Cage Fighting

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!!

Welcome to 2009

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?

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!!!

Damn - October already?

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...