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.

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.

May

My maincrop potatoes went in during the early May bank holiday at the beginning of the month, and by the time of the next bank holiday near the end of the month I've just spotted them breaking the surface, so they've put on some good growth from chitted tubers in about 3 weeks. This adds weight to my theory that most things will catch up if planted a bit later and there is no point in putting plants into wet cold soil. They will just sulk until it warms up anyway.

That said the year seems to be flying by at an alarming rate. I have some salad seeds but it's looking like I'll need to buy some plants as well as I haven't got the seeds in the ground yet. I've already bought some squash and cucumber plants and one courgette (bit of a gamble there; don't want too many plants but if this one doesn't survive, I'll have none). They are currently residing in my old cold frame, having not built the new one yet. However, there has been a giant leap forward in cold frame technology and I have used my glass shower screen as a lid. It works really well because you can slide it open and closed, so I will consider that a success for now.

My wife and the tiny human spent quite a bit of time at the plot last weekend, and the place is now bedecked with wind chimes, streamers, garden gnomes and little fences, along with a freshly tidied-up patio area outside the shed. I always wanted part of the plot to be an ornamental garden so it's fine by me. It also means all the twee garden ornaments chosen by the tiny human can grace the plot instead of the garden at home.

Vole / Ravenous Beast

I turned my compost heap and found a vole in residence. The little creature obviously mistook me for the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal* and attempted to escape by turning its back on me and sitting still with its eyes closed, but I eventually coaxed it out of the back of the heap.
*(a ferocious but stupid creature, who assumes that if you can't see it, then it can't see you)

More warmth, more work...

A spell of decent weather and lighter evenings have meant a few extra trips to the plot of late. I have now started digging and preparing for the potatoes to go in, as well adding some manure to other areas where I think I will either grow salads or squashes. I'm deliberately limiting what I grow to things that store well or that I know will be used at home. To accommodate about 40 potato plants this year, I've started to ditch my bed system, that has been in place since I started in 2007. The aim is to reduce the amount of time I spend on maintaining infrastructure and increase the time on the plants. I've also tried to continue with my new found technique of actually doing something when I go to the plot rather than just standing around looking at it. I think I usually get more done when I'm on a short time limit, than when I have all day.

I've now finished pruning the raspberries but the supports for the netting have fallen down so that's another job for the future. I've also had to re-plant some of the onions I put in which have been strewn about by birds, spoiling my neat rows.

I'm fairly relaxed about when my crops will be planted this year. Most stuff can't go out until after the last frosts anyway, and in this part of the world that means the end of May. It's difficult to find the space and time to get seeds going at home so I may well cheat and buy some small plants at the garden centre when they become available. They can then go straight into my new cold frame, which, um, I still haven't begun constructing. But Rome wasn't built in a day, was it?

Soil (no pictures)

It's mid-April and it looks like it's time to start catching up with all the jobs I should have been doing in February and March. The cold has kept me indoors and nature has taken a break too, with most plants only now springing into life. I have noticed they wake up with amazing speed when the time is right. Last week I (finally) started pruning my raspberry canes, a job usually done sometime just after Christmas. The longer you leave it, the harder it is to tell which canes to prune. Well, last week they were just canes. This week, most of them have buds or small leaves on.

Last year's onion sets were planted in February and were well-established by April. This year with two weeks of April gone they're not even in the ground yet. I don't mind because I have some over-wintering onions which all seem to be doing OK - therefore it won't matter if my main crop is a bit late, I'll have some to fill the gap. 

So one of my first jobs of spring has been to prepare ground for the onions. I decided I ought to add more pictures of this sort of thing but being quite a fussy photographer I find it hard to capture images I'm happy with. Also, being easily distracted, I rarely remember to stop what I'm doing and take a picture when I'm working on the plot. I'm sure some of the mundane things I do would be best described by a picture. But I seem to have developed a strong urge to post pictures of bare patches of soil. I've taken some pictures and then realised when I got home that it's just an empty bit of brown earth. It's like getting home from a walk in the countryside and finding the picture you took of that brilliant view doesn't really do it justice. Perhaps another allotment gardener reading this blog might understand the feeling of having created something that goes with gardening. When I've prepared a bed I keep going back and looking at it. It feels good. Unfortunately, to the casual observer, it probably doesn't look like much.

There's a huge amount of satisfaction involved in preparing a vegetable patch. I start with a weedy square of vacant ground then remove as many weeds as I can by hand or by digging them up with a spade. I try to get as much root as possible. Then I begin turning the soil over, digging out big stones and other rubbish, and roughly chopping the big clods of soil, trying to avoid murdering worms in the process. Then I go to my compost heap and sift a wheelbarrow full of compost and return to spread it over the surface. Then I mix the compost into the top layer of soil (the worms can do the rest). I find the rake is my favoured tool for this stage, it is also used to bash big lumps of soil into smaller ones until the whole thing turns into a fine tilth ready for planting. 

Oh no it's not

A new series of gardener's world and a slight warming of the air last week, shades of spring? No, hope was swiftly crushed again by the weekend as temperatures plummeted back down to zero, minus seven with wind-chill. Strictly not gardening weather!

I visited the plot to drop off a caddy full of kitchen compost and noticed that the garlic and over-wintering onions are all doing well. The daffodils are just about to start flowering as well, although not quite. The raspberry canes still desperately need cutting back and the beds I dug over in autumn need digging again. The ever-elusive cold frame has still not been built. Still, if a job's worth doing, better not rush it, I say.

I ordered my seed potatoes last week. I have gone for Sarpo Mira (late maincrop), which I have grown before. They stored well last time. I hold out no hope for a dry summer this year so it is no coincidence that they are best known as the most blight-resistant variety available. I've also chosen Mayan Gold, an early maincrop which I heard someone enthusing about on Gardener's Question Time, so thought I would give them a go. The potatoes are supposed to make fantastic chips.

At the same time, I ordered my parsnip seeds, and along with them got the usual envelope full of catalogues, adverts etc. - including a leaflet for converting my bath into an easy-access walk-in number. Thanks, Thompson and Morgan, what are you trying to say?! Then again my back does get sore after digging, and I do have a milestone birthday on the horizon this year, maybe I'll send away for the full brochure... Argghh!

In other news, Wise Mike has procured an Autospade, and offered to lend it to me for digging the plot, so watch this space for a full report, just as soon as the spuds arrive and the temperature gets above freezing for once.

Christmas

 I ventured to the plot just before Christmas to collect my veggies for the dinner table. It had been raining solidly for a couple of days and it wasn't the sort of weather I would normally expect to be digging in! See pictures below. The parsnips were hard to get out of the ground and needed a lot of mud washing off but they are in pretty good shape, tasty roots with only a small amount of canker affecting them. I would have expected more damage considering how wet it has been.

I also unearthed the baby carrots I planted in August (at Monty Don's suggestion on Gardener's World). These were not so successful, and had succumbed to quite a lot of wireworm (?) or maybe slug damage on the outer skins. There were enough carrots for a large meal, and a few did make it onto the dinner table, but the sheer amount of work involved in peeling and removing all the damaged flesh of such small carrots was so great I gave up in the end and used shop-bought veg for the sake of my sanity. My overall verdict on this late planting method is that the crop grew quite nicely, no doubt helped by the very warm weather in September, but the germination was very erratic and the crop quite small. Leaving the roots in the ground in such a wet year left them open to attack as I had feared, and I think they would need lifting a lot sooner in future to protect from damage. I think the latest planting time would be mid-July in future, with the aim of lifting in November instead of leaving them to their own devices.

Waterlogging on the plot. Brave daffodils shoots can just be seen in the water.

parsnips, and mud. lots of mud.

Water cascading past the plot on the access road

Overwintering onions seem to be doing well

Some heartening evidence of garlic starting to sprout, but this was the only visible shoot.

It was so wet, my footprints filled up with water after digging up the parsnips.