Sulking, sheds, and spuds

I went to the plot at the weekend for a sulk in my shed, as the weather was too bad to indulge my other major outdoor pastime of cycling. I rescued the scarecrow from his prone position due to high winds, and found that all the sheds had been broken into again, but like last time, nothing was taken, or even disturbed, apart from the lock. I was careful to use a weedy lock this time, now I won't bother to lock it any more. I was able to get a little bit of work done, including turning my compost between rain showers. I also made a cup of brown liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea, which I threw away.

Later in the week I found myself frozen in front of the potato display in the garden centre for what seemed like hours, completely unable to choose what I wanted to grow this year. In the end I broke the deadlock and picked up Premier first earlies, which promise to be 'very early and resistant to both blight and eelworm' (although an early variety doesn't need to be resistant to blight, because that is usually a late-summer problem). Those were swiftly followed by Desiree maincrop. I was tempted by Pink Fir Apple but reading the description I don't honestly think we would get through many of them back at home, so I went for a traditional variety instead.  I also picked up my  year's supply of parsnip (Tender and True) and carrot (Flyaway) and some potato fertiliser, all on special offer. I do like a bargain.

Free seeds

I have been down to the garden centre to redeem my reward vouchers, Only £3.00 this time but at least that means I haven't spent as much money this year. As with this time last year their seeds are reduced to 50p a pack. I've left it a bit late so not much to choose from, but I quite like that, it helps me choose! I plumped for:

Sweetcorn, Mirai. Early, extra sweet variety. Plant Feb-May, harvest Aug-Sept.
Celery, Granada. High yielding, stores well. Sow Feb-Mar, harvest Aug-Oct
Pea, Twinkle: Early, disease resistant variety. Sow Feb-April, Harvest June-July.
Pea, Lincoln, long cropping heritage variety, Sow March - June, harvest June-Aug

For the garden:
Nigella Mulberry Rose
Cosmos Purity

More seeds

Leek seeds were sown indoors last week. Must remember to label them because they look exactly like onions when they first come up.

First seeds of 2011

The plot has been a virtual no-go area for several weeks, but I spent a few minutes sowing some onion seeds earlier today. I usually order onion sets but always end up ordering too many and spending too much, only to get patchy results, so this is a new approach for me. These seeds were some of the ones I got in the sale at the garden centre, using my garden centre reward vouchers, so hopefully if they grow well my onions will all be completely free this year! At least that's the plan...

Tradition has it that onions are sown on Boxing Day, but this is most likely a rumour started by men who, by 26th December, needed a bit of alone time in the shed to escape the Christmas madness! It's true they need a long growing season, so any time in January should be fine according to Terry Walton on http://www.gardenersclick.com/.  They need to be kept at about room temperature to germinate, so two trays of Duchy Organic Sturon onion seeds are now on the window sill under plastic propagator lids. My windowsills are quite dark so I have stuck silver foil on one side of the clear lid, in an effort to reflect as much light in to the seeds as possible at this time of year, a trick I saw on Gardener's World. The seeds are exactly the same as leek seeds which I have had good success with so hopefully these will do well.

Autumn bargains

I've been letting the allotment manage itself for a few weeks, and to not much ill-effect thankfully. I've been very busy re-styling my back garden at home, and won another award for my front garden over the summer too. Luckily a couple of hours weeding and mowing and it looks quite neat again. Perhaps because I started my allotment at this time of the year, I always see the end of the main summer harvest as the start of the new gardening year. So here we are again.

This year's plan is to be a bit more careful where I source my seeds etc. I tend to buy online from the biggest suppliers but I want to be a bit more frugal.  First off, seed potatoes. I read in a magazine that there are only a few companies that actually grow seed potatoes, and they do sell direct - so I'm going to try and track them down, as when I've ordered from Thompson and Morgan I find they take ages and don't give me an ETA.

Second, this is a good time of year to visit the garden centre, just before they get their Christmas stock in. My favourite local centre, Wyvale Woburn Sands, are running an offer for their loyalty card customers of all packets of seeds 50p each! At that price, it makes sense to buy what they've got and not worry too much about specific varieties. They also sent me a £5 voucher recently, so I went and filled my boots with 10 packs of seeds, net cost, FREE! As a result I will be growing mangetout peas and dwarf green beans in 2011, along with a selection of flowers for cutting. Can't go wrong really, all of them have 2012 'best before' dates. The garden centres just want to have fresh stock at this time of year.

One packet was onions - I'm going to try them from seed. I'm always anxious to do some gardening at Christmas when it's too cold to go outside and I've heard boxing day is the best day to plant onion seeds.

Finally I'm going to grow some garlic from my own bulbs this year instead of buying them in. It's supposed to be the best way, and I've got plenty spare.

Free seeds

I have been introduced to a character called Phil, who, just likeThe Moog and me, started growing his own vegetables last year. Like me, he enjoyed it, and in fact, was so taken with it, he decided to set up his own venture to get everyone doing the same. What can I say? Respect! Have a look now:
http://www.youfarm.org/

I put my name down for Phil's free seed pack, and here it is, some things I've grown before, some I haven't. Looking forward to getting them started. My favourites are the Swede (because they are such small seeds) and the spinach (because they are green).

Keeping busy

My friend Tom thought it would be all quiet on the allotment front at this time of year, but allotmentalism is an all-year round sport. He was surprised to find me planting leek and sweet pea seeds on the kitchen table last Sunday. We used a paper potter, which seems to be a good way of using up some of the many free newspapers people keep pushing through our door (much to the annoyance of the Moog). It was a Christmas present from Maria and Cameron, thanks guys. The seeds are already starting to show their little green heads.

Meanwhile, down on plot 29, work continues apace whenever the weather allows. I've started digging over beds and straightening up the paths - my plan is to narrow my paths to gain more growing space and use the woodchips supplied by the local council to cut down on the amount of lawnmowing I have to do in the summer. I wasted considerable effort on mowing and strimming paths in 2008.

The Moog, the Moog's friend and Mrs Moog-Keeper came to the plot yesterday and whilst Moog and his friend played with empty plastic bottles, we broke our backs trying to turn over one of my claggy clay beds. The west side of my plot has quite poor soil, and it really needs improving fast. I am going to have to bite the bullet and buy some horticultural grade grit from the garden centre at some point to break up the clay. Before that, though, I was pleased to use the first of my very own compost. All the stuff I've been chucking on the heap for over a year now has turned into some lovely soft soil conditioner. Let's hope it does the trick.

Autumn photo gallery

In my continued effort to keep up to date, here are a few photos from the last few months down on the plot.










First, my sunflowers eventually started producing blooms, and we had a fair few vases full of these in the house for a while. I happened to notice them on sale in the florists for an extortionate amount! Mine cost the price of a pack of seeds, about £2, and now, of course, I have an airing cupboard full of free seeds for next year! The hyperbole on the seed packet led me to believe I would need sunglasses to look at these, and people would be coming from far and wide to view my many-coloured blooms. Far from becoming something of a local celebrity, I was a bit disappointed that the ‘harlequin’ seeds produced mostly bog-standard yellow flowers.










I was quite excited at the beginning of autumn, planning what to plant for next year, but the excitement has worn off in the face of regular rain showers and the return to GMT which have both been keeping me off the plot.

Here, however, are pictures of my first winter veg. Parsnips have been slowly growing away all year, thanks to early identification by John they didn’t get pulled up. They’re nice and sweet.

Pak Choi are now coming along well. These are to be used in the spring, or whenever they are big enough. I seem to have solved the flea beetle problem by applying simple cardboard collars (as seen on Gardener’s World) and covering them with a mini polytunnel, excellent value from B&Q only £9.99. Also in the polytunnel are spring onions and overwintering lettuce. I’ll see how the spring onions get on, but I may not bother with many more of those – they’re easy to grow but never seem to be ready when I want them, and don’t seem to store well – when they’re so ridiculously cheap in the shops all year round I might devote the space to something else.









Not pictured here are my leeks. I couldn’t get a picture because they’re too small for the human eye to detect. The biggest ones are only like the baby leeks you get from the supermarket. I suspect a combination of poor soil and late planting out.

Everyone else at Stacey Hill seems to have grown leeks as big as American fire hydrants, with their luxuriant, rust-free foliage waving and mocking me as I pass. Mine are more like pencils. And not even those big novelty pencils you get at the seaside. Mind you, they still taste good.

The trouble with seeds

Moog thinks the most annoying thing about this allotment business so far is the seeds. How anything grows in the wild apart from weeds is anyone's guess.

The most disappointing seeds so far have been French Marigolds, which I planted to add a bit of colour and fragrance to my plot (they're supposed to keep insects off too). Out of an entire packet of seeds I've got about 10 little plants. That's still good value but not the big border full of colour I was hoping for. The most successful seeds so far are lettuce and courgette seeds. The lettuces are quick and almost all of them come up and start turning into viable plants. The courgettes also produce big healthy looking seedlings, none of the spindly stems that frequently collapse as soon as you water them. Moog thinks they're in proportion to the size of the plant so maybe I just need to grow big things.

I have had the following disasters so far, which have all tested my patience to varying degrees:

1. French bean seeds rotted because they were too cold and wet (despite being on a warm window sill in a propagator). All rotted except one single solitary magic bean which now a foot tall. Replacements coming on fine.
2. Chillis and peppers took ages to germinate. Consequently I managed to separate the seeds from their labels. I was just about to give up on seeds and buy some plants from the garden centre when they all started sprouting. The trouble is, peppers and chillis are identical as seedlings so I now have no idea which plants are which. Luckily, the tomatoes I had put in different shaped pots so I can identify those.
3. Leeks came up well but it has taken me the best part of a weekend to pot them all on into bigger containers, and I have no idea if they will all survive; time will tell. I would like to know how my next door neighbour John has got leeks like sticks of rock while mine are still like blades of grass.
4. When things did come through I was slow potting them on, as I expected them to get a bit bigger first. Moog now tells me I need to pot things on as soon as the first couple of proper leaves come through, otherwise little seed trays/pots get full of roots and the plant stops growing.
5. Some plants germinate but then just fall over dead. I don't know why, I am attributing it to "damping off" according to all the books which say it is due to fungal infection. Seedlings are so fragile, I don't know how wild plants make it on their own.
6. Leggy seedlings have been a feature, as I haven't really got a suitably light-but-not-direct-sunlight place to put them. The kitchen and spare room window sills are too dark, the greenhouse is too hot. Where is the Goldilocks zone for seedlings? Any advice welcome...

First early spuds are in

My first row of early potatoes went into the ground at the beginning of April, during the couple of days warm weather we had. They're called Orla and are supposed to take 10 weeks to produce potatoes. I hope that the following weekend of snow and frosts have not had too much effect, since the shoots are not showing above ground level yet and I don't expect they will just yet. I've also managed to put them in the wrong bed according to my plan, that'll teach me for trying to be clever.

Also new to the plot this week:
- A garden bench - John next door said it was no use bringing seats down there until we'd finished all the work...
- Four rosemary bushes, partly to use for cooking and partly as a neat end to the plot.

I see young plants are available in the garden centres at this time of year, and as the cold weather has stopped me getting many seeds going I might be forced to cheat soon. Mind you, I will be filling up my greenhouse with seed trays in the next week or so. Already on the go are some marigolds to keep the flies away, and look pretty of course.