Playing catch-up

It's official; it's a terrible gardening year. Monty Don said so on Gardener's World, and Terry Walton said so on Gardener's Click. All my allotmenteering friends and neighbours agree, too. This knowledge has lifted my spirits, because now, I'm not alone. I was getting a bit downhearted and wondering why I bother, but now I know everyone else has had collapsing seedlings, poor yields, slug attacks and phenomenal weed growth, I feel in good company. There's a sort of blitz spirit, perhaps if we keep our heads down we might just get through it.


Photgraphic proof that the sun did shine, albeit briefly, in 2012

Monty said it's not too late to plant things so I followed his example and got some baby carrot seeds into the ground. I may not have many potatoes for Christmas this year but maybe I'll have a few carrots instead. I also put some dwarf French beans ('crops in 7 weeks', the packet says) and when I have cleared a space, I will put some spring onions in as well.

In other positive news, there are some peas and beans on their way through soon, and I await with interest to see if my cucumbers are edible.  They are about the size of a small sausage presently and looking good. We've had some new potatoes, although they're a bit bigger and fatter than I would have liked. I've never actually been able to time new potato growing properly, they either get killed by frost or I let them grow too big. They should breed a variety that grows a little stalk with a flag on it when the potatoes are at optimum size.

Lots of other plots are looking much more overgrown than mine. I'm disappointed to see a few newly-rented plots have already been left to be reclaimed by the weeds, the new gardeners no doubt as dispirited as I have been this year. I guess having no experience to tell them things might get better (if not easier), they have given up. Having said that, I started working my plot in 2007 which was, at the time, one of the wettest summers ever seen, and I'm still here. So perhaps the expectations of these new entrants are too high, or they just don't have the staying power that is needed.

One pleasant side-effect of tall weeds everywhere is that quite a few wild flowers are blooming, and I had thought of just letting mine grow and calling it 'prairie planting' like they do on TV. Only a couple of weeks ago the grass was waist high in places. However, the lack of good growth and harvesting has meant I have been able to spend my last few visits to the plot catching up with the weeds, and it is beginning to look like a plot that is cared for once again.

I've also started dismantling the wooden borders I had been putting round my beds. The grand plan was to fill them up like raised beds, but of course I have never had the volume of compost or topsoil available to do that properly. The boards do mark out the edges nicely, but in reality they get in the way, and mainly harbour slugs and other menaces, so they're coming out. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to come to this decision, perhaps it's because I didn't want to undo the hard work of putting them in. But I am learning that allotmenteering is more successful when you accept that nothing is permanent, and you work with what you've got, not against it.

Murder in a green and pleasant land

Ah, England, that land which is kept forever green by a never-ending supply of rain. The green, when you look closely, consists mainly of weeds.  

Turns out I was right to scoff at the experts when they forecast a year-long drought; I mean, have the people who say this sort of thing ever been to the UK? If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s that whatever the weather, it won’t be what you want.

The lack of sunshine has stalled my climbing beans, whilst the squashes (courgette, pumpkin and butternut squash) are all just sitting sulking instead of romping away like usual. One cucumber has managed to survive but again isn't doing much. My tomato house is up, assisted with four stakes, some bamboo canes, zip-ties, string and several bricks to stop it flying away in the constant, unseasonal gale-force winds.

Meanwhile, the damp conditions have brought my strawberries, raspberries and onions on well, but very slowly, so they are under constant attack from snails and slugs. Snails are more evident and I have caught a number of them committing suicide by crawling over the top of my strawberry netting and getting stuck. Unfortunately the weed-control fabric that keeps the plants from being over-run is also the ideal hidey-hole for invertebrates.  

Last week, my gardening friend and colleague Derek recounted how he had visited his plot on a damp evening and been greeted by a huge army of marauding slugs. He bravely slaughtered as many of them as possible until he found himself, like the soldiers in the movie Aliens, out of ammo and still surrounded by a rising tide of slime. I can empathise with the sinking sensation of doom, having fought similar battles with other pests but I was feeling quite pleased that I haven’t seen that many slugs this year. Unfortunately, I must have thought that a bit too loudly because karma overheard and my last trip to the plot was accompanied by a light rain shower and a gastropod plague of biblical proportions. I thought the strawberries were bad, with both slugs and snails queuing up to munch the ripest fruit, until I saw the onions and garlic, each plant wilting under the weight of three or four slugs each. Some just a few millimetres in size, some huge.

So, with the same feeling of being surrounded by an enemy horde, I was forced to make a stand and despatch as many of the offending creatures as I could get hold of. I would like to say to any Buddhists reading that it’s not something I greatly enjoyed doing and I feel sure that if I’m ever brought to account by a higher power for the number of living things I have destroyed, the foreman of the jury is very likely to be a slug or snail.

Unfortunately despite my attempt at slug genocide I fear I have only stemmed the first wave, and I felt the sensation of doom rise up in me too.  

On the plot, no-one can hear you scream.

Maincrop harvest

Finally harvested the 'Cara' maincrop potatoes last week, quite a big haul - two big shopping bags as heavy as I could lift into the car. A few have been spoiled by slugs and little worms (not sure if they are wireworm or eelworm, and can't be bothered to look it up right now). Those will be used first, and hopefully we'll have enough to last until Christmas.

Am I Organic?

When I say organic, I'm not talking about the smells that come from The Moog here. I mean my approach to allotment gardening. I thought I'd probably be using mostly organic methods, but it's much harder than you might imagine. How organic is organic? How far do I need to go?These are some of the things that have come up lately:

How do I know if my beanpoles are from an ethical source? It doesn't say on the pack, but I can't grow beans without them. I expect my mesh and netting are produced in a plastics factory somewhere too, which uses oil and pollutes the atmosphere. But if I don't use them, the birds will eat my crops.

How do I fertilise my crops if I can't use chemicals? The instructions that came with my garlic bulbs say "spread sulphate of potash around the plants". Well, I've got some sulphate of potash, but it doesn't say "organic" on the label, and I'm pretty sure it looks like the sort of stuff that was produced in some vast chemical plant somewhere. I don't know how it was made, or where, or what from, or what the consequences for the environment were. All I know is that it was £1.59, when the organic fertiliser (which, I hasten to add, made no mention of "potash" at all) was £4.99. I realised in the shop that I don't know enough about fertilisers to choose the right alternative.

How do I keep slugs off if I don't use pellets? HA! I'm winning here. That one I've answered by using nematodes, I hope. I've watered in the special powder and I hope that it'll at least keep the numbers down, even if it doesn't completely remove them. I have used the same stuff at home to good effect. That means I don't have to use the little blue pellets as much, which must be a good thing.

Can I cut out peat completely? I try to buy peat-free compost, but the quality is really variable, it's more expensive and harder to find in the garden centre. If you let it get too dry it's almost impossible to make it soak up water again. Also, I like to use the little peat pots for my seedlings, because they don't need pricking out, you just plant the pot. Surely that's got to be better than using a disposable plastic tray? Which is best, saving the peat bogs, or using less oil to make plastic?

There's a lot of talk about organic gardening, and lots of the old fashioned chemicals have been banned now anyway. So I've decided to do what feels best to me - not what anyone else says. For example; I'll use sulphate of potash until I find out what the right organic alternative is. I'll make my own compost, but I'll burn stuff too. And I'll use peat pots - not because I don't care about peat bogs, but because I've had to spend hours and hours digging bits of old plastic out of my plot; and it really made me think about the amount of plastic that goes to landfill or gets dumped in the environment. If the government ban something I've been using, I'll move to something else; but for now, I'll just use my best judgement.

It's not that easy being green.