More of the same, really....

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....

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

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.

Rassin', frassin', pigeons.....

Last Thursday, gentle reader if you recall, I wrote that I had forgotten to put down slug pellets around my newly planted Climbing French Beans. And so I returned on the Friday to do so, only intending to stay for the amount of time it would take to shake said pellets onto the ground, allowing me to skip away while merrily flicking the Vs at the soon to be annihilated slimers.

So imagine my surprise, nay horror, to discover that my lovingly nurtured Red Cabbage and Brussel Sprout seedlings had been CHEWED BY PIGEONS OVERNIGHT111!!!111!!!1 Now, normally, these lumbering, comical birds don't bother me, in fact I rather enjoy watching them peck each other on the head while waiting in line to eat the nuts from my wall-hung peanut feeder but this just takes the biscuit (or brassica).

The only option, of course, is to create a net cage and, of course, I didn't have any net with me and so, of course, I had to scoot back home and return with the only net I had which I'd just got for my newly planted Strawberries and which, of course, wasn't big enough to go over the brassicas and so, of course, I had to stitch the edges together with hairy garden string, like some really incomptent sutures [*takes breath*]. This is a real pain in the bum as I've not finished planting brassicas yet (I've still got Broccoli, late Sprouts, Savoy Cabbage and Curly Kale to go in yet) so I'm going to have to ask The Husband if he'll design (and build, pretty please...) something a bit more robust and easily manageable to go over all the plants when they eventually go in. Still, I'm pleased to report that my ham-fisted efforts do seem to have worked, a week later the cage is still in one place/piece and no pigeons have gained entry.

So let me guide you gently by the hand into this week's efforts. Well, I've extended the bean poles, I now have 16 poles (8 on each side) with two plants for each pole (i.e., 32 plants). Good job, then, that we like French Beans in our house. I've also finally got my 23 Sweetcorn plants in the ground as well although I can't help feeling that I may be being a little premature here, but others on site have planted theirs so I suppose if we get hit by a late frost, we'll all lose them together!

I have monumental colonies of Blackfly nestling very happily thank-you in the tips of my Broad Beans so I started spraying today until I read the bottle halfway round and it said something like, "Extremely dangerous to bees - do not use on open flowers" and what was I doing? Naturally I was spraying onto the open flowers of the Broad Beans, so stopped immediately. I've kind of decided to use this as a controlled experiment though, to see which of the plants do best, those that were sprayed and those that weren't.

I noticed that Henry opposite had planted Marigolds underneath his Blackfly-free Broad Beans (try saying that really quickly three times) so went and bought half a dozen to plant amongst mine before researching why. Apparently, the Blackfly don't like the smell of Marigolds so will avoid them and find somewhere else. I'm going to buy some more tomorrow (they also look good).

Anyway, enjoy a picture of the current state of the allotment and I'll see you next time.