Little helper on the plot

The conversation went something like this:

ME: 'Look, I am putting up this string and hanging some shiny CDs on it to scare the birds away.'

TINY HUMAN: 'Ooh, can I help?'

ME: 'Yes of course.'

[Tiny Human then potters off and spends quite a while digging a hole to put a piece of bamboo cane in. She then soaks the ground with several watering cans of water, and smooths it with a broom.]

TINY HUMAN: "Look Dad, the bird will see that shiny disc, and go "arrgh" and fly off, but he'll fly into this stick, and fall into the mud and get stuck. It's bird-mud."

ME: 'Oh. Well done, I would never have thought of that.'

After that, we picked strawberries.

Hello my name is Moog and I have too many cucumbers (now with pictures)

You may consider my recent lack of blog posts as a stunned silence. The reason, for the first time ever since taking on my plot, we have been basking in what can only be described as a 'summer.' Yes, you read that right. Think for a minute. When was the last time a British summer wasn't declared a washout by the tabloid press (and by me)? I'll tell you, it was 2006. Just before I started allotment gardening.

This has led to a period of new discoveries for me. of course no allotment year is ever exactly the same, but a certain depressing regularity has formed, mainly involving failures caused by too much rain and cloud. This year, after a ridiculously cold spring, we've been treated to nearly a month of wall-to-wall sunshine. It rather caught me out as I've never actually experienced a year like it on the plot. Suddenly, things they say in gardening books started to make sense. Like, "you can hoe on a dry day" and "don't forget to water stuff." Suddenly, crops (and weeds) have started behaving like they're supposed to.

Since my last post, harvesting has begun and taken up large amounts of my time, along with watering in all the hot weather. First I started harvesting my over-wintered onions, some of which grew so large that there was no space between them - from sets planted a hand-span apart to begin with.

Then came the strawberries. I have never seen so many. They started ripening mid-way through Wimbledon fortnight and didn't stop until the end of the Tour de France (I find sporting events a good way to plan the year). Our freezer is full to bursting waiting for jam-making to commence, and so, for a while, were our bellies. Raspberries followed somewhat later with a decent crop but have not been so prolific as the strawberries. This is a nice payback for the grim moments I remember from last year, trying to harvest strawberries in the rain. This year it was done with the sun on my back and the Iseley Brothers' Summer Breeze playing through my headphones. The strawberries, warmed by the sun, were sweet and delicious.

Strawberries

Toward the end of July as rain began to threaten, I harvested my garlic, which had done all the growing it was going to do, and my maincrop onions which were threatening to get too large. I also wanted to take them out of the ground before they could be re-energised into growth by the rains. Salad onions have also just got big enough to eat, and I have a very large row of salad bowl lettuce. I am surprised the lettuce hasn't bolted yet. It goes limp if you try to harvest leaves at the plot, so I have taken to potting up plants and taking them home that way. With a plastic bag over the bottom of the pot to retain moisture they have kept re-growing at home.

Main onion crop drying in the shed

And now, I have too many cucumbers. Both plants (variety "Ridge Burples") survived this year and broke out of their plastic tunnel. At first they were only ripening slowly and I got one or two in mid-July, but a visit to the plot yesterday in the first week of August produced no less than 9 large cucumbers. They are delicious, but we have too many. The plants have taken over an entire 4x9ft bed and are now exploring outside it too.

Butternut squash coming on at last

Other crops have been slow to catch up. pumpkins and squashes are only now getting going and we have only had two courgettes from the single plant I purchased. If there were more plants, you could guarantee each one would be heavy with fruit, I suppose. But at least this way I don't have a glut, as I do with cucumbers. Parsnips have failed to germinate this year, I have just a few very young specimens that won't be big enough to produce good roots this year. Potato plants are doing well, but have a few gaps in the rows, one of which has been filled by a rather spectacular volunteer tomato plant.

Volunteer tomato plant, variety unknown

Thankfully I have been able to keep up with watering and harvesting due to the lack of growth in both weeds and grass - meaning less mowing and weeding. I have, however, let a rather large infestation of bindweed creep up on me, and the potatoes in particular are badly choked by it. My wildflowers didn't germinate very well either, but every now and again a new flower pops up and the seeds will probably keep doing that over the years to come.

My first attempt at a wild flower display

New fruit cage and latest photos

Time for a post with some photos. Here is my new raspberry cage which is made from two tripods to resist falling over. I am quite pleased to have come up with this much better-engineered solution than my original method of whacking single poles straight into the hard ground, only for them to inevitably fall over. It has so far resisted unseasonable gale force winds so should do the trick. The netting is from Harrod Horticultural and whilst expensive has withstood the test of time. Excellent stuff. In the foreground, maincrop potatoes.

Raspberry protection

Next up, strawberries are doing well and are now under netting. They are planted a bit too close together really, I will plant my next lot much further apart. They need fresh air and get mouldy and rotten if we have wet conditions, such as last year's wet summer.

Strawberry patch

 In the distance behind the strawberries you can see onions and a small row of Salad Bowl lettuce. Here is a better picture of my nice neat overwintered onion rows. They are nearly ready, they look so good it will almost be a shame to harvest them. I think I will put some speedy salad veg in their place when they come up.

Neat onion rows

 Here is a closer view of the companion planted area at the front of the plot. Allotments are a haven for all sorts of pests so the carrots are planted in between two rows of garlic to guard against carrot fly. The garlic will come out before the carrots but the chives and onions will hopefully put the flies off the scent too. I'm also using resistant variety 'Flyaway' for maximum protection.

Carrots, companion planted with garlic chives and onions

 Finally here's a long shot of the plot. Cucumbers are under the plastic tunnel to the right. The long grass on the far right is my neighbour's fruit bushes, he is, by his own admission, slowing down, and can't keep up with this bit of his plot at the moment, although the rest of it is still in perfect condition.

The plot, June 2013. Note huge young dog in background by the shed.

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.

Depths of winter

I was able to supply parsnips and potatoes for the Christmas dinner table this year. Potatoes were from storage, parsnips were straight out of the ground (well cleaned and cooked first, obviously!). There are a lot of forked and twisted roots this year as I grew the parsnips in poorer soil than before, but they clean up OK with plenty left to eat. I seem to have lost my knack to roast properly and keep burning them, so more practice is definitely required.

There was one chance over Christmas when I had a clear day to go and do some more tidying up, so Scarecrow was stripped of his Christmas suit - although since I was last at the plot we've had really strong winds so I expect he'll be having a lie down when I return. I also cleared a few barrows of weeds, finished pruning the raspberry canes and mulched them ready for next year. I've found work done in the winter to prepare and keep tidy saves a lot of time in the spring and summer. I've taken to removing weeds right off the plot now, rather than composting or burning - it's too wet to burn, and I don't want them laying around rotting on the plot as they'll only re-grow. I'm pleased to report the garlic has finally decided to start growing, their familiar hard green shoots emerging like the tip of Excalibur rising from the lake. Hopefully the bulbs have put on a good amount of root growth under the soil.

I was able to donate some strawberry runners to a fellow plot holder who has done a remarkable amount of work, just round the corner out of sight from me. Pete and Jo, who are (I presume) retired have been spending every available day since late summer working on their two plots. One is a traditional veg plot, the other is like a pretty garden - still in its early stages but by summer it's going to look beautiful. I'm very impressed and will try to post some photos later in the year.

I still haven't really started my gardening 2012, despite having a bulging seed box to sort out, the latest seed catalogues to read, and a garden centre voucher burning a hole in my wallet. Hopefully I'll find time to make some plans and blog about them in the next week or two.

Summer update: jam

It's been a while since I've had time to blog. Work continues on the plot of course, assisted, sometimes punctuated by, the tiny human. Over the summer I've been combining evening trips to the plot with dog-walking duties, so Moog has had more than his normal share of visits.

Mrs Moog Keeper has mastered the art of making jam this year, so instead of having no idea what to do with all our raspberries, we now have a steady supply of delicious jam. In fact I now can't keep up the supply of raspberries to match Mrs Moog Keeper's new-found appetite for jam-making. Thankfully the autumn bliss variety is just coming through to keep her in fruit. I may have to extend the amount of fruit I grow at this rate. Jam can be very easily made in the microwave, I recommend trying it. All you need is the fruit, some jars, plus some special jam sugar (easily found in the sugar section of the supermarket)- there's a recipe on the side of the pack.

Sadly we were not able to make such good use of the strawberries which looked so promising earlier in the year. The plants were laden with young fruit at one point, but I think mainly due to a lack of watering at the critical time (remember the really dry spring we had?), lots of them dropped off the plants, still green. We had a reasonable crop but not as good as I was expecting. Better luck next year.