New Year Rituals

Seed catalogues arrived on my doormat on New Year's Eve 2013, just in time to re-ignite my interest in allotmenteering for the year ahead. A few things that I'd like to try have been noted.

I also received a nice Christmas present of a few unusual seed varieties in a 'Funky Veg Kit' mostly unusually-coloured vegetables, which has inspired me to give them a go. Some I've tried before, like Swiss Chard Bright Lights, and some I haven't, like purple carrots.

I have drifted away from trying new things recently as they are rarely successful, preferring instead to stick to things I know will be reliable and that we will use in the kitchen, but I feel a change coming on for this year. After all, even courgettes were poor for me in 2013 so we didn't get much variety from the plot. Also the pest and disease-resistant varieties I have been favouring tend to be the least interesting in terms of flavour. The decent summer of 2013 has given me a bit of hope that things don't always have to be like that, so I am hoping to nurture a bit more diversity on the plot in 2014. Salads and some different potato varieties will be high up on the list. I will probably keep some tough varieties in for insurance purposes.

Autumn thoughts

The dark evenings seem to arrive so quickly it's scary. Gone are my twice-weekly visits to the plot as it slides into semi-dormant state again until March next year. But there's still plenty to be done; not quite sure when I'm going to find the time to do it all.

Visited the plot at the weekend and retrieved all my maincrop potatoes and some nice carrots, before they got washed away or destroyed by slugs. Quantity not that great but did get some absolutely huge spuds, variety Sarpo Mira, unaffected by blight and some single potatoes at least twice as big as your fist. They will make good bakers, although one potato could feed three or four people! Very hard as usual to dig them without spearing them with the fork. Had just enough time to transfer them to the shed, but will need to check through them properly and sort out the non-damaged ones for storage.

Next I need to prune the raspberry canes, finish tidying up the strawberry patch and prepare the ground for onions and garlic to go in for next year, I had forgotten that autumn can be as busy as spring down on the allotment. Wise Mike's Autospade should come in very handy for winter digging. 

Each year I think about giving up but I would miss it now, maybe one day we'll move somewhere with a bigger garden, but not yet. What I really need more of is not space, but time!

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.

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?