Time for an update

One of the strange things about 2013 so far is that the weather has been very poor, but I have actually been able to keep up with jobs better than I usually do. I think it is partly because the very cold weather has stopped weeds taking over, as well as delaying planting times for my own crops. Added to this, I made a concerted effort to reduce the amount of infrastructure - paths, raised borders etc. and the lack of maintenance has left me time to carry on with more important jobs. I'm also getting much better at focusing my time on being productive; every time I visit the plot I set myself some goals and usually achieve them.

Things are progressing so well I've found I needed to scribble a plan for the first time in a few years. I usually carry it all in my head but I felt a plan was in order this week as I began to run out of space. Regular visitors to this blog will note the technicolour computer drawings of 2007-08 are long gone! We're now in back-of-an-envelope territory and I think I feel better for it.

Allotment plan, 2013

The plan shows where I've started to remove the smaller beds for the potatoes, onions etc and move to an open-plan, more traditional dug-ground system. This means less work maintaining paths and more growing space. I use scaffold planks to walk on the soil between the rows instead. The beds shown with a slightly heavier border are the ones that are not planted yet. The top of the plot is quite shady, so vegetable growing is concentrated on the lower side and the less productive areas are used for things that are less dependent on conditions. I plan to get rid of the two lower strawberry beds and move younger plants further up the plot after they finish fruiting.

Sleeping, not dead

Awful weather in November has made it really hard to get to the plot. Any dry days have been taken up with other things so I'm grateful that the plot is in semi-hibernation at the moment.

I was able to pop in and collect the last of my maincrop carrots and the first of my parsnips last week, but that is about it. No more progress on the tidying up and winter digging I wanted to do. My cold frame project is two years overdue and I had grand plans to move the raspberries but that will probably never happen. I am pleased to report that the overwintering onion sets have started to sprout, as has quite a lot of couch grass, despite my best efforts to weed out the roots. We ran out of stored onions a couple of weeks ago, although they fared remarkably well in storage given the miserably damp conditions in which I harvested them.  Only one or two were  unusable due to neck rot where they didn't dry out properly.

It was very satisfying to have no less than four allotment products on the table with a late November roast dinner. They were garlic, potatoes, carrots and parsnips. The parsnips were tasty but I have high hopes that they will now just keep tasting better as we have had a few days of really cold and frosty conditions. I'm also hoping the cold will have kick-started the garlic into life, as there was no sign of it last week. I have some baby carrots still in the ground, I'm hoping nothing has attacked them under the surface as I want to have them at Christmas. The spuds usually last us until then too, but it was a poor year and we've almost run out. I have heard that there may be a shortage, or at least increase in price of seed potatoes next year because of the weather.

Tidy

It seems hard to imagine, standing on a sun-baked plot in September that just a few weeks ago we thought it might never stop raining. One of the benefits of having had most of my crops ruined by this year's weather is that I can find time to do all those tidying up jobs that I never normally get round to. So the plot is looking quite tidy at the moment and I've even managed to do some autumn digging. Today I managed to dig up and burn a lot of weed roots and got rid of a big bag of rubbish. When the plot is tidy I feel more in tune with it, I hope weather and time continues to let me keep on top of it.

It's easier to see the structure of the plot when it's tidy too. I'm thinking of making more of an effort next year to get the top part of the plot shaped a bit more like a garden, with flowers for cutting and maybe some shrubs or herbs. The end of the plot closest to the shed is never very productive for veg growing. I think maybe some wild flowers would work better if the soil is poor. It was always my intention to have the plot as a garden with a mixture of planting but sometimes, like this year, I don't plant as many flowers and I always miss them.


 

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.

A bit chilly

The whole country has been stuck with sub-zero temperatures for a while now; no point in writing about that when so much has been written and said already (Google News returns over 5,500 articles on 'cold Britain') - the British obsession of talking about the weather knows no bounds when a couple of snowflakes arrive. I can stand the cold by wrapping up warm, and it can be a very pretty time of year, but it's the lack of daylight that really gets me.

As I haven't ventured out much lately, the kitchen scraps for the compost heap have been building  up at home, so I was forced to venture to the plot to empty the overflowing caddy. It was five degrees below zero on my car's thermometer so I didn't stop long.

Everything was covered in a thick frost except for the pile stable manure that the council have dumped near the entrance, which was gently steaming and adding to the mist. I did take a couple of barrows of the stuff but it is mainly straw and wood shavings - the latter I have been warned not to use as soil improver as they actually decrease the nutrients available to plants while they rot.

I took the opportunity to retreive some more parsnips. Being so large I have only used a couple of them so far this winter, leaving plenty left for Christmas dinner. I expected the ground to be frozen like concrete but was pleasantly surprised to find there was just a thin frozen crust. Underneath it was, well, just soil. I turned a couple of spades over so the local robin red breast could have a go at finding some worms, then made my way home to defrost with a cup of cocoa.

Beautiful British Weather

Yesterday Moog and me popped down to the allotment for a bit of harvesting. Of course it rained, but I got down to picking French beans by the handful, giant courgettes, peas, a few carrots and a lettuce for the fridge while Moog sat patiently on the bench.

While harvesting I discovered some of my carrots are split. This is a shame as they won't store very well now. The cause? Our Beautiful British Summer. Apparently carrots split when they start growing suddenly due to heavy rain after a dry spell, which is exactly what we've had. Moog thinks I should have watered them more when it was hot and dry, but then I can only find these things out with experience, and Moog was noticeably lacking in advice at the right time - hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I can only hope the weather hasn't also done for my onions, as I was hoping to store them well into next year.