Lumps - Day 2

2009-07-22T21:18:00.004+01:00

And so here we have Day 2 of the Red Ant Bites. You will observe that there is more pronounced redness and you can see where I've been scratching between the bites when it's all got too much. They were a bit troublesome last night but I slathered them with Lanacane cream which is a local anaesthetic albeit a pathetically mild one - I really needed the stuff they put on little kids in hospitals before sticking a needle in them, that'd do it...

This next picture is not really for the faint of heart, so if you're feeling even slightly fragile, please look away now and just imagine it's a picture of kittens and puppies.

There - don't say I didn't warn you. Yes, I know my legs need a shave but I'm not going to do them now, am I, not with the bites now GROWING PUSTULES!!!

More tomorrow....

Beware the Red Ants - vicious little buggers....

2009-07-21T17:17:00.009+01:00

What you are looking at here is the untoned, in-need-of-a-shave, lower right leg of a slightly overweight woman who had a bit of a tan from when we got the heatwave a little while ago (remember that? When it got too warm to sleep? That was our summer this year, right there - I hope you made the most of it!) but which has now faded. I genuinely apologise for inflicting the sight upon your innocent retinas. And, yes, those are floorboards you can see, bare floorboards with just the ghostly herringbone imprint of ancient perished underlay upon them. We're redecorating and the carpet's come up. Just in case you thought we were too poor to afford decent floor covering. Which we're not.

What I want you to concentrate on instead is the constellation of angry looking red lumps scattered liberally about it. I may as well own up to the fact that, yes, the leg belongs to me (I have another just like it but without the lumps) but I think you'd probably guessed that anyway. After all, why would I be talking about someone else's pale, hairy, lumpy leg unless I was being especially bitchy that day, so, yes, it's mine. Just thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that it's not attached to your body because THE ITCHING IS DRIVING ME NUTSO!!!

Yesterday, because it wasn't raining (hence the lack of posts lately - nothing much to report if I don't go to the allotment due to the weather), I decided several hours of stuff needed doing, involving harvesting produce (or, as we pronounce it in our house, in that very annoying American way, 'pro-dooce'. Because it amuses us, alright? Look, we've been married for 13 years so we have to make our entertainment in whatever way we can...) and transplanting 50 beetroot seedlings into where the onions are now being harvested from. Ooh, bad sentence but '...transplanting 50 beetroot seedlings into from where the onions are now being harvested' is worse. So just suck it up, grammar nazis.

Now, like many of you good people, I have an iPod. It has my entire music collection on it, numbering close to 9000 tracks now and, for the first time ever, I took it to the allotment with me. Strapped on the headphones, chose my 'St Vitus Dance' playlist (all tunes I can't keep still to) and, singing away at the top of my voice, danced up and down the potato rows, boogied around the beans and shimmied amongst the sweetcorn. Our site where my allotment is is large, 4 acres, and I was the only person there so my dignity (and their eardrums) remained intact.

But, my goodness, what a difference it made to my work rate! I suppose much like people listen to music when they're at the gym or going for a run, you get into the rhythm, and shaking your booty and singing along to some bangin' beats tends to take your mind off the tedium of weeding (or jogging or stairclimbing or whatever) and by the time I'd finished listening to my list of tunes written by the genius Cathy Dennis (Kylie's 'Can't get you out of my head', Britney's 'Toxic', Rachel Stevens' 'L.A. Ex', Katy Perry's 'I kissed a girl', Sugababes 'About you now') and was most of the way through my Funky Prince playlist (not the sloppy stuff, just pure purple funktasticness, like 'My Name is Prince'), I found that I'd dug up at least 100 onions (it's okay, I meant to) and laid them out in the shed to dry, weeded where they'd been and popped in all 50 beetroot seedlings.

I also found that my brain was so busy dealing with the additional stimulus of the music that I was not paying attention to the fact that, all that time, I'd been kneeling in a red ant nest. A nest now full of very angry red ants. Because I was busily demolishing their home. Which is understandable. The stings, when they happen, feel like you've lent against the end of a bit of sharp dry grass. Obviously I felt them but they felt like I'd lent against the end of a bit of sharp dry grass. It wasn't until I bothered to look down that I saw my kneeling pad had a handful of very smug looking red ants scuttling across it and back into the grass that I realised it wasn't dry grass. Bugger.

Ant 'bites' aren't actually bites at all. Black ants wee a little bit of formic acid onto your skin which stings a bit but that's all. Red ants have a modified ovipositor (a tube through which eggs are laid) which presumably resembles a hypodermic syringe which they jab you with and inject you with formic acid. At first you don't see anything so I didn't know how many times I'd been bitten but, having been bitten several times over the months I've had the allotment, I knew they would take 12 hours or so to emerge.

And so it came to pass - I could feel the itching starting in bed this morning and when I went to put on some insect bite cream, I could definitely see the six red lumps. The itching will become worse when I get hot, so nighttime is always tricky - it's not that easy to sleep with one leg on top of the covers. The lumps will get smaller and go down but will become dark red and eventually leave a sort of darker skin-coloured stain will can take months to finally vanish.

I may entertain you with further pictures of the Evolution of the Lumps but take this posting as a warning - be careful around red ants and brush them off you as soon as you see one!

Monsoon - just like last year!

2009-07-08T13:05:00.009+01:00

So yesterday in the south of England we had the most enormous downpour of rain, with a real, proper, old-fashioned thunderstorm (the kind that frightens the pets and small children). It even flooded London underground stations. An absolutely enormous amount of water fell, very quickly, out of the sky - it was something to behold. Dead Biblical, it was.

This morning I wondered what had been happening this time last year down at the allotment (by way of comparing how things are going this year) and, interestingly, we'd also had a massive downpour of rain, on 9 July 2008, so almost exactly a year to the day.

Anyway, yesterday I'd managed to find a gap in the clouds to shoot off down to the plopment to pick some lettuce and see what's what. I was dismayed to discover that my white netted brassica cage had collapsed in the middle but extremely annoyed, upon closer inspection, to discover unmistakable muddy fox footprints right on the top of the mesh, smack bang in the middle of the broken bamboo poles and crushed plants! Little Sods. And that's the thanks I get for treating the foxes suffering from sarcoptic mange - they've just taken a running jump and landed in the middle of the netting!!

Took me a while to reconstruct the thing and replace the broken bamboo poles by which time the heavens had opened again and I had to retreat to the shed for about 15 minutes while the deluge passed. Hopefully I may only have lost a handful of plants - most of the others have been flattened but the stems are still viable. I might get the plants growing along the ground rather than up, but at least they're still going.

We are now actively eating the lettuce, mange tout and I've just picked my first harvest of climbing french beans. I've also started digging up the new potatoes and it won't be terribly long before the onions have to be dealt with. My strawberries have now finished and I think I've had all the blueberries I'm going to get this year but it was all a good start.

Time for pictures then:

General view down the length of the plot, from the shed. Things are starting to grow, thanks to the recent sultry heat followed by lots of rain.

The repaired Fox Trampoline. Buggers.

The Lettuce Hedge. The Little Gems are bulking up quite nicely although I don't know (not having grown them before) how long they take to develop a heart, but I'm quite happy to let them take as long as they need. We're already eating the lime green Salad Bowl and the red Lollo Rossa, plus there's more elsewhere in the plot and some still in the plastic-house at home so it's not like we'll go without while waiting for the Little Gems to do their thang...

This is the (3 x) squash and (5 x) courgette (zucchini) patch. We've already had two small courgettes which, I suspect, is just the start. I'm aware that you probably only need 2 courgette plants to feed a family of four for the summer - there's only two of us and I've got 5 plants! Uh-oh....

Behold, the Butternut Squash, Crystal Lemon Cucumber and, er, Ordinary Cucumber wigwams. The two plants nearest the camera (one of which has a yellow flower on it) are my Butternut Squash plants. I bought these as large seedlings for £1.25 each from the Chiddingfold Horticultural Society's stall at Chiddingfold Festival on 14 June this year (I also had a stall) as the free seeds I'd got from the BBC's Dig In campaign had spectacularly failed to germinate, and they've settled in nicely. I've not grown these before so am going to have to find out what to do with them later on (assuming they develop fruits, that is!). Behind them is a single Crystal Lemon Cucumber plant (although there's another in the plastic-house at home which is just waiting to be planted out - keep forgetting to take it with me though...) then the wigwam behind that has four cucumber plants of either Telegraph or Marketmore (I planted both varieties). These are now growing strongly and need to be tied to the poles on a regular basis or else they sprawl across the ground.

The Sweetcorn are coming along although the one in the bottom right of the picture is having a tremendous sulk and doesn't want to play with the others. There's quite a large variation in the size of the Sweetcorn plants so far - I have absolutely no idea why this should be as they were all treated the same, as was the soil they've been planted into. Oh well, as long as I get some cobs this year I'll be happy.

Last year I was both astonished and thrilled at the sheer quantity of Climbing French Beans that were produced from about 20 plants that I'm wondering if it's too much to hope for a repeat performance this year. This is how they look at present - two wigwams of four poles each, with at least three plants around the base of each pole, so that's somewhere in the region of 24 plants (although there may be a few more) in total. We've already eaten a decent sized portion of beans so fingers crossed!

The onions and garlic are starting to yellow which means they're nearly done. Some of them have got pretty large too. Hopefully this last spell of wet weather will cause them to swell up even more before they topple over. And then I've got to decide how I'm going to dry and store 400 bulbs.

The two rows of Resistafly Carrot I sowed in the spring seem to be surviving as well. I'm persevering with growing carrots because homegrown ones taste incredible. Last year's ones were multi-limbed and tunnelled so I had to throw most of them away but what I did manage to salvage and eat was a complete revelation.

I think that's enough for now - just a quick catch up really.

Stand By Your Beds!

2009-06-23T10:20:00.012+01:00

Tonight is the annual allotment inspection. The committee processes around all the allotments they administer in Farncombe and decide whether you're doing well enough to be allowed to continue to next year. I feel a bit ambivalent about this - on the one hand it does ensure that only those people who take growing veggies seriously get to do so and it ensures the site is kept looking nice (no vast beds of enormously tall weeds or plots full of rusting metal) but, on the other, it does feel a bit like being back at school, where some stranger is judging what you do and how you go about it. You have little option but comply to their requirements. Having said that, though, the requirements are not that onerous, just keep the grass weeds down, edges and paths mown and ensure that a minimum of 50% of your plot is cultivated.

So yesterday I popped down just to ensure the edges of the beds were trimmed and the longest of the grasses were cut down but I'm quietly confident the plot will pass muster.

Things have been growing apace since the last pictures and, I'm delighted to say, out of all the seedlings/plantlets I've put in over the last month or so, I've only lost one lettuce, so that's not bad at all. Everything is now in except for some successional lettuce seedlings and another 8 Climbing French Bean seedlings which will go in once big enough. I'm still sowing Carrots though. Oh, and I did have to pull up all the Broad Bean plants (so, actually, that probably does count as a loss, a big one too - oh well...) but have used the space where they were to sow carrots and plant beetroot and chard seedlings.

Current overall view of the plot - veggie section nearest camera, fruit bed further away to left of frame

Courgettes and Pattypan Squash bottom to mid right; Butternut Squash and Cucumbers round wigwam; Sweetcorn bottom to mid left; Dwarf Yellow French Beans mid top; Mange Tout and Climbing French Beans round wigwams on far left

Mange Tout & Climbing French Bean wigwams on right. Next to it, going up the picture, is where the Broad Beans were. It now contains - from the left hand edge in - a row of Chard, Lettuce & Rocket, Carrots and Beetroot. Clicky for biggy.

Finally managed to weed the onion and garlic bed - there are about 350 onions and 50 garlics in here!

The lettuce hedge is coming along.

I'm going to start harvesting Salad Bowl leaves (the bright green ones) this week - it's a 'cut and come again' variety so you only use the leaves you want. The red Lollo Rossa are a bit behind, and, this year, I'm also growing Little Gem (the darker green, more upright ones in the pic) which is a cos-type lettuce, meaning you harvest the whole thing in one go.

The potatoes are doing fine.

The smaller row on the left of the picture are my Earlies and should be ready for harvesting in 2-3 weeks' time. The taller row on the right are my Desirees which are a main crop. You can't really tell from the picture but the row was more or less equally split between those planted on ground that had been manured in the spring, and those that hadn't. I think there's definitely better, healthier looking plants on the manured half of the row which is nearest the camera. It'll be interesting to see the difference in the size of the spuds themselves.

As far as the fruit bed is concerned, so far, as of today, I have picked a total of 2658g of strawberries (= 5lbs 13oz). Sainsbury's are currently selling organic strawberries at £9.97 a kilo, so multiply that by 2.658 = £26.50!

The raspberries are all autumn fruiting varieties and, as they were only planted last autum, much like the blackcurrants and gooseberries, they only start fruiting in the second year so I have to wait until next year to get the benefit of these. But the Blueberries are coming along and are starting to turn blue:

Blueberries turning blue

Again, I don't expect a large crop this year (frankly, I'll be lucky to get a punnet's worth) but I'm expecting good things next year, especially after the pampering the 3 bushes have had and will continue to get!

So, it all looks okay, doesn't it? Fingers crossed for tonight and I'll post an update later.

So where's this summer, then, eh?

2009-06-10T09:48:00.030+01:00

It's the 10th of June 2009 and the weatherpeople predicted a hot summer for us, better than the previous two years. I'm looking out of the window and it's grey and cold and raining. Oh well, 'twas ever thus, I 'spose. Still miserable though.

I have been down to the allotment quite a lot lately but keep forgetting to take the camera. Nearly forgot yesterday as well but remembered at the last second so here's an update of what's happening. Please bear in mind that the weeds and I are in a battle but the situation's not really as bad as the pictures make it look - honest!

First off, where I grew the chillies and herbs last year - in a small bed right in front of the shed - I am now growing cottage garden plants specifically for the bees. There are two small Lavender hedges which are blooming nicely, three Foxgloves (only 2 of which have flowered) and I've recently put in an Aster, a Sedum, a dark maroon double Aquilegia and a Potentilla. The two different kinds of Sorrel that were there had overrun the bed so I dug them up completely (they're members of the Dock family and are just as invasive, plus we weren't eating them). The Garlic Chives that were also there I dug up and have brought home to put in a pot in the garden. I figured it was more sensible to have the herbs nearer the kitchen rather than a 10 minute walk away, so I also now have coriander, lemon thyme and basil growing in pots at home.

Because the outdoor tomatoes were hit by blight last year I've decided to keep them in the plastic-
house this year and see if it makes any difference. I'm also growing tomatoes from seeds that I collected from a small vine-type called Vittoria which I particularly like from Sainsburys. No idea if they're 'special' in any way, like they have to be grown in a specific environment or they're sterile or something, but I did look for the seeds on the intertubes and couldn't find them, so this is a bit of an experiment. I just scooped some out of a tomato, spread them on a piece of kitchen paper and let them dry for a day or so before tearing off the bits of paper and planting them direct in pots. It's worked a treat so far and we'll just have to see if any fruits develop. Also I'm growing chillies and red peppers in the plastic-house this year as well. The red peppers didn't really work outside last year and I didn't grow chillies at all even though I use crushed dried ones in cooking all the time. The chilllies and the herbs (basil and organo specifically) I will dry and crush. It'll be interesting to see how much I can get from a few plants because dried herbs in glass jars cost a fortune in the supermarkets.

So, then, this is now the view from the shed looking down the allotment. As you can see, there's been some progress.

At the bottom of the picture you can see the two rows of potatoes (and their associated weeds!) which are looking very healthy indeed. I earthed them up twice and left it at that. It probably won't be too long before we'll start digging up the first earlies. I think, next year, I'll try International Kidney which is the godawful retail name for Jersey Royal new potatoes. Presumably, only those potatoes actually grown on Jersey can be called Jersey Royals (it's that EU law thing), so even though the seed potatoes are Jersey Royals, because you're not growing them on Jersey, they have to be called something else, hence International Kidney.

Anyway, in a bit more detail then, for those that can be bothered ploughing through my drivel, this is the beginning of the squash and courgette patch. The top right of the picture is the first of my bog-standard ordinary green courgette plants to go in (there are another 3 or so in the plastic-house, not quite big enough yet). The other three are the 'Summer Squash Early White Bush Scallop', or pattypan squash as they're known in America, I believe. There's a picture of them on my post below of 15 May 2009.

This is the Sweetcorn patch. I'm growing the same variety (in fact, from the same packet of seeds) as last year, 'Applause'. They're a bit wee at the moment which is a little bemusing. In fact quite a few of my seedlings are a bit 'behind' everyone else's even though I sowed them at the right time. Hopefully they'll all catch up over the next few months. There are, I think, 13 sweetcorn plants which will give us far more cobs than we actually need - I'll try and get my act together this year and cook, strip and freeze some cobs.

Towards the top of the picture, you can make out the 7 Dwarf Yellow French Beans 'Rocquencourt' (again, there's a picture on the 15 May post below). Germination of these was a bit patchy so I've got some more sown in the plastic-house to augment these when they get bigger.

This is the Mange Tout Wigwam. There is a mixture of shop bought and home sown plants here. The germination rate of the seeds I did myself was atrocious, as low as 25%, so when I saw some healthy looking plants for sale at a local B&Q, I thought I might as well get them and add them to the few I've managed to grow. Hopefully now there'll be some sugar snap peas later in the year.

I find it goes against the grain with me to buy ready growing seedlings/plants from the garden centre. To me, a major part of allomenteering is that you grow the plant yourself from seed. I've had to concede that, sometimes, supplementing your own seedlings with shop bought ones may be the sensible option, especially if the slugs get your seedlings and it's too late to sow a new batch - your only option is to head to the garden centre. But I intend to avoid doing this as much as possible.

Next to the Mange Tout wigwam are the two Climbing French Bean wigwams. This is the Cobra variety that did so unbelievably well for me last year. Fingers crossed I get a bumper crop again this year.

The weird white structure beyond the bean wigwams is this year's attempt at a brassica cage although, to be honest, it looks a bit more like a Tate Modern installation. I got so unbelievably pissed off last year with constantly picking cabbage white caterpillers off the broccoli, sprouts and cabbage that this year I've invested in some very fine insect mesh in which the holes are so small that apparently they will even keep white fly and carrot fly out. We'll see. However, never being one to get it right first time, I planted out some shop bought organic calabrese plants (see my comments above) that were half price before I put the mesh over and found that it's too narrow to go over all the plants! And by the time I'd got round to putting the mesh out, the Calabrese were very happily established and growing away merrily so I didn't think it was a good idea to dig up and transplant the two that are left, one on each side, that don't fit. I've added some Savoy Cabbage seedlings as well and there are at least 10 sprout plants and half a dozen each of Kale and Red Cabbage to go in as well. As I plant more, I'll unroll the mesh and we'll see how well it works.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Broad Beans have been completely mullah'd by the blackfly. There were 18 plants there that were very happy and, up until about 2 weeks ago, had nary a blackfly upon them. I only grow them for The Husband and, luckily, he was quite understanding that we may not get so much as a single pod on any of the plants this year. Don't think I'll bother again.

I have two rows of Carrots which are doing quite well. Last year I started them off in pots and then transplanted them into the allotment. I now know this is wrong - they don't like it and it causes them to grow many additional limbs. You have to sow the seed directly where you want them to grow. So I did that this year - two rows so far but more to come. I'm trying a variety called 'Resista' which is, as the name suggests, supposed to be resistant to Carrot Fly. I put string lines down and sowed along the line, leaving the string in place. This means I can then identify the seedlings when they come up. (Picture was taken just after The Husband had kindly strimmed the grass down for me, and the bits of grass fly all over the place).

We have the beginnings of this year's lettuce hedge as well. I'm growing Salad Bowl, Lollo Rossa and, this year, Little Gem. Where I've put them this season they get some shade during the day from next door's shed so we'll see if it makes a difference, although they didn't seem to mind being in full sun (what we had of it) last year. I'm doing proper successional planting this year so the biggest ones nearest the camera have been in the ground longest. The smaller ones near the top have only just gone in. There are more coming along in the plastic-house.

Onto the fruit, then. We've had getting on for nearly a kilo of strawberries from the plants, with plenty more to come. The birds don't seem to bother with the soft fruit, which is a blessing because it means I don't have to net it off. I'm growing a couple of varieties of strawberries this year, Elsanta and Aromel, and now we're just waiting on the Blueberries, which are swelling up beautifully. I have pampered them somewhat - they each live in their own little bed of ericaceous compost, get fed with azalea/rhododendron feed and only watered with rain water. The berries are getting large but not turning blue yet, hopefully that'll happen as the summer progresses.

The raspberry canes are establishing themselves so we won't get much (if any) fruit from them this year. The raspberries that I grew last year (and then moved to their new location in the fruit patch) have come through again (you can see them near the top of the lettuce picture). Obviously I wasn't thorough enough when digging them out and I hadn't appreciated that they are as invasive as brambles. Oh well. The Husband persuaded me to leave them there but I think I may be storing up trouble for myself in future years. I've also discovered rogue potato plants growing where I'd missed digging them up last year. Must ensure I get them all this year otherwise I'll eventually end up with an entire plot full of potatoes!

The blackcurrant bushes have established nicely, as you can see from the picture. The goose- berries have also. We have to wait until next year to get fruit from either of these plants but that's okay. Between the blackcurrants and the black plastic are the raspberries. The black plastic is going to stay there now until next year, hopefully it will kill off the grass underneath it so I can start cultivating a bit more land.

So, that's about it for now. I'll do another update later on in the season when things are looking really good, and I'll try and remember to weigh everything I harvest this year and do a price comparison as I think it'll be interesting (if a little nerdy....)

First Strawberries of the year!

2009-05-30T14:35:00.001+01:00

Yay for the first strawberries of the season!! Okay, there's only 8 but it's a start...

Price of supermarket bought organic vegetables

2009-05-19T18:49:00.005+01:00

On 20 October 2008, I was in my local Sainsbury's and decided to write down how much they were charging per kilo for some of the veggies that I was growing at the allotment. I grow my veggies as organically as possible and so decided that the price of the organic versions was the one I should go for as that would be the nearest in quality to what I would be producing.

I've had this scrappy piece of paper kicking around the kitchen since then as I've always meant to post the figures on this blog but just never got round to it.

Well, today's the day! I know we're now seven months down the line and the current prices of the vegetables listed probably bear no relation to what they are now but if you're at all interested, you can do what I'm going to do come harvest time and weigh what you've picked and work out how much it would have cost if they'd been bought from the supermarket.

Actually I'll probably do this again nearer the time and write a fuller list (as there's only six types here) so, in reality, this is all a complete waste of both your and my time, but we're both just going to have to suck it up because I'm writing the list anyway -

Remember, the price is per kilo and it's the top of the range organic stuff from Sainsbury's:

Purple Sprouting Broccoli - £9.95
Brussels Sprouts - £1.95
Red Cabbage - 77p
Cucumber - £4.33
Parsnips - £3.19
Carrots - £4.22

Isn't that astonishing? The price of the purple sprouting broccoli is frankly criminal! And why is red cabbage so cheap by comparison?

Anyway, I'll do this again later in the year, but at least I can now throw this manky piece of paper away...

Welcome to the new plastic-house

2009-05-15T16:56:00.018+01:00

A few days ago I was wandering around eBay (as you do) when I thought I'd visit some of the seller's I have saved that I've not been to for a while. One of these is Premier Seeds Direct. They're fully registered and inspected by DEFRA so you can be assured of the quality of their seeds, and they do some fabulous and unusual varieties. Prices are very reasonable too - everything is 99p a packet plus postage but if you buy several packets, you only pay one lot of postage and everything arrives in a couple of days. I can highly recommend their site and suggest that you head off there for a wander round yourself.

I got five packets of seeds, a couple of which, no doubt, I could have got from my local Homebase but as I was already loading up with other seeds I thought I'd bung those in the basket as well. What I got was:

Crystal Lemon Cucumbers - The website says: "An unusual Heirloom variety producing a profusion of apple-shaped fruits, with lemon-coloured skin and lime green flesh, which is very mild, sweet, and never bitter. Best harvested at lemon size. Although outstanding for salads or pickling, chances are you will end up eating most of these delectable nuggets out-of-hand like an apple. This is a vigorous plant which should yield a tremendous crop." I did extremely well with just two Telegraph cucumber plants last year so we'll see how these interesting ones go.

Dwarf Yellow French Beans 'Rocquencourt' -"One of the finest and earliest yellow heirloom French Filets available with a taste that is truly un-comparable. Heavy crops of long thin oval yellow string-less pods with black seeds are produced on sturdy dwarf plants. Can be sown in succession until mid-July as this is one of the most cold tolerant of all French beans." This sounds good, doesn't it? I'll let you know how it goes. I also don't know if the colour remains when cooked or if they turn green, like those purple ones you can get. But I expect I'll find out.

Summer Squash Early White Bush Scallop - "A prolific variety, scallop-edged and flattened, this patty-pan variety is sweet, nutty and white-fleshed. Compact bush-type plant is ideal when space is a factor. Cultivation character and habit as per Courgettes, fruiting all summer if picked regularly. For optimum eating quality, harvest when fruit are a maximum of eight inches in diameter. Use raw in salads and with dips, or steamed, fried and baked. Freezes well. Matures in 50-55 days." Don't these look fab? This is just an experiment really because I've no idea if I'll even like the taste of them but, hey, if I don't give them a go then I'll never know, right?

Little Gem Lettuce - "One of the quickest and earliest varieties to mature. Little Gem produced small compact plants which are packed with a crisp sweet heart and little outside leaf". It'll be a miracle if I can get this to grow properly but I like shop-bought Little Gem so thought it was worth a try.

Broccoli (strictly, Calabrese) 'Waltham 29' - "Excellent compact, 20 inch plants have dark blue/green, solid, medium sized heads, with plenty of side shoots once the main head is harvested. Developed to withstand the coldest of winters. Don't use this variety for spring planting. Best for late summer sowing for autumn to spring harvests." I grew Purple Sprouting Broccoli last year and wasn't exactly bowled over by it. What I want to try this year is 'proper' Broccoli, like what you get in the shops, which is actually Calabrese. I'm hedging my bets with this, though, because I also bought a polystyrene tray of six Calabrese seedlings today that were on special offer, which can go into the allotment shortly.

But then it dawned on me that I didn't really have enough space left in the plastic- house in the garden so decided there was only one thing for it, and that I'd have to just get another one, so welcome, one and all, to the new companion plastic-house (the one on the right of the picture). May the deity of your choice bless her and all who grow in her!

(God, I don't know what's happened with the fonts and the colours and I can't sort it out. Look, just read the words and ignore the rest of it. Hopefully the next post it will be back to normal!!)

Digging In

2009-05-11T13:12:00.017+01:00

The weather is still being unaccountably glorious, and I've been spending my time at the allotment mostly weeding which is, frankly, not that thrilling to do never mind blog about! So be grateful I've spared you from the boredom of reading about yet more couch grass and aching hip bones.

I'm aware that it's been 10 days since my last posting so this is just a brief catch up really. I've decided that the Leeks have been in the ground long enough. Some of them have started to put up flower spikes which makes the centre of the leek weirdly solid when you cut into it. They've sort of been semi-successful. They didn't grow nearly as big as I wanted and have been in the ground almost a year which strikes me as being an unreasonable length of time but, for all their sins, I'm having another go this year and about 30 seedlings are looking long and spindly in the plastic-house. They can stay there for a bit longer yet, I'm in no hurry to plant them out - I've yet to decide where on the allotment they're going to go; the criteria is somewhere possibly not quite so shaded this time, where they can be left in peace for a very long time and where they're not going to interfere with any other planting.

My potatoes have been earthed up once and need to be done again. The row in the picture here are Maris's of some kind or another (Peer or Piper - can't remember which), but I do remember they're second earlies. The main crop, Desiree, are also about an inch or two above ground and should also be earthed up again. I expect I'll get round to it over the next week or so. The Maris's are immediately next to the right hand edge of the black plastic in the picture, and the Desirees are further over to the right, next to the border of the plot. And, yes, I did shove the hoe between the two rows after I took the picture so it's not currently as bad as it looks - promise!

The Broad Beans are doing very well indeed and (touch wood) don't seem to have been attacked by the blackfly yet, although this can only really be a matter of time. I'm growing more of them this year than last year as The Husband really likes them and I don't think I explored their full culinary potential last year.

The 400+ onions and garlic that were planted up on either side of winter are doing pretty well. I have to admit to having been very slack about weeding these guys - the picture shows where I've started doing the weeding at the top end of the rows but then lost the will to live. I intend to go back this afternoon and pick this up where I left off. Onions and garlic really REALLY object to sharing their beds with weeds and will sulkily not grow so well if there are any, so it's genuinely in my best interest to pull my finger (and the weeds) out. I'll have no-one to blame if I end up with nothing bigger than a spring onion if I don't.

The fruit patch is coming along nicely and I've been expanding it sideways (this just involves clearing more ground really, and is not that exciting to see so there's no pics). Not sure what I'm going to put in the newly cleared ground but it's always good to have some space. I fear that at least 4 of my raspberry canes haven't taken, which is a bit of a shame, and they'll have to replaced this autumn. The 46 strawberry plants have all got flowers on them so fingers crossed for a good crop this year. I've been pampering the Blueberries - not only are they each sitting in a pocket of ericaceous compost but they've also been fed with Azalea feed and are only watered with rainwater (tap water is too acidic - or is it alkali? can't remember). They've all got flowers on them but the early fruiting bush has the most - see?

What else? Oh yes, it was my birthday last month and some very good friends gave me an Apricot tree, which was lovely of them. Strictly speaking I'm not allowed to put full-size trees - or trees that will grow full-size - on the allotment, but I've got nowhere else to put this (I literally don't have the room in my garden at home). So I've decided to sneak this in, between the cherry tree and the fence at the end of the plot, and try and keep it pruned a bit so it doesn't get too large. I planted it yesterday and was a bit concerned to notice that, upon extracting it from its pot, it barely had any roots at all. I stuck it in the ground with some Growmore fertiliser anyway, and we'll just hope for the best. If it takes and starts to put out any leaves - at the moment it just looks like a bare stick - then I'll post some pictures.

I also applied for and received my free seeds from the BBC's Dig In campaign that they're currently running. Over a million packets of seeds were made available on a first-come first-served basis if you applied online or happened to be somewhere where the Dig In van was. In the envelope you get a packet each of Lollo Rossa lettuce, Butternut Squash, Gardener's Delight Tomatoes, Boltardy beetroot and Early Nantes carrots. I'm currently already growing Lollo Rossa lettuce and Boltardy beetroot, tomatoes won't work for me unless I have a greenhouse (which I don't) and, anyway, I'm experimenting with Vittoria ones, I grew Early Nantes carrots last year and they turned into comedy vegetables AND were eaten to death by carrot fly; for that reason this year I'm having a go with a variety called Resista which are meant to be resistant to carrot fly. So, in all honesty, I'm just having a go with the Butternut Squash seeds, to see what happens. Still, they were free - I may plant them up and give them away to friends, who knows?

The swifts have returned!

2009-05-01T09:37:00.003+01:00

I was pegging out the washing this morning (it's the only domestic chore I like doing) and checking on the vegetable seedlings in the plastic-house, enjoying the feeling of the sun on my back, birds singing away when I suddenly heard a familiar (and much-missed) sound - 'squee squee' - that can mean only one thing: the swifts have returned. Gazing up into the achingly blue sky I spotted them, two dark, thin crescent shapes, weaving around each other. As I watched, another joined them, then another until there were six in all. I like to think they must have arrived overnight, finally completing the 5,500 mile journey from South Africa that they endure every year, and they're gathering together to have a quick gossip before getting on with the important business of finding a mate and somewhere to nest. The sadness is that they're only here for 12 weeks to raise their young, and then they're off again and the skies are just that much quieter.

Every year I watch out for the return of the swifts - summer can't begin without them. Last year they arrived on 3 May so they're 2 days earlier this year. They always give the impression of having so much fun - they're the fastest flying birds on the planet and I just adore that 'whoosh' you get when they swoop low overhead, squealing as they go.

The allotment site is surrounded by 1930s houses and seems to be quite popular as nesting sites for the swifts. Last year I can remember standing up and having to duck as a gang of swifts did a very low (and very quick) flypast just over me!

How to avoid Rickets

2009-04-21T23:00:00.016+01:00

Is the weather just as gorgeous where you are at the moment? This time last year it was bucketing down with rain but this year, this year I've already got tan lines! Admittedly this has caught me out and I can't find my sunscreen so I'm having to play melanoma roulette until I get some more. But isn't the sunshine great?

The last few weeks have mostly been spent generally doing the weeding and covering with black plastic in readiness for the transplant of seedlings from the plastic-house. There's still more to be done but a fair bit's covered now. I also managed to inveigle The Husband to come along and do more strimming and a spot of digging - plus I thought he was living too much of a troglodytic teenage boy lifestyle, stuck within four walls, staring at a computer screen, and was getting deprived of Vitamin D. So he needed to get out into the sunshine before he developed rickets.

Here, then, is proof that The Husband does occasionally go out of the house in the hours of daylight. Actually he's doing a totally fabulous job of strimming and now the allotment looks properly loved and cared for.

Other stuff I've done this week is to construct a bamboo wigwam with hairy string in between and around the poles for my sweet peas to grow up. I've not grown these from seed but bought some trays of wee seedlings to grow on and then plant out, all in the same colour, dark purple. They were quite pot-bound by the time I planted them out, ripping them apart to spread them around evenly, so we'll see if they survive such brutal treatment. I've never grown them before so it's all an experiment really.

The sweet pea wigwam is in the fruit area of the allotment (is there a proper name for that? I mean, everyone knows what an 'orchard' is, but is there an equivalent name for where you grow your fruit bushes and plants?)

We've now got 45 strawberry plants in the allotment (and about another 20 in a couple of tubs at home), and they've started flowering already which is great, because that's where the berries come from! Yay!

Also the gooseberries are doing beautifully - there are two yellow types (which seem to be growing upright) and one red kind (which is more sort of horizontal). There are three blackcurrant bushes which are also happy. I pruned them hard in March and plunged the offcuts into a couple of pots and they've all taken which means there will be an extra 8 plants next year!

Gooseberries

Blackcurrants

So there we are then. Next post I'll have an update of what's going on in the plastic-house.

Spuds Are Go!

2009-04-01T19:01:00.005+01:00

The weather's perked up again and time is relentlessly moving on, flowers are bursting open and birds are shouting from every decent vantage point. If you're not a gardener or veg grower you may not be aware but March and April are quite possibly the busiest months of the year.

I've been popping down to the allotment 2 or 3 times a week for a couple of hours at a time mainly just to do weeding and clear the ground in preparation for The Seedlings That Are To Come. I'm going with the same system I used last year which is to sow seeds in little pots and keep them cosseted and fussed over in the plastic-house at the end of my garden. When they're big enough they'll get transferred to their final places in the allotment. This method ensures I know what is vegetable seedling and what is weed.

What I am doing slightly differently this year is using the inner cardboard tube from finished loo rolls as much as possible rather than little plastic pots. This has involved me demanding increased ejection of bodily waste so that I get enough tubes for my purposes. The Husband is being remarkably tolerant of my cries of "poo more frequently!" since, as he retorts, the only possible retort to that is, "well, feed me more then", he retorted. And he's never been one to turn down an extra helping of tuck. As he says, he's just one man, trying to do his bit for the planet.

My first early spuds have been quietly chitting away in the downstairs loo (that's 'chitting' not...no, never mind). Gardening lore states that your spuds should go into the ground at Easter but it truly hadn't dawned on me until I read it on the allotments forum I frequent that Easter is a moveable feast so last year the spuds went into the ground at the endish of April because that's when Easter was last year. This year it falls on the weekend from 10 to 13 April which is the weekend after next, so, really, spuds should go in any time now.

As this is the single hardest job on the allotment, I asked The Husband if he would come along and help me dig two long trenches across the width of the plot for sticking the spuds into. If I'd done this myself it would have probably taken a good couple of hours spread over two days to do it but, with his help, we dug the trenches and bunged in the spuds in half the time! Yay!

So that was all that got done today but, fear not, things are coming along apace in the plastic-house. Regard the leeks and sprouts seedlings in their new loo roll homes.

And as I'm typing this I'm also watching live footage of the ridiculous protests in London against the G20 summit. I truly can't abide these people - while there may be a small kernel of folks for whom a protest like this is meaningful and who want to make a statement about climate change or Palestine or CND or whatever, for all the others it's just an excuse for causing trouble. And now they're starting fires outside the Bank of England - well, that's going to do wonders for their carbon footprints isn't it? I can't help wondering how many of the so-called Climate Change protestors actually walked to the venue, and how many took a car or a bus or a train or even a plane. When I see these tossers on the box I really can't help being reminded of Rik Mayall's portrayal of 'radical student' Richey Rich in the Young Ones - middle class kids trying to be 'hard 'n' street 'n' cool'. I really don't think smashing the windows of a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland while being egged on by the paparazzi is really going to help many polar bears now, is it? At least I'm trying to grow my own food - what are they doing? /rant mode off/

Just call me 'Ripley', okay?

2009-03-17T11:27:00.005Z

The weather this week has, so far, been just lovely - sunny and quite warm too, up to 17 degrees centigrade/62 degrees fahrenheit so on Sunday The Husband and I headed off to the plopment to christen the strimmer!!

To be honest I was a little afeared at first - it has an outboard motor-type thing on the end of it and I really didn't want to look foolish and like a weedy girl by failing to get it started, so persuaded The Husband that, being all manly 'n' that, he should have a go first. It took some pulling to get the thing going but once it did - vroom, vroom! And also loud! I felt a bit bad about the noise especially as the site was teeming with folks, some of them brand new this year, all of whom had decided to bring their kids along. It may be my natural paranoia but I could swear some of them gave us the stink-eye but to hell with them - they'll soon learn that the site secretary is extremely strict about grass being kept cut, so edges and pathways have to be Brazilianed to within a inch (or preferably less) of their lives and short of getting a petrol driven (or worse, bicep-driven) lawnmower, or garden shears that will make you want to stab out your eyes after about five minutes, the only way to comply with this diktat is to get a petrol strimmer.

The petrol tank wasn't really big enough for this first use as there was a LOT of grass to get through, especially at the top end which is currently uncultivated, but at least we got to have a go. The Husband did around the shed and the compost bins and then persuaded me to use it. I was a bit reluctant at first but, once on, the resemblance between me and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens was absolutely unmistakeable - watch out, alien weeds, I'm a-comin' for ya. Cut grass was flying about and I was off! At least until the petrol ran out, but I'll Be Back...

Here are some pics then:

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to the plopment we go.....

2009-02-22T10:49:00.010Z

Yesterday (Saturday 21 Feb), the weather was gorgeous. 12 degrees, Blue sky, tons of sunshine (enough, I reckon, to give a touch of sunburn - no kidding!), dry, so I decided that it was about time I did some more plot clearance as it's getting perilously close to sowing time. Mind you, having said that, I tend to keep my seedlings safe and toasty in the plastic-house in my garden at home until they're large enough to transfer to the plopment so I do have a bit of lee-way.

The site was pretty busy, about a quarter of the plots had someone working on them, all clearing and raking and generally enjoying the sunshine.

I decided it was high time the stumps of the red cabbages and all the Brussel Sprouts should come out, as well as the totally useless Winter Spinach that we hadn't eaten any of and which were now just withered stalks (won't bother with that again). So stuff was dug up and discarded and weeding done along the way. Weeding is, this year, so much easier than last year - seemingly at the minute it's just forget-me-not, some other stuff I don't recognise but which has shallow roots and some rogue couch grass. The soil is loose and not much more than damp so removal is really easy. I do, though, have virgin ground at the top end of the plot that needs digging over and that'll be hard work but I'll get round to it eventually.

I decided to leave in the Purple Sprouting Broccoli as it's still being cropped, and the Savoy Cabbages, although terribly wee, are still trying their hardest so they can remain. Also the Kale still looks good. But everything else has come out, including the cabbage plants that the pigeons got to and some overwintering red cabbage seedlings that haven't grown at all.

The cleared spaces were then scattered with Growmore and raked flattish. So that was that.

I'd taken my camera with me but decided that I wasn't going to take boring old standard photos of what the plants looked like. So I wandered around and got interesting and arty instead. I'm not going to tell you what any of these are - some are obvious, some you'll have to guess (don't forget - clicky for biggy):

Is winter over yet?

2009-02-12T10:48:00.004Z

I'm looking out my jewellery workshop window and seeing a beautiful day - blue sky, sunshine, a slight haze on the horizon, hardly any clouds - but the ground is still frozen. Seems the cold weather is not yet over. The snow took over a week to melt completely although I can still see a small pile between the bins on the pavement over the road. This means that it's still too cold to do decent work at the allotment today.

However I did manage to get some seed potatoes yesterday from Secrett's Garden Centre in Milford. I've decided to grow spuds again this year and have chosen Maris Peer as Second Earlies and Desirees as Maincrop. I've made a list month-by-month of what I can start sowing and things really kick off next month, March. I've also scanned in the plot plan for this coming season as you can see. The entire plot has still not been totally dug over and there's uncultivated land at the top of the plot which currently has fruit on it. I may fill in the gaps at the top with more french beans, and I'll probably grow lettuce in the gaps between the rows. I've decided to grow more herbs at home (where they're closer to the kitchen) rather than at the plopment.

The plan's mostly self-explanatory but the three oddly-shaped circles (I couldn't get them even) labelled 'BB' are blueberry bushes. At the bottom, along from the shed there are unlabelled shapes. These are; circle nearest the shed = dalek compost bin; square = horse poo corrall; circle on the far right = weed pile. Don't forget you can click on all the pictures to make them bigger:

Blimey - they weren't kidding!

2009-02-02T09:49:00.004Z

Snow storms from Russia were predicted - and snow storms from Russia is what happened! I am so pleased I did go to the allotment a couple of days ago, because (as you can see from the pictures - which are of my garden, incidentally) everything is under at least a foot of snow and there's apparently more on the way this afternoon!

Needless to say everything in this country's ground to a halt - trains and flights cancelled, roads untreated. But it is very pretty, nonetheless! This is the largest snowfall the south of England has had since 1991 (which I remember).

The Husband ventured out to the nearest cornershop to pick up milk and bread (no chance of doing a big shop in Sainsburys today) and said there was a real fun atmosphere out on the streets - kids building snowmen and having snowball fights, being pulled around on toboggans. The cats are thoroughly bemused (the snow's deeper than they are and they won't venture out) - we're trying to reintroduce them to a litter tray but they're seriously unimpressed with everything.

I managed to get out to clear the snow from the bird feeders - as you can see, they were waiting for me.

Anyway, I'm off to put the kettle on, so keep warm everyone and don't forget to check on your elderly neighbours.

The Comedy Vegetable Parade!!!

2009-01-31T15:58:00.008Z

I've been meaning to get down to the plopment for the last few days but always managed to talk myself out of it, knowwhaddimean? Anyway, decided I wanted to have red cabbage and apple as a side dish for Sunday lunch which meant that, quite reasonably, I had to go the allotment to pick some! Plus (rather excitingly - and alarmingly - but excitingly) snow is predicted across the UK within the next few days so if I wanted to start clearing some of the plot before spring, I pretty much had to go NOW.

So now that our Saturday and Sunday mornings are no longer in thrall to the tyranny of the weekend papers, I decided to head off down the road - and I'm jolly glad I did. Even as I write this, as the afternoon is sliding into early evening, it's still beautiful out there - blue skies with that hazy pink at the horizon.

I decided that it was time the leggy carrots and parsnips gave up their comfy beds as the space is going to be needed for something else, so out they came.

Honest to God - will you just LOOK at these freaks of nature? Far too many legs and carrot fly tunnels. The parsnips have a woody core as well. Oh well, I decided the parsnips can go into the dalek bin to make next year's compost but the carrots can be washed and then be fed to some grateful horses that I know.

I now know why they grew so many limbs. Turns out it's not such a good idea to grow them each in an individual pot then transplant the seedlings into their final place when they're big enough. For some reason they just don't like it and start sprouting new arms and legs like crazy. What I should have done was just plant the seeds where they were going to grow and then thin them out accordingly. This I will do in the coming growing season and see if it works. If it doesn't then I'm not going to bother again, especially as carrots are so cheap in the shops. I realise, for an allotmenteer, that this is almost heresy but I'm nothing if not realistic. Of course, having said all this, the taste of homegrown carrots is really quite astonishing so it is worth pursuing. Parsnips, though, hmmm. Not sure. We don't eat anything like as many of them as we do carrots, but perhaps I'll give them one more go...

One thing I did finally manage to get round to recently was drawing the plan for next season - I can't seem to insert a word document here so, sorry, no picture of it. But there's rotation!! And I'm putting this year's brassicas where last year's sweetcorn was so well-rotted horse manure was applied. This is the first time I've added the manure that I collected last spring and summer from the stables where I ride, and what lovely stuff it's turned into. I hope it does the trick.

While I was forking about in the poo corral I heard a rustling in the bushes at the other side of the site from me. I stopped to see what it was and saw the most beautiful fox having a sit down and a yawn in the sun. It was about 30-40 feet away from me and didn't seem all that bothered! It moved into some thicker undergrowth to one side and curled up for a sleep. I continued with what I was doing, then decided I would do my best to take a photo. I got as close as I could but didn't want to startle it. My new camera has a really good zoom but I don't have a tripod so please forgive me the dodgy focusing but at least I got a reasonable picture of it's ear and half-opened eyes! You can click on all the pictures to make them bigger.

I only hope that the new Chicken Palace, which is coming along well and now has proper netting (if that's the right word) to keep the predators like lovely Mr/Ms Fox out. I don't know when the little dinosaurs are arriving as I'm not taking part in the project, but I'm looking forward to their arrival all the same.

As these cold winter evenings give such beautiful night skies, I thought I'd finish with a picture that I took last night. I think that's a planet hanging underneath the moon, but can't be sure. Perhaps it's Venus which is usually the brightest planet in the night sky... anyway, enjoy.

More of the same, really....

2009-01-22T15:06:00.006Z

Well, it kinda shames me to say it but, for today's posting, you may as well read the last one on 6 January. It's far too cold and wet to get out to do serious allotmenteering (at least as far as I'm concerned it is). So The Husband and I just popped down there today to check that everything was in one piece and hanging on in there.

First thing I noticed was the berludy pigeons have been ransacking my purple sprouting broccoli big seedlings/ small plantlets that have been overwintering. Now, I suppose I really do only have myself to blame but, for some unknown reason, perhaps I thought the flying rats might just overlook my bountiful juicy brassicas during the coldest, hungriest depths of winter and leave them alone. 'Well, duh...' I hear you all scorn in unison. So, yes, they've been hammered but, to be honest, I'm not really that bothered. I planted these new seedlings before I'd started harvesting the previous crop of PSB and, you know what, I wasn't exactly bowled over by it. I mean, it's nice enough, sure, but I think I really do prefer the big, old-fashioned single-headed green Calabrese (the stuff labelled 'Broccoli' in the supermarkets). The pigeons are welcome to it. Actually, I'll just dig the lot up when I come to clear the plot of the remaining crops in the next few weeks. And at least know that I won't bother with PSB again. Another lesson learned.

What else? All the onions and garlic are fine and look much the same as they did earlier in the month. The Chard has now gone over so will come out of the ground. The broad beans are about an inch high and a couple of inches wide so it looks like they may come good this spring. There are still squid-like carrots and parsnips in the ground which I will excavate and see if anything can be used. The long plastic cloche (it looks like a miniature polytunnel) covering my winter salad leaves had blown over again leaving the plants exposed but they seemed to be fine. The leeks don't look to have grown any bigger, so I think it's time to stop waiting for them to actually do something and start eating them. The red cabbage is looking distinctly sad. All the outer leaves appear to have vanished (probably down some pigeon's gullet) and the burgundy globes of the tightly packed inner leaves definitely look as if they've been hit by frost. I've decided that I'll harvest them this week, salvage what I can of them and turn them into Red Cabbage Ragout (about the only thing you can make with red cabbage - it's yummy and has onions, cinnamon and cooking apples in it too). They look pretty small in the picture, next to the (also pigeon pecked) brussel sprouts and, in all honesty, they are a bit but never mind, although they were small, they did actually grow and I grew them from seed so I'm pretty chuffed all round.

The fruit garden is exactly as it was on 6 January, so we just have to wait until spring really hits us before seeing any changes there I expect.

So, this week I need to actively start thinking about what I'm going to grow this year and where I'm going to put it, rotation-wise. L8rs....

Welcome to 2009

2009-01-06T13:22:00.006Z

I'm trusting we all survived the excesses of Christmas and the New Year and emerged the other side in one piece. As mentioned in my last post of 2008, I can confirm that I did get a Stihl FS38 petrol driven strimmer - it's orange, noisy and very, VERY manly. Trouble is it's just too damn cold out there at the moment to go and use it. I dare say it's powerful enough to cut frozen grass but I'm happy to wait until my feet don't turn into blocks of ice just in order to give the plopment a bit of a haircut.

I tend to get stir crazy if I have to stay indoors for a few days at a time, so decided that today the weather was bright enough (and the green bin in the kitchen needed emptying) for a trip to see how the site was doing. I also wanted to pick the last few meagre brussels sprouts and purple sprouting broccoli.

I also got a BRAND NEW CAMERA!!!! YAY!!!! So this was an also opportunity to play with the settings - The Husband took most of the pictures. D'you like my new hair? Nah, only kidding, it was so cold that I was wearing my Russian (fake) fur hat and even had the Deputy Dawg ear flaps down which left my head toasty warm but somewhat deaf.

Everything's doing fine down there although it's so cold that the water troughs have frozen completely - poor the Water Boatmen that live in there.

Anyway the onions and garlic seem to be thriving. If you recall, in Autumn last year I planted 200 onion sets of both overwintering Japanese and Red varieties, and probably about 50 Garlic cloves. The close up picture shows a few red onions (and even some frost on the ground, just as proof of the general coldness of the day).

The Savoy Cabbages are all coming along but weren't big enough to eat for Christmas Day lunch and, frankly, still aren't big enough to eat even now.

The fruit bushes and canes still just look like sticks stuck in the ground so we don't know yet how they're doing although all three Blueberry bushes have new buds. The cherry tree also seems to be surviving as do the many strawberry plants that went in at the end of last year.

We were only there for about 20 minutes or so before running home to the joys of central heating and a hot cup of tea!

So what have I learned?

2008-12-06T14:32:00.012Z

I expect this will probably be my last post for 2008 as I really don't intend visiting the plopment much more this winter, once every 1-2 weeks is likely, so there won't be anything truly scintillating to tell you until next year, so I'll use this post as a roundup of what I've achieved this year and what I intend to do differently next year.

So, to start, the weather today is absolutely gorgeous - crystal clear heartbreakingly blue skies overhead, the slight smell of woodsmoke, cold enough to see your breath but not freezingly so - and what did we decide to do? That's right, along with most of the population of southern England, we went christmas shopping in Guildford. We were expecting it to be hell-on-wheels but, you know what, it wasn't. Can't really put my finger on why exactly. We decided to get into town early, as close to 9am as possible, even then expecting to see queues of cars trying to get into Sainsbury's car park but we more or less swooped in AND managed to park in The Husband's favourite area of the car park easily. We then gaily threw the diet to the wind and started off with coffee and warm chocolate croissants, enabling me to leave The Husband with a newspaper while I pottered around some nearby shops. 'This is all going far too easily' I thought, 'something's bound to go awry' but, today, Our Shopping Game Was Strong. Ninja warriors had nothing on us this morning - we were in and out of Marks & Spencer, TopShop, House of Fraser, Game and (less excitingly) Sainsburys as fast as a fat kid going for the last sandwich at a birthday party. We were done and home in under 2.5 hours. The rest can all be done online. Hooray!!!

Rather excitingly, I picked up my christmas present that my parents-in-law are going to give me yesterday. You might think that it would be pink, possibly fluffy, most definitely sparkly and you would be wrong. Girl's done got herself a Stihl FS38 Brushcutter! And, look, I even just found a picture of a girly using one (although that's not to say it isn't a desperately manly piece of kit - in case you've got one and you're a bloke and you feel I've just slurred your inherent butchness and manliness...) I think the picture's just to show that it's light and so simple to use that even (*snort*) a woman could do it! Still it made a VERY exciting sound when we fired it up at the store and I suspect I'll have to wrench it out of The Husband's hands if I want to use it myself - he had that definite gleam of "ooh, toy!" in his eye. It's a petrol-driven 2-stroke strimmer that I need to keep the edges and paths of the plopment under control. A cordless electric one just doesn't have enough oomph to be able to deal with allotment strimming so even though it's an expensive item, I had to have one. Thanks in advance, Desmond and Minnie.

So I went down to the plopment today, then, just to check that everything was still where I left it and to take some final pictures for the 2008 blog.

About 2 weeks ago (and I forgot to take pictures), my fruit tree and bushes arrived so The Husband and I spent a couple of hours planting them while the ground was still warm. There was:

1 x	Raspberry Autumn Bliss - 5 Canes
1 x	Cherry Maynard - 2 Year Bush BARE ROOT
1 x	Blueberry Patriot - 1 Litre Container
1 x	Raspberry Glen Prosen - 5 Canes
1 x	Strawberry Aromel Runners (10 plants)

3 x Blackcurrants Wellington XXX
2 x Gooseberry Langley Grange

I also moved the Raspberries that I'd planted out back in May this year as they were now in the wrong place, so I put them with the others.

First, then, I put all the Raspberries and Blackcurrants in two rows. They may be too close together but I'll have to deal with that next year. The Husband has said he'd construct some posts and wire next spring to tie the new growth to.

The cherry tree is a new self fertile dwarf dessert sweet cherry which should not reach any taller than 2 metres in height and requires no pruning. Strictly speaking it's a patio plant and is probably intended to be kept in a pot, but I'm not allowed to grow 'proper' trees at the site so dwarf varieties are the way to go. Picking is in early July so we'll see (a) if it works and (b) if I can get to the cherries before the birds.

The strawberries have now all gone in and don't really look like much in the ground so I've not bothered taking a picture of them. The three different varieties of blueberry are now planted in a row so fingers crossed they'll also work. The gooseberry bushes arrived a little late to plant in the allotment due to the recent very cold weather so I've put them in a large pot in a sunny sheltered place on my patio and they can stay there until next March.

As for everything else, my overwintering onions are doing fabulously - looks like there should be a good crop to come up before I put in the next lot in spring.

All the brassicas are thriving still, the sprouts and purple sprouting broccoli are still producing and the Savoy Cabbages are doing their thang - hopefully we'll have one (plus sprouts) for Christmas Dinner.

I'm also still harvesting Chard and I just love the effect of the sunlight shining through the Ruby Red Chard leaves.

Oh, and I've forgotten to tell you that the allotment site will be having communal chickens for the first time! The site secretary announced in the summer that the site was going to become part of the Community Chicken Project depending on how many people were willing to get involved. The Husband and I seriously thought about it for a very long time - I would so love to keep chickens - but doing anything by committee, with rotas for this and that, never works out. I mean, whose responsibility is it to take the chucks to the vet if/when they become ill? What happens if someone forgets to put them to bed at night and the foxes (and we have a lot of foxes) get them? What happens when they come to the end of their laying life? Does anyone get to eat them? There are just far too many potential problems with far too many people involved so, rather sadly, we decided joining in wasn't an option for us. I'd much rather have my own chickens with no-one else being involved. However this hasn't stopped me being rather excited by their eventual arrival and, to this end, a rather magnificent Chicken Palace is currently being constructed on site! I don't know how many hens are going to be installed but their run and henhouse is taking up the whole of a vacant half plot - you can see how big it's going to be in the picture - the framing will obviously eventually be covered with fox-proof wire/netting/whatever.

So - what have I learned?

Growing vegetables is not that difficult but there are different levels of work needed at different times of the year. Obviously I started the plot this year in February and it was just totally grassed over. Clearing the ground of the ordinary grass, the couch grass, the mare's tail and all the other weeds took a huge amount of hard, dirty, heavy work but I always knew that I would really only have to do this once; after that it's just maintenance, weeding and adding/digging in compost/manure as and when necessary. The first year is hard and more expensive than you can imagine unless you have the time to shop around and get second hand stuff like sheds and greenhouses and manure corrals, etc. I just wanted to get on with it but, as with the clearance, I knew I was only going to fork out ('fork out'! Geddit? Oh, please yourself....) once for all this stuff. The shed has been absolutely vital, not just for somewhere to put tools, etc., but also somewhere to shelter from the rain and to dry out onions too.

What vegetables worked this year?

All the brassicas were a revelation and so easy to grow - they'll definitely be coming back. The lettuce was very successful but I must do more successional sowing. 20 or so Cobra French Bean plants gave me a yield of over 40lbs that I ended up giving away. The Rainbow Chard has been an eye-opener. Potatoes have been very successful as have the onions and the sweetcorn. Broad beans, despite getting blackfly, grew well and The Husband loves them anyway. Basil and Coriander grew like weeds and I'll try drying them next time. Telegraph variety of cucumbers loved the outdoors weather this summer (although they're mostly a greenhouse type) and were juicy and crunchy. These I will all grow again next year.

What was less successful?

Tomatoes were hopeless - all succumbed to blight. Carrots, although extremely flavourful, grew so many extra limbs that preparation took forever. They also got hit by Carrot Fly. However I will try again next year with them as the flavour was so good, but they only get ONE MORE CHANCE. Parsnips had woody centres and, again, resembled octopuses. Sweet red peppers didn't do as well as I had hoped and probably need a greenhouse to be successful. These I will probably (bar the carrots) not grow again next year.

What would I do differently?

Not that much, in hindsight. Obviously there'll be some crop rotation next year and I think I'll grow the climbing French Beans up 3 or 4 teepees of canes dotted around the place rather than in a long line - the winds wreaked havoc with them this year. I'd very much like to save up my pennies next year and get a 6'x8' greenhouse and perhaps try again with the tomatoes in there, plus chillis and red peppers, but we'll have to see. That can always wait again for another time.
Whether I do potatoes again is a question I've not decided yet. Yes, they were very tasty and easy to grow but they do take up quite a lot of room. However, since S gave up the top half of the plopment and I took it over, space isn't quite so much of an issue. Dunno, I'll have to decide later. Also quite how the new fruit area will turn out is another unknown factor. But you'll have to come back next year to read what happens there!

Well, then, many thanks to those who've vicariously travelled with me along this path of discovery - here's to next year!

Happy Winter Solstice and New Year to you all!!!

November? Or July?

2008-11-16T11:10:00.008Z

This weather is seriously messed up. It's the middle of November and I've turned my central heating off! It was over 15 degrees Centigrade outside here yesterday (for those who work on old money or live in the colonies, that's about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), and warm enough inside to have the windows open. We've got buds forming on the Beech tree outside our house before it's even lost all its leaves! It's Madness, I tell you....

Ancient Gardening Wisdom says that you can still plant new stuff into the ground in November because the soil is still just about warm enough for a decent root system to form before the cold really settles in - no kidding?!? This year I could probably plant pineapples outside right now and they'd take! Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration but I'm taking the opportunity anyway to transfer all the rooted strawberry runners that I took off my tubbed-up strawberry plants this summer into the new fruit garden bit up at the allotment. There are 42 plants to go in (so far I've done 21) plus I've got another 10 or so plants of a different variety to be delivered at some point. The picture shows the ones I've put in. They're a bit measly at the moment but I'm hoping they'll fill out next summer.

Actually, thinking about it, I've got quite a lot of fruit bushes and plants on order - I wonder when they'll be delivered? I might have to drop the nurseries an email to find out....

So, as you can see, I popped down to the allotment yesterday just to see what's going on, harvest some sprouts, pick off yet more cabbage white caterpillers (cheeky buggers got one last egg laying session done without me noticing), dig up some more comedy carrots, hoe the onion patch and plant the remaining strawberry runners. Well, I managed everything except planting the runners but I'll do that either today or tomorrow. Time was a bit short yesterday because it was my nephew Riley's 3rd birthday party in the afternoon that we were attending, and I'm a sucker for birthday party catering!

Anyway, just to keep you posted, here's the current sorry state of my allotment (they always look unattractive from now until late spring).

The Savoy Cabbages are coming along a treat! Forming nice hearts albeit a little small just now, I'm sure they'll be scrummy! You can also just see the Kale in this pic as well (top left hand corner) - we've eaten a lot of it but I suspect they're coming to the end of their lives. I must find out if I can pick and freeze Kale in order to store the last of it....

The 200 onion sets that I planted a few weeks ago are growing away merrily - there's a mix of white and red onions, plus quite a lot of garlic too and, thankfully, the birds have left it all alone, which is a relief as I didn't fancy having to replant that lot!

The leeks are coming along although the size is not consistent and they're looking a bit fleabitten but I'm reasonably pleased considering I've never grown them before and they do seem to be a bit temperamental. Fortunately I can't see any signs of rust, so I'm hoping they'll fatten up a bit more before I want to start eating them.

Finally I just wanted to apologise to Paula from Locks Farm for not posting her comments - for some reason I didn't get notification in my email that you'd sent them so only saw them when I logged in today. They've now been posted!

Chard and Onion Tart

2008-10-28T10:34:00.024Z

Swiss/Rainbow Chard is one of those vegetables that you often see growing on allotments. It looks a little like rhubarb and is a useful winter vegetable. (The picture isn't from my allotment I'm sorry to say but mine does look a little bit like this! Picture courtesy of Hollis Gardens)

I'd never seen it sold in any supermarkets so had absolutely no idea what it tasted like. At worst, it could taste like celery which, frankly, is The Devil's Vegetable and best avoided, but hopefully it would be nicer than that. I did some online research and spoke to a few people and the consensus was 'strong spinachy flavour', so I thought, "What the heck, I'll have a go".

It's a very rewarding vegetable to grow, just stick the seed in the ground and away it goes and slugs don't seem to like it very much, which is all to the good! So now, as ever, I need to find a use for it. Off I go again to the same Greenbox Company website where I found my Homity Pie recipe mentioned in an earlier post, and they have a whole bunch of recipes for Chard.

I made this recipe below last week and thought it was just so fabulous that I'd share it with you, but with more pictures than last time, so you can see how to do each stage, and just how easy it is!!! Apologies in advance to any American readers but the quantities are in metric, however there are easy-to-find-online conversion tables available, so here we go. Some of the pics have been taken using flash, some not.

Chard and Onion Tart
Serves 2 (large portions)

3 small onions, finely sliced
A decent handful of Chard leaves
Butter
6oz shortcrust pastry (half wholemeal, half plain flour is good)
Small pot Creme Fraiche/Sour Cream
Grated fresh Parmesan
Black olives
1-2 tbsp fresh chopped Thyme or decent sprinkling dried Mixed herbs
Salt & Pepper

Preheat oven to 200C/Gas Mark 4

Make your pastry:
The maxim to remember when making shortcrust pastry is 'half fat to flour', i.e., 6 oz flour = 3 oz butter. And I've generally found that the size of the tin you're going to use dictates how much pastry to make - "well, dur..." I hear you cry, but if you have a 6 inch diameter tin, 6 oz of pastry will fit, 7 inches = 7 oz, and so on.

I like half wholemeal half plain flour pastry, and I'm using a 6 inch fluted loose-bottomed flan tin. So, in a big bowl, weigh in 3 oz wholemeal flour, 3 oz plain flour (don't bother sifting) and add 3 oz butter.

Mix it together with your fingers, rubbing the butter through the flour with your fingertips so that it eventually resembles breadcrumbs. This can take a little while but is necessary.

Next add a very small amount of water (it's easier to add water if you've not used enough, but you can't really add more flour if you've used too much because then the fat ratio won't be enough) and, again, using your hands, mix it up until it's a dough that leaves the sides of the bowl pretty clean.

Take your flan tin and using a piece of kitchen roll, grease the tin thoroughly. Next, add the pastry to the tin. The thing about wholemeal pastry is that it's incredibly difficult to roll (unlike plain white pastry), so the easiest thing to do is just take little bits and mould it into the tin, pushing it down so it's not too thick. Again, this takes a little time but is very easy to do as the bits of pastry mush into each other very easily without leaving a join. (I know the picture's at a funny angle but I was trying not to get my shadow in it!)

Prick the base with a fork then stick the tin in the oven for about 20 mins so that it can cook through first. This means that you shouldn't get a soggy bottom (and we all know how uncomfortable that can be...) when it gets baked for the second time with the rest of the ingredients in. This is known as 'baking blind'. The sainted Delia Smith recommends also brushing the base of the flan with beaten egg to form a seal - this does work but it's a bit of a faff and isn't really necessary with this recipe. The picture shows the pastry case before being baked.

So, while that's in the oven, you need to prepare your vegetables.

Peel, halve and then very finely slice the onions. In a largish pan (I use a flat-bottomed wok), melt some butter, add the onions and the thyme/dried mixed herbs. Cook this over a low heat so that the onions don't brown and they sweeten up.

Fill a largish saucepan with water and set it to boil. Wash your chard, the separate the fleshy leaves from the stalk by tearing them off. Chop the stalks into smallish pieces, then roughly chop the leaves. These are the chard leaves I used which, yes, I did grow myself, thank you for asking!

And these are the stalks once the leaves have been removed.

In this picture, the stalks have been chopped up (top right of chopping board) and the leaves are in the process of being chopped up.

When the pan of water is boiling, drop in the chopped stalks and boil them for a couple of minutes - this is because they're thicker than the leaves and need cooking first. Then drop in the rest of the chopped leaves and boil for no more than a minute. This is known as 'blanching'.

Drain the chard into a sieve or colander, run cold water over them to stop the cooking, then squeeze as much water out as you can. I use the back of a wooden spoon. You don't want the mixture to be very wet when it goes into the pastry case.

Then add the cooked chard into the onion & herb mixture in the large pan/wok. You may find that the chard has sort of clumped together into lumps, so now's the time to separate it out to get a more cohesive mix. Heat it all together thoroughly and season with a little salt (you shouldn't need much, the parmesan is salty and I use Lurpak Slightly Salted Spreadable Butter in my pastry, but it's up to you) and freshly ground black pepper.

By now the pastry case should have cooked so spread the chard & onion mixture onto the pastry and push down a little bit to make sure it gets into all the edges.

Add the chopped black olives - I used Black Greek Kalamata Olives from a jar but you can use what you like.

Grate fresh Parmesan over the top. Please, people, don't use the ready-grated stuff that smells like socks - treat yourself to a small piece of the real stuff, it's nutty and sweet and just delicious! You can also add it to any recipe that calls for grated cheese as it's so flavourful.

Now you add your creme fraiche/sour cream. The recipe I used actually says, "a few spoonfuls" but I had half a tub to use up so I did go a bit menkle with it. You might even want to cover the entire top which would, frankly, be fabulous if a little rich (although you could use the half fat stuff instead...). Just drop some spoonfuls on and spread it around a bit.

Then put it back in the oven (I'd put it on a baking sheet/tray as well, just in case there's any leakage although, if the mixture's not too wet, this shouldn't happen, but better safe than sorry...) and leave it there for 15 to 20 mins or so. This will basically just heat it through and melt the parmesan, and it looks like this when taken out.

I serve this with a very simple salad of just lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes but it would go brilliantly with a cold rice or pasta salad, or something fruity with couscous. The flavours are fantastic - the chard definitely tastes like spinach but it doesn't shrivel down to the nothing when you cook it and also doesn't leave that weird furry after-effect on your teeth like spinach does. The olives give a deep tang, the onion and herb mix is sweetly oniony and, err, herby(!) and the parmesan makes it all cheesy. The creme fraiche/sour cream cuts through the lot, and if you serve this with lettuce you won't need any mayonnaise!

Enjoy!

Aww, shucks.......

2008-10-22T10:24:00.012+01:00

It's always good to know that someone out there in the real world enjoys reading what you write and I got up this morning to discover that I'd been 'proximaded' by a woman who blogs under the name of PreTzel in Iowa, USA!

Basically the translation more or less says, "This blog invests and believes, the proximity. [meaning, that blogging makes us 'close' -being close through proxy]. They all are charmed with the blogs, where in the majority of its aims are to show the marvels and to do friendship; there are persons who are not interested when we give them a prize, and then they help to cut these bows; do we want that they are cut, or that they propagate? Then let’s try to give more attention to them! So with this prize we must deliver it to 8 bloggers that in turn must make the same thing and put this text.” Isn't that great? Okay, it's just a bit of fun really and gets passed on to other bloggers (a bit like - but more fun than - one of those round robin letters - 'send this letter on within 48 hours or your central heating will start to smell of fish', you know, that sort of thing) but it's nice to be even a little bit appreciated. So thank you very much, PreTzel.

Trouble is, I don't read eight other bloggers (at least not yet) but I'll pass on the award to those that I do read:

First of all, Ali the Frog's Blog - we first met up at www.allotments-uk.com and have since got chatting offline. Ali's always very interesting to read and people come from miles around to admire her scarecrows!

Then there's Omegamom - K and I met first many years ago on another (now defunct) forum called ONNA, and then we actually met face to face in 1999 when The Husband, The Mother and The Stepfather and I went on holiday to Arizona where K happened to live at the time. She's now in Alaska and is a frighteningly smart lady living in a breathtaking landscape. You want to know about American politics and especially about the American view of all the financial shenanigans? She's your gal! Plus she adopted a baby girl from China several years ago so if that tickles your fancy, head on over! And she has chickens! I'll stop using exclamation marks now....

Stringbean Cheryl's blog deserves a mention, although it needs updating more frequently!!!!! (Okay, I lied about the exclamation marks...)

Finally there's one I've just started reading - Locks Park Farm, stories from a small organic farm in Devon. Just check out the photographs *sigh*. This is the life I would like to lead (apart from the slaughter of the farm animals - I don't think I could do that) - perhaps in my next lifetime...

Anyway, that's it for now, I'm off out to sow Aquadulce Broad Beans because the weather is just beautiful right now so I'll leave you with some pictures other than from the allotment for a change:

This is the view of my back garden as it current is - yes, I'm aware there's a small plastic greenhouse right in the middle of the picture, 'mkay?

This was taken last week when I was out riding in the stunning countryside near Dorking, Surrey. I ride out from the Sariah Arabians stables and there are over 6000 acres of forestry commission land surrounding Leith Hill Tower that are threaded through with hundreds of miles of bridlepaths and footpaths and it's a gorgeous place to ride. That's not me, by the way (obviously I'm taking the picture), that's my good friend Annie riding a lovely Anglo-Arab mare called Shalom - you can see the temperature's dropping because you can see Shalom's breath in the picture.

This was also taken, from horseback, last week. We were under the trees where it was dark but there was a gap where we could see the sun shining on the leaves of the beech tree making them golden and orange, with the stunning blue sky behind, and I just had to take the picture!

And, finally, putting on my archaeologist's hat again, a couple of weeks ago The Husband and I decided to have a pootle down to the South Coast for the day and I suggested we visited The Trundle on the way. The Trundle is a Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure that has a Bronze Age burial mound on the top and Iron Age Hillfort earthworks surrounding it, so there's been activity there for thousands of years. It's directly opposite Goodwood Racecourse and the views are indescribably beautiful. This was taken from the top of the hill (you can just see the earthworks cutting through the very bottom left hand corner of the photo), facing (sort of) north west. Don't forget you can click on every picture in this and all previous posts to make them bigger, and I'd recommend it in this picture, which I'm currently using as a screensaver. It's a perfect example of timeless English countryside.

Homity Pie!

2008-10-15T11:16:00.005+01:00

When I was working at the University of Surrey in the last century, I used to really enjoy the meals provided by the vegetarian restaurant. They were very influenced by 'Cranks', a famous vegetarian/wholefood restaurant chain which, more or less, closed down sometime in the 90s (I believe one restaurant is left in the West Country) but they produced some great recipe books. Anyway, I believe the Homity Pie that I used to love at the University is a Cranks recipe and, due to the glut of potatoes I've had from my allotment, I decided to have a go at making it, and this is the result - big success!

Obviously it was a whole pie before I took the picture but it was only after we'd eaten half of it that I wondered if anyone else would be interested in seeing it, and so my rampant egotism took over and demanded that I take a couple of pictures!

Here's the recipe, courtesy of http://colouritgreen.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/homity-pie/

homity pie

1 batch of half wholemeal pastry

2 lbs new potatoes, washed.

2 large onions, halved and sliced

1 wet garlic, chopped

140ml pot of soured cream

2 tbsp of butter

lots of grated cheddar cheese - about 6 oz

Cut the potatoes into cubes and cook in salted water until only just cooked. Drain and set aside. Roll out the pastry and line a greased flan dish, I use an 8" one that is fairly deep. Blind bake in the oven at 160C whilst dealing with the onions. Cook the onions and garlic in the butter gently for about 10 minutes. Now mix the onion, garlic and butter mixture with the potatoes. Then add the soured cream and most of the cheese (leaving some for the top). Pack into the pastry case and then sprinkle with the remaining cheese.

Cook at 160C until browned (30 minutes or so)

It's really simplicity itself and unbelievably yummy! I'd be tempted to cut the potatoes into really quite small cubes, think perhaps slightly larger than dice cubes. This made enough for four substantial meals, which we ate with coleslaw and Moroccan Couscous salad. I should warn you that it's very 'ballasty' though - wholemeal pastry (even if it's only half wholemeal flour) is very dense so the thinner you can get the pastry the better. Don't bother to roll the pastry out because it just falls apart, just grab a handful and push and mould it into the flan tin.

Enjoy!!

My first ever home-grown cabbage

2008-10-13T16:20:00.005+01:00

Check it out - my first ever home-grown cabbage! I can't quite believe that I grew this from seed, and now we're going to eat it!! I'm planning on making Homity Pie tonight with coleslaw and salady stuff, and this red cabbage will go into the coleslaw.

And then I cut it open - I was expecting, oh, I dunno, wormy holes, small maggots, a completely hollow centre, anything other than what I got which was, quite frankly, breathtakingly perfect. The inside of a red cabbage is nothing short of beautiful - the colours, the wavy design, the fact that it's just so tightly packed. I had to rush off with the two halves in my hands to show The Husband what I'd found and to boast that I'd grown this fantastic thing from a single, tiny seed! I was thrilled that he found it just as gobsmacking as I did, and wasn't just saying something nice to please me. Honestly, sometimes the fact that I can eat what I've grown just blows me away! And it chuffs me up no end when I show people my tights-in-the-garage-full-of-onions or my potatoes in their storage bags and they say, "wow, looks just like what you'd buy in a shop!" and that's just it - we all forget that we can grow the stuff that we buy in the supermarket and it'll taste better, be fresher and, quite often, look exactly the same. Ooh, I'm feeling quite evangelical now - or it might just be the 4 glasses of good red wine I've drunk this evening...

Pictures, as promised

2008-10-08T13:06:00.018+01:00

Further to yesterday's post, and as it is SUCH a beautiful day today, I dragged The Husband away from his comfy chair to come and take some photos at the plopment, so here they be (you can click on each picture to make it larger - and I apologise for the fact that I can't work out how to reduce the gap on the page between each section of pic & text...):

This is the existing brassica bed to which I've just added a few more red cabbage, spring cabbage and a dozen sprouting broccoli seedlings. They've been in a couple of days now and the pigeons haven't discovered them yet, so I'm hopeful that I won't need to put up netting.

This is the carrot bed. There are about 100 carrots in there. With a bit of luck I might actually get some that are proper carrot shaped rather than something that would amuse Esther Rantzen...

This is how the Dwarf Curly Kale is currently looking - lush and green, I think you'll agree!

These are my Brussel Sprouts - I really am quite inordinately proud of just how well my brassicas have done, never having grown any of them before. Perhaps they just really like the soil and the conditions are right for them....

This is how the herb bed is looking. As I said in yesterday's posting, the Coriander and French Sorrel have both gone beserk. The Coriander plant turned into a bush that had to be staked and even then still fell over - it goes all the way out to the right hand edge of the picture. Underneath it is the French Sorrel which has also gone a bit mental. [You'll notice I've discovered how to label things on the pictures - classy, huh?]

This is where I've planted up the 200 onion sets and garlic cloves. Not very clear I know, but you can just make out at least one of the 3.5 rows. The birds had only pulled one of the garlic cloves out, which I was relieved about as I didn't relish having to replant them all again - the backs of my legs are still stiff from planting them the first time!

This is where the fruit is going to be planted, when all the bushes, etc., arrive. Two blueberry bushes are already in but they're hard to make out in the picture. I need to get more black plastic to cover the rest of the ground....

So then, a shot of the bottom half of the plopment, taken from beside the future fruit bed.

And a view taken the other way, from the shed looking up the plopment.

And finally, an action shot of me! Taken by The Husband pretending to be a papparazzo hiding behind the raspberry canes!

Damn - October already?

2008-10-07T16:07:00.005+01:00

Oh, hey, look I KNOW I've not done an update since the beginning of September and I KNOW there's no pictures with this one but that's just the way it goes sometimes, doesn't it?!? I promise I'll take the camera next time (probably later on this week) and just take a whole bunch of pix.

First things first - just how mental is this weather? Just after I last posted it got cold, then we definitely did have an Indian Summer for about a coupla weeks which was most welcome, then it got a bit colder, and now it's raining but unseasonably warm!! Every time I go to the plopment I have to take a change of clothes because I don't know if it'll stay the same from one hour to the next....

Right then, to business. With the help of The Husband, we've managed to clear the beds that S dug while she was working the plot which meant, rather sadly I suppose, that I've had to dig out the 2 rhubarb plants she put in (mostly because I don't think I'm going to be growing rhubarb and, if I did, it wouldn't be where she'd planted them) and about a gazillion self-replicating strawberry plants (I AM going to be having a strawberry bed but, again, not where she'd put them and probably a different variety), so I'm starting with a clean slate. Also we took out about 10 pounds of Desiree potatoes! We ate the bigger ones but I have to say that I'm about to chuck out the little fiddly ones that are left because not only are we eating hers, but also all the ones that I planted, so we're swimming in spuds!

The top half of the plot is going to be mostly dedicated to fruit so, to this end, we've planted two different varieties of Blueberry bush - 'Jersey' and 'Duke' - one is early fruiting, the other later, and I have a 'Patriot' on order. I've no idea what acidity the soil is so we just played it safe, got 2 smallish (40 litre) bags of ericaceous compost, dug big holes, filled them with the compost then stuck a blueberry bush in each, watered them in and are hoping for the best.

I have many other things on order - 3 Blackcurrant bushes (Wellington XXX), 2 Gooseberry bushes (Langley Gage), 2 Raspberry varieties (Autumn Bliss and Glen Prosen), Strawberries (Aromel), and 1 dwarf Cherry tree (Maynard). I'm also looking into apples and pears but they need to be on very dwarfing root stock and we've not decided what varieties we want yet. I've decided against Redcurrants because we don't eat them now so god knows what we'd do with a bushfull of them.

Yesterday, while it was dry, I took the opportunity of planting 200 overwintering onion sets, consisting of 100 'Swift', 50 red 'Electric', and 50 yellow 'Shenshyu' varieties. I also put in cloves of Solent White and some other kind of garlic whose name I've forgotten.

Last week I cleared the Sweetcorn (as they've now finished) and weeded where the French Beans were (leaving their roots in the ground as they fix nitrogen into the soil) and put in 6 red cabbage, 4 spring cabbage and 12 sprouting broccoli seedlings for brassica fartiness next Spring. We've been eating the Curly Kale (in a fabulous pasta dish which includes bacon, anchovies and chilli, topped with grated fresh parmesan - yum!), and we've had one meal with the Brussels Sprouts, so it's all coming good. Although I do need to find a recipe that uses Chard - any ideas?

My coriander has gone beserk and I'm planning on doing something with the seeds, and the Sorrels are also clambering all over the place - think I'm going to have to thin them for next year. The peppers have done their darndest but none of them turned red. Oh well, I want to grow Chillies next year anyway so may have to rig up some kind of glass frame to go against the shed, into which peppers could go as well.

I think that's is for the time being. I'll put up piccies in the next few days...

I'm expanding!!

2008-09-01T09:40:00.007+01:00

I can't believe that it's September already - where did the year go? And when's summer going to arrive? To be honest, I think we've had what little summer we're going to get back in May and June when it was really hot and sunny. The hottest day of the year was 11 May when The Husband and Da were putting up my shed down at the plopment. Oh well, not much we can do about it, perhaps that's the way our weather's going to be from now on - hot and sunny in late spring, and then damp and warm until winter starts hoving into view.

Yes, I'm expanding! Admittedly I've just had a 3 day Royal Visit from the venerable parents-in-law which always involves sitting around and eating a lot, but this year was entwined with sister-in-law's landmark birthday (i.e., one with an '0' at the end) including a big party with people attending from all over the country and, frankly, I'm feeling poisoned from all the food-that's-really-bad-for-you-but-tastes-SO-good plus alcohol that I've been forcing down my neck and now my clothes have mysteriously shrunk, but, more importantly for this blog, I've now taken over the top half of my plopment! Yay!

If you recall when I started posting all this drivel way back when, I told you that I had actually only taken on a half-sized allotment as an old girl, S, had been allocated the top half. Now the occasions when S and I visited at the same time where very few and far between but when we did happen to be there at the same time, she always said that she thought she'd taken on too much, that it was a lot of hard work and she felt a bit overwhelmed. Therefore I knew it would only really be a matter of time before she gave it up. With this in mind I decided to ask the Site Secretary a few weeks ago about the protocol for taking over when S decided she wanted to give up - could I just have it? Or would I have to go to the end of the waiting list? The Secretary said that as I was already working the lower half, then I could automatically have the top half, as and when S decided to jack it in. Annual rental is paid in Spring so I thought I'd have to wait until then but last Wednesday the secretary rang me to say that S had contacted her to say she was giving it up and that she'd taken everything off the plot and out of the ground that she wanted. The secretary said it was now all mine and that I wouldn't have to pay any extra until next Spring because S had already paid until then! So now I'm really excited and daunted at the same time. I can now plan for soft fruit (which I couldn't grow before as I had no room) including proper raspberry and strawberry beds, gooseberries, blueberries, (possibly) rhubarb, a small apple tree (strictly speaking I'm not allowed to plant trees on the plopment but I can't see that a small one, no more than 5 feet high say, can hurt...), Victoria plum tree, etc. But the site is overgrown - mostly with grass I have to say, but still overgrown and will need to be cleared properly, so I'm back to where I was, ground condition-wise, in February this year. I'll have an autumn and winter of digging and weeding ahead. The two pictures (you can click on all the pictures in the blog to make them bigger) show the full length of the plopment taken from the end of S's plot (my existing plot is the bottom half - you can see from where the french beans are growing up bamboo canes? I was growing stuff just in front of that, and then down to the shed - have I explained that properly? oh well, you get the idea hopefully!) I think what I'm going to have to do is clear as much of it as I can and just buy loads of black weed-suppressing plastic to cover the ground until spring. I'm also going to have to look into getting a petrol-driven strimmer as well - a rechargeable cordless one just doesn't have enough power or battery life to do the job, and I really can't manage a full size plot with a pair of garden shears - even doing the half plot was a pain.

So that's my Big News at the moment, but what's happening in the growing half? Sadly, as I suspected, my big, beautiful tomatoes have all contracted blight and have had to go on the bonfire (or will do when it dries out enough to burn stuff). You can't put them on the compost because the spores will survive, and they're too heavy to put in bin bags to take home to go to landfill so I'm going to have to burn them. Like most people, I enjoy a good bonfire but I'm extremely aware of how close to people's houses the allotments are and if I lived there I would be livid at bonfire smoke constantly drifting through my washing, so I'm going to have to time it properly. Actually, as a group of people, the allotmenteers at my site are pretty good about keeping bonfires to an absolute minimum.

I'm digging my way through my second early spuds, Maris Piper. The yield for these has been at least 2 or 3 times that of the Pentland Javelin, but they are prone to scab. Scab is unsightly but doesn't affect the eating quality of the potato once you've peeled them, so while it's a bit of a nuisance, scab's not really that much of a problem.

We've started eating the sweetcorn and it's fantastic! I've got 18 plants and they've all grown beautiful large cobs which we're currently eating for lunch! They're a variety called 'Applause' and they've been really successful.

Oh, hey, look, the sun's just come out - I think I'm going to have to sign off now and shoot out to do some digging, while I can.....

Faster, Higher, Stronger....

2008-08-20T13:38:00.013+01:00

It's been almost a month since I last updated the blog which is, perhaps, a little remiss of me, and for which I humbly beg your forgiveness. In my defence, the weather at the end of July deteriorated so I didn't go to the allotment all that much plus the last couple of weeks I've been glued to the telly watching the Olympics. And when I did go to the plopment I seemed to do nothing more than pick French Beans, which I thought was very boring to write about. The running total is - get this - 38.5 pounds of beans. I'm getting sick of them, as are my family, friends, neighbours and complete strangers in the street. In fact anyone who comes anywhere near me will be asked if they want some beans. My freezer is full of them, as is my fridge. There are carrier bags of them sitting on my garage floor.

This is all the more astonishing when you see just how battered and weedy the plants are looking now, but they're still damn well producing! Having said that, though, I think production is tailing off now and hopefully will be finished in a few weeks. It said on the seed packet that Cobra French Beans are a prolific cropper and they're not wrong! I've had getting on for 40 pounds of beans from about 40 plants (planting 2 or 3 to a cane). Whether I plant as many next year remains to be seen. One thing I will change, however, is the shape of the cane structure. The way it is now is traditional but I hadn't realised just how windy it gets at the plopment, and the structure's come apart on more than one occasion. Next year I think I'll put the canes in a more robust teepee-shaped construction which also means I can dot them about the place as well.

All my onions are now out of the ground. Our site secretary recently sent a warning round that the top of the of the allotment site had been hit by Downy Mildew which affects onions. I'm at the bottom end of the site and actually don't know if it affected my onions or not. The leaves were going yellow and falling over, but that's what they do anyway when it's time to harvest them. There's all sorts of ways of harvesting onions including doing stuff like bending over the tops and leaving them in the ground prior to digging them up (not sure what this is supposed to do), or easing them out of the ground with a fork but not pulling them up altogether, and leaving them there for a couple of weeks (I think this is supposed to start the 'stop growing' process). I know you have to let them dry for at least a couple of weeks before you can store them (otherwise you run the risk of them rotting in storage).

I decided that as the foliage was dying down on all of them they might as well come up out of the ground and do their drying in the shed which is draughty enough to allow drying to occur. The Husband kindly attached battens to the walls of the shed so that various hooks could be screwed in to hang implements from, and these battens actually make handy little shelves which, although extremely narrow, are wide enough to support an onion bulb. I've also got some hanging up in a pair of tights in my garage with a plastic tie between each one so they don't touch - the idea being that you cut the toe off the tights leg and remove the onion, undoing the tie so the next one drops down. It seems to work except that I can't seem to hang the tights high enough so they don't drag on the floor! We've eaten a few as well and while they're not as eye-wateringly strong as I remember previously home-grown onions to be, they're most acceptable. They're also very crunchy, which I like. So as long as they dry properly and store well, I'm going to chalk that up as a huge success for the onion crop! Next thing I have to do is track down some over-wintering Japanese onion sets to plant in September and see if they work.

The lettuce hedge is no more. The Salad Bowl lettuce was brilliant but bolted, as had the Wild Rocket, so they all had to come out. I've been successionally growing Lollo Rossa lettuce as well though so we're now eating them. I've also sown some mixed lettuce seeds that, supposedly, I can overwinter if I put cloches over them, so we can have salad leaves in Spring. I'm pretty cynical about that working but I'll give it a go. My carrots, however, are going from strength to strength. Luckily (touch wood) I think I've managed to avoid Carrot Root Fly as I've found no evidence yet in any of the carrots I've dug up, so I've just carried on sowing seeds at 2-3 week intervals, and planting them out in the plopment when big enough to handle. Although it may not be terribly clear from the picture but there are 5 rows of carrots, each with about 20 plants, so that's (hopefully) 100 carrots! The orange string shows where the latest row of little transplants went in a few days ago.

I think my Sweetcorn will be ready to eat very soon but I'm going to leave them a bit longer yet.

I've been gradually earthing up my Leeks individually lately. You do this so that a large percentage of the plant is blanched - the white bit that is eaten. I'm rather pleased with how they've come along especially as Leek Growing Lore seems to be very complicated and I just ignored all that and shoved them in the ground. We'll see what happens when I come to harvest them next year though. Hopefully I should get about 35 Leeks come harvest time, all of varying sizes I should imagine. The local Fruit & Vegetable Show is on in a couple of days and while part of me is quite tempted to have a go at entering some of my produce, I don't honestly think I've got anything that's of Show standard. I've been concentrating far too much on getting the ground cleared and actually producing something edible than to bother with all the palaver of producing showbench winning veg! Maybe next year though...

The Cucumbers have been a runaway success but are now, I think, coming to the end. I took a couple of pictures about 10 days ago so am posting them now. The first picture shows what they look like on the plant - this view reminds me of H R Giger's designs for the original 'Alien' film - all dark, smooth and tubular. I then picked them and laid them out on my kneeling pad with my trowel for size perspective - aren't they great!! Since then two have been sliced up and are sitting in two Kilner jars in pickling vinegar to be eaten over the winter, and we're eating our way through the others. Even after 10 days in the fridge they remain solid, hard, crunchy and juicy. I genuinely didn't expect to get anything like as good as this. Guess I'll be growing them again next year!

The Broad Beans have now all finished and I'll be taking out the plants quite soon, but leaving the roots in the ground as the roots of all bean plants fix nitrogen in the soil, so it's best to leave them. All of my Pentland Javelin first early potatoes are now out of the ground and either in storage or have been eaten. In their place I've sown Winter Spinach and Swiss Chard. The picture shows the Winter Spinach which has grown a bit quicker than I expected really (the black plastic covers the ground where the onions had been). I tasted one of the leaves the other day and it seems to be quite nice. I understand, though, that instead of just taking off individual leaves like you would with ordinary spinach, for winter spinach you cut off the entire plant to use, leaving the roots in the ground from which the plant regrows!

What else? The Herb Garden beside the shed has been quite prolific, even if I didn't eat very much of it. We had some of the French Sorrel as salad leaves (it tastes just like uncooked Bramley cooking apple), and I made some soup with the ordinary Sorrel (which was nice enough but not outstanding). The Basil I'm going to have a go at drying in my airing cupboard to then crumble up to put in a jar. The Garlic Chives I didn't use at all but as it's a perennial, it'll be there next year.
The Coriander has loved its location but is flowering like billyo now - I may save the seeds. The sweet peppers are coming along nicely as well - I have half a dozen decent sized green peppers but I don't like them green so even though I could pick and eat them now, I'm going to wait until they turn red.

The tomato plants are rampant but I have a horrible feeling there may be some blight there - there were fruits with tell-tale brown marking on the top. The brassicas are doing well, especially as I spend about an hour each visit just picking off the dang caterpillers. The green leafy growth coming out of the parsnips is just vast - I'm a bit concerned they're going to be huge and woody by the time I come to eat them, and I wanted to have them over winter rather than in the autumn. Is a puzzlement.

My First Cucumber!!!

2008-07-25T18:55:00.009+01:00

Ladeez and Gennelmen - it gives me great pleasure, and no small amount of pride, to be able to introduce to you, my very first ever homegrown cucumber [drumroll]

Ta-Dah!! I decided that today was the day that the cucumber was big enough to be harvested and to commemorate the occasion, I've taken a couple of photographs so I can remember what it looked like after I've eaten it. So, for example, here it is reclining gently on the handrail of the bridge that leads to my garden.

Then I decided it did need something to compare it with so that you, gentle reader, might have some idea of the humungous size it had achieved, so here it is, sitting next to Sylvester, our slightly-
larger-than-
average cat who just happened to be there at the time I had the camera in my hand so was roped in to act as a ruler.

I also noticed at the plopment today that the tassels have started appearing on my developing sweetcorn cobs, so that means I have to start watering them all from now until harvesting. And one or two of the Broad Bean plants have started putting out shoots from the base - I dunno what that's all about but I'm inclined to leave them to see what happens, and if I get extra additional unexpected bonus beans, then so much the better!

I put in a few more Winter Spinach plants, so there's seven gone in now where some Pentland Javelin spuds have come out, and I think I'm going to investigate sowing Spring Cabbage for overwintering, to be eaten next May or thereabouts. Oh, and I must just tell you, we ate those gnarly carrots last night and the taste was almost overpowering!! It was like eating solid Essence of Carrot - intense wasn't the word. I've never eaten homegrown carrots fresh out of the ground before and it was just astonishing, frankly. So I'm definitely sowing more of those babies, you betcha!

Finally, by way of a change, I caught my 2.5 cats sitting companionably on the bridge this afternoon and, as it so rarely happens, I took a picture and am posting it here for your delectation. The black cat is Damian, my 0.5 boy - he spends half his time with us and the rest at his other house, 3 doors down. Then in the middle being sociable and facing the camera is Sylvester, and finally, closest to us but facing away is Pepper. They all say 'hello', by the way.

Anyone want any beans......?

2008-07-23T13:24:00.014+01:00

Okay, those of you who know more about these sort of things than I have been very kind in not sending me emails pointing and laughing at the 'measly' 2 pounds of beans I picked last week. Because this morning, dear reader, I filled a carrier bag with the blighters and weighed them when I got home - 4lbs 10oz or 2086 grams. Oh. Dear. Lord. Fortunately the lady who owns the horses where I go riding says she'll have some, and I can feed a family of 5 down the road (except they're off to Tenerife on Thursday for 2 weeks) but that still leaves me with far more than I need. The upside is that it would have cost me £13.45 to buy that many beans at Sainsburys, although I'd want sectioning if I did...

The freezer bit of my fridge/freezer is a couple of large drawers but it's not vast so I've been pondering the old-fashioned way of preserving foodstuffs, by bottling or, as they call it in America (even though it uses jars) 'canning'. Apparently, if done correctly, stuff in jars can last for up to 15 months just sitting on shelves in your pantry (if you're lucky enough to have one) or, as in my case, the garage. It's still a very popular way of buying vegetables on the Continent. I can remember being quite surprised the first time I visited relatives in Holland and seeing glass jars of carrots and peas that had been bought from the supermarket.

Apart from the ridiculous bean situation, what else is happening at the plopment? Well, I decided to pull up some carrots and was genuinely thrilled there was actually enough to eat. And because I hadn't thinned them, they've all grown around each other and sprouted extra limbs and just gone generally gnarly! You wouldn't find those in the supermarket! Apparently our site is quite bad for Carrot Root Fly so I'm just hoping that these haven't been affected. Since I planted these guys, way back in April, I've planted at least 50 more carrot seedlings each 2 or 3 inches away from its neighbour so hopefully I'll get 'proper' straight carrots a bit later on.

The monster cucumber just goes from strength to strength! I'm having to tie the plants further up the bamboo cane wigwam almost every time I go as they're starting to sprawl somewhat. There are plenty other little tiny cucumbers forming so I've got my fingers crossed that we actually get to eat some of them this summer.

I'm digging up more of my First Early potatoes - Pentland Javelin. I'm not sure I'll bother with them next year, the yield per plant doesn't seem to be particularly high, they don't really have a lot of flavour and they don't seem to like being cut into quarters and boiled very much - they fall apart too quickly and the skin comes off. So I'm a little disappointed, to be honest, but at least I know now for next year. I've still got Second Earlies - Maris Peer (or Piper, can't remember which!) and Main Crop Desirees so it's not as if I'm going to be lacking in spuds this year! Where the Pentland Javelins have come out, I'm putting in Winter Spinach seedlings, and I've still got Swiss Chard sprouting at home which can go in when the rest of the potatoes come out.

That's about it for now - the Swifts are still squealing wildly around my head and I've never seen so many Cabbage White butterflies in one place before, all signs that Mother Nature is doing her thang for which we all must be eternally grateful.

Till next time, this is Kaz signing off saying "be most excellent to each other".

....Gods, what a monster......

2008-07-16T15:10:00.013+01:00

I was dahn the plopment this morning, doing the usual, weeding, clearing a bit more land for the forthcoming Winter Spinach and Swiss Chard plants, when I decided to pick some beans. I'm growing Climbing French Beans (variety: Cobra - the same that whatsisname off Gardener's World is growing at his allotment, but I put mine in first....Joe Swift, that's him). A few plants have grown to the top of the poles but the majority are still clustering at around knee-height.

"There'll be just a few, " thought I, "I can use a few tonight and blanch then freeze the rest". Readers, what a sad, deluded fool I was to think such naive thoughts. I couldn't believe how many there were! So I decided that, when I got them home, I'd weigh them. As you can see, I put them in my biggest mixing bowl and stuck them on the scales (remembering to weigh the empty bowl first and zero it) and, amazingly, there are just over 2lbs of beans, or 933 grams for you more modern types. I checked with Sainsburys online to see how much they're selling their organic beans for and they're currently charging £6.45 a kilo. That means there's six quid's worth of French Beans in that bowl alone. God only knows, though, what I'm going to do with all the beans that are going to be coming - I've spawned a monster!!

Another candidate for the category of 'monster' is this cucumber - this is the same one that I pictured just six days ago and you can see how much bigger it's grown! I really hope it works properly as I adore cucumber. The plants are starting to sprawl across the ground a bit now so I'm having to tie them up to the bamboo wigwam in the hope that the developing cucumbers grow straight down. Unfortunately they do seem to be popular with Whitefly and I'm not sure how much damage they'll do - I think Google will be my friend in this and I'll research it in a bit.

It was a lovely day at the site today - the swifts have started swooping and screeching again after a gap of about a fortnight. They'll be gone by August so I'm wondering if the adults are now flying around with the fledglings, getting their muscles working and building up their strength for the monumental flight soon back to Africa. I'll really miss them when they've gone, they were joyfully chasing each other no higher than about 10 feet above my head today. It occurred to me that there were very few pictures of the rest of the site on my blog, so, the first one here is a view taken from beside my shed looking up the pathway. I'm about three-quarters of the way down the site which is nearly 5 acres in total - it's really quite big as you can see, and surrounded by houses on all four sides. A bit open, though, so it can get windy, but lovely nonetheless.

Facing the other way, down the path, immediately next to my plopment is a small car parking area - which you can see in the picture - then more allotments. There are others on the other side of the road but I didn't photograph those as the batteries in my camera were playing up then! C and M have the allotment with the white metal chairs and table, at which they hold parties on sunny Saturday evenings! How terribly civilised....

Some of you may wish to know what the plot next door to mine now looks like - this is the one, you may recall, that I was envious of earlier in the year because it's so neatly laid out with raised beds. Well, this is it now, and I have to say that, if nothing else, the sunflowers are magnificent!

Finally, a general shot from the end of my plopment looking back towards the shed and pathway. Please note the fantastic genuine 1970s parasol - my parents-in-law never throw anything away and to them I am particularly grateful for letting me have this fantasy in yellow and brown to sit beneath while resting my weary bones and deciding what to weed next. It has been a total life-saver this summer, so thanks Desmond and Minnie!

It's NOT a monsoon, okay?

2008-07-10T15:55:00.014+01:00

According to the BBC, yesterday's downpour was absolutely not a monsoon although, apparently, some of the more populist newspapers were calling it such. According to The People Who Know About These Sort Of Things (i.e., proper scientists), 'monsoons' only occur in the Indian Subcontinent and although, as in this case, the term is frequently misused to describe heavy rain, it actually refers to the seasonal reversal of wind direction. So all we had was a month's worth of rain in one 24 hour period. And, boy, didn't it feel like it?!

I decided that I really ought to check out the plopment and see if everything was still there. I haven't been posting much because, frankly, I don't think it's all that interesting for you guys to read that I cut some lettuce for my tea, did some weeding and decided to stake my tomatoes as they were getting a bit tall and being blown over by the wind at our exposed site. But an update is a bit overdue.

I went down to the site for a couple of hours today just after lunch and, thankfully, everything was still there and thriving happily, so let me put up some piccies:

First off, here are the tomatoes which, as you can see, have now been staked! These eleven plants were given to me by a friend who didn't know what they were (other than tomatoes), i.e., whether they were bush or ... er ... the other kind (what are they called? you know, the ones that grow tall?) Anyway, I stuck them in the ground, did that business of removing the side shoots (when I remembered) and they seem to be happy enough. There are flowers and everything now. When the fruits start forming, I'll have to remember to start feeding them. After taking this picture I weeded out the encroaching couch grass that you can see at the bottom of the picture - b***** stuff....

Growing just behind the tomatoes are my outdoor indoor cucumbers. These are Telegraph cucumber plants which are, ideally, meant to be grown indoors but I'm trying them outdoors and I'm surprised at how well they're doing. They've thoroughly enjoyed the recent wet weather and there are a handful of little baby cucumbers coming along on both plants. I had to tie them further up the bamboo poles so that they don't trail on the ground and the plants and stems are really hairy and feel like they should sting but don't - bizarre. You can also see one of the cucumbers coming along nicely.

The onions are doing very well although apparently there's been an outbreak of Downy Mildew on some plots further up the site. I had a look at mine today and I'm not sure if they've contracted this or not. I'll need to keep a close eye on them because I'm very proud of my onions this year. The close up picture shows how large they've grown in comparison to an ordinary trowel. I think I'm going to have to start harvesting some soon...

So, what next? I'm growing Climbing French Beans (var: Cobra) up poles this year (I prefer french beans to runners which get stringy) and even though most of the plants are nowhere near the top of the poles yet, I've started harvesting some damn fine looking beans. Last year, before I had the plopment, and for several years before I had been growing French Beans in a couple of huge pots at home and last year had barely a pound of beans from them in total all summer. I think I've picked around a pound of beans just today so this all bodes well! Yum!

Just at the bottom right of the bean plant picture, you can see the Red Cabbages, so here's a better picture of the six biggest ones. I have some others growing in the brassica patch but they're much smaller so should mature a bit later in the year.

Also in the brassica patch are my gorgeous Curly Kale. I have been cooking a fabulous pasta recipe using garlic, bacon and Curly Kale so decided to grow it rather than buy the pre-shredded bagged stuff from the supermarket. My veg book (the Hessayon one) said that Kale was one of the easiest vegetables to grow and I can say it's been simple - just put the seed in a pot and it grows! I think we're going to be able to start harvesting a few leaves very soon, so I may well have to sow a few more seeds to get plants to see us through winter. You can't really tell from the picture (because it's been taken looking down on the plants and through the netting) but they're actually about a foot tall).

The sweetcorn is doing its sweetcorny thing, with each plant getting bigger and taller at different rates! When the wind is blowing through them they have that lovely rustly tall grass sound. Fingers crossed that I get some decent cobs out of them.

Finally, despite the wind and the cold, my little red pepper plants are still hanging on in there and starting to put out flowers which, hopefully, will turn into luscious sweet red peppers. Actually, I've already decided that if they don't work this year I shall persevere with them next year, perhaps finding different ways to grow them because (a) I like them and (b) they're so blimmin' expensive in the shops - I mean, 69p each!! - that's it's worth keeping going until I get it right!

Dog Days of Summer have arrived!

2008-07-01T15:44:00.012+01:00

I thought today was the last day of June until my husband sent me a text saying, "Pinch, punch, First of the month, no returns!!" ('cos we're grownups now, innit) but I have to concede (...mutter, grumble...) that, in this case at least, he's absolutely right - 1 July it is. June seems to have flown by and, indeed, I seem to have been a bit tardy with my blogging but that doesn't mean I've not been down the plopment slogging my guts out darn near every single day (honest!). I mean, the weather's been so good lately that you can't ignore it - the weeds don't stop growing just because you fancy having a day off.

As a complete aside, I found out today why the hottest months of the summer are called (by some folk, but not me, I just call them July, August and September) 'Dog Days'. Apparently they're named after the dog star, Sirius. Starting about 3 July Sirius rises and sets in conjunction with the Sun. In Ancient Egypt, Sirius was the Nile Star and its rising signalled the flooding of the Nile. The name Sirius has two possible origins. It may come from the Egyptian word for Nile, or from the Greek seirios, meaning 'scorching'. The Romans called it 'Canicula'. Believing the star drove men and dogs mad, a brown dog was sacrificed to pacify it at the time of the blazing hot days of summer (when the star rose) which were called 'Caniculares' - it is this Latin word that was translated in the 16th century to 'Dog Days'. So there you are, bet you didn't know that!

Anyhoo, to return to what's going on at the plopment - you may recall that I planted four sweet red pepper plants against the shed. I've now decided to turn that into a small herb garden as well, bordered on the two short sides by lavender to form a sort of windbreak (when they get bigger of course). So last weekend The Husband and I ventured into Guildford to find that the Guildford Festival was running. When I lived in Guildford I always used to love dawdling amongst the craft stalls that go up and down the cobbled High Street during the Festival so I insisted that I had to have a decent perusal. The Husband, being a bloke of course, ran off to a bookshop. I eventually found myself at the herb stall. They've been coming for years and grow literally hundreds of varieties of herbs in the Surrey Hills and it's always tricky deciding what to get. In the end I got French Sorrel (which tastes like uncooked Bramley Apple), Broad Leaved Sorrel (which has a sharp, slightly lemony tang), Coriander, Sweet Basil and Garlic Chives. I got just one of each and planted them in front of the red peppers. Let's see how they go.

Apart from that, I've been mainly clearing more ground, weeding and watering. So here are a few pictures for you to see what's going on. Firstly, this is the lettuce patch - aren't the colours retina-searing? I love that bright lime green of the Salad Bowl. I've been smart (for once) and done proper successional planting so that there should be enough to last the summer. I'm also growing a handful of Wild Rocket (the dark green plants in the picture) a few red crinkly Lollo Rossa lettuces as well (just out of frame on the left). This is where Cynthia (R.I.P.) used to live. No sign of her I'm afraid, I think she's gone to the great Toybox in the sky.

What else? The sweetcorn are marvellous - I've barely watered them and they've just taken care of themselves. I hope we get a decent batch of cobs from them.

And I'm extremely pleased with how well the Telegraph Cucumbers are doing outdoors - see, here's a little cucumber! (Sorry it's a bit out of focus but you can see how enormous it is!)

This is just a general shot of the plopment, facing up the hill rather than towards my shed for a change. You can see that I have, once again, extended the brassica cage and I've still got Swede busily germinating in the plastic-house at home that will need to go in there, so it'll get bigger yet!

And - finally - one of The Husband, taking a well-earned rest after doing an hour's weeding of the potatoes for me - bless!

R.I.P. Cynthia

2008-06-24T09:25:00.003+01:00

Cynthia's gone! Oh Noes! Went to the plopment yesterday afternoon and she was missing in the line of duty. I should have listened to Ali who suggested sticking a piece of wire or something through her head (Cynthia's, not Ali's...) in order to secure her to the ground. I didn't do this as, on the one hand, it seemed really cruel (not that I think inanimate objects can feel pain - I'm not that mad, you know) and, on the other, it would just provide more of a challenge to the foxes who, I believe, have kidnapped her.

I've produced a couple of posters to put up at the site in case anyone finds a rogue orange snake on their plot and wonder how it got there but I suspect I've seen the last of her. Oh well, it'll be unwanted CDs on bits of string from now on, then.

Trusssssst in meeeeee..........

2008-06-18T17:05:00.009+01:00

Hey, everyone - say 'hello' to the latest addition to the plopment, 'Cynthia'! In my interminable meanderings through the backroads and bywaters of the Information Superhighway (does anyone still call it that anymore?), I have found myself drifting inexorably towards gardening and allotment websites - can't imagine why - and somewhere or other I read that, apart from the infuriating netting, another good pigeon deterrent is a toy rubber snake! Now, I've just put in quite a few lettuces which I now understand pigeons are also partial to. Constructing, and, indeed extending, net cages is akin to trying to stuff a live octopus into a string bag and my heart was heavy at the prospect of having to do this in order to protect the lettuces so I figured, what the hell, let's have a go at the snake option.

So off I went to eBay and found something suitable at abctoysandgames1 and for a very reasonable price too (and, no, I don't work for them). I was tempted by a black one but it wasn't clear on the advert if it was all black or had orange stripes. Now, bearing in mind that black and orange is a recognised danger sign in the animal kingdom (think tigers or wasps), it should stand to reason that any self-respecting pigeon would give a black and orange snake an extremely wide berth. I asked them and, sadly, the snake was all black. The other options were green (which I thought would get lost among the lettuces) or the colour I did choose, orange. And so Cynthia came to live with me, well, at the plopment actually.

According to The Wise Ones at an allotment forum I frequent (www.allotments-uk.com), a toy snake should work but it needs to be at least two feet long. Cynthia is made to curl at one end but you can straighten out her tail a bit and she's pretty lengthy. She went into the lettuces on Monday 16 June (see picture above). It then dawned on me as I was walking home that we have a multitude of 'playful' foxes at the allotment site who love nothing better than mucking about and playing with anything that isn't staked down or too heavy for them to move. I feared the worst for Cynthia so decided to pop down the next day to see if she was still there. Well, as you can see from the second picture, she was but it was obvious she'd been 'interfered with'. The earth was a bit scratched up around her middle and she was a bit dirty but she was still in one piece. I've not been down today but may go tomorrow and we'll see if she's stayed put.

Of course, all this may be a little academic because the site steward Jan popped down for a quick chat yesterday morning and when I proudly pointed out Cynthia to her, she remarked that the lettuces were actually quite large and probably wouldn't have been mugged by the pigeons anyway! Oh well.....

Finally, I was wandering around Homebase earlier this week and they had some really very nice sweet red pepper plants for sale at £1.99 each, so I bought 4 to put in the plopment and hope I have better luck with them than the ones I tried to grow at home on the patio three years ago. Jan, the steward, suggested that I plant them right up against the side of my shed because, (a) it gets sunlight all day there and (b) they would get additional heat that had been reflected/stored by the shed. I thought this was a damn fine idea so cleared the ground to make a small bed and plant them up. I think the next thing to do is to rig up some kind of protection for them as it's quite windy so perhaps some kind of tall cold frame arrangement with an open top would do, or even leaning some largish pieces of clear plastic against the shed. This is obviously going to be my next mission, along with the planting up of the 30-odd Leeks that are waiting to go in.