Harvesting overwintered onions
I’m about to head to the plot to see whether there are overwintered onions ready to harvest.
Onions have a variety of habits: some are planted in the winter, do nothing (apparently) for months and months, and then shoot into growth in spring. Others are planted in spring, and others still are sown as seed in the winter and sit in the ground through the cold months, before appearing in spring. It can be very confusing.
Basically, the little sets that you plant in the autumn are overwintering onions, also called Japanese onions. They put down roots through the winter, which is when they appear to be in suspended animation, but they are working away underground.
They will be ready to harvest any time from mid May onwards, and you should take any that start to flower first, as they won’t keep. In any case, overwintering onions don’t store well because they don’t get that papery brown outer layer that holds in the inner moisture. You need to plant spring sets to get storing onions. Overwintering onions also have thicker necks, which don’t dry, so the crop will tend to rot if left too long, either in the ground or in storage. They are immensely useful to grow in the period before storing onions are ready, and we have both reds and whites, as we like their mild, juicy nature.
Labels: allotment-overwintering-onions, radar onions, senshyu onions, storing onions
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
May potatoes, peas and beans
It’s been a struggle to find a good time to earth up the potatoes this month! It’s been more like ‘mud up’ to be honest, and while that’s good in one way (mud is an excellent light excluder, so there’s little chance of green potatoes in our harvest) in another way it makes it really difficult to get the earth to mound up, which apparently increases the potato harvest, and it also means that when the weather finally becomes warm (if it ever does) there’s a high risk of the former mud becoming a nice solid crust around the spuds, especially if you have a high clay content soil, and that’s difficult to break up and dig the spuds out of without spearing a few on the way.
The peas are enjoying the weather though, proof that every cloud really does have a silver lining. They are a cool season crop and have a high range of pollinators, so as long as the sun gets out from time to time, they will do fine and the longer it stays cool, the longer they will produce flowers for.
The broad beans have struggled this year. We lost our first seedlings to rats in the snow, and the second lot have come up well but seem to be lacking pollinators. Most broad beans are pollinated by bees, although they can also be pollinated by almost anything that brushes against the plant (a bit trigger happy, are broad beans) which is usually reliable but when there is a lot of heavy rain, the raindrops knock the plant about a bit, it drops the pollen which is immediately washed down to ground level and swept away by more rain, so pollination can be difficult in wet months … and that’s what we’ve been having since February!
Labels: allotment -crops, allotment-broad beans, allotment-potatoes
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on
Monday, May 14, 2012
Garlic: wild and cultivated
Our cultivated garlic is looking sturdy in the rain, but it will be a while before there is anything to harvest. I know that some people advocate harvesting immature bulbs at this time of year, as they have a delicious mild flavour but honestly – who’s going to do that unless they have a total garlic glut already? And even if I did have a garlic glut, I’d be worried that something would wipe out my crop before harvesting.
At present, we haven’t found that the old adage for garlic ‘plant on the shortest day, harvest on the longest’ holds true. We do try to plant around 21 December, but we’re not usually harvesting until early August. That’s a long time away from now, and I’m not pulling up any of my garlic at this stage, just in case some marauding fox comes and digs some of it up in June (it’s happened before) and leaves me without enough to get through the winter.
Meantime though, there are Ramsons. Wild garlic is pretty, invasive and dead easy to grow. It can’t be mistaken for anything else because it smells like garlic (only milder) and in April and May it’s a delight to eat. The bulbs aren’t a lot of cop, to be honest, it’s the leaves that are the tasty part: use them like chives in an omelette or make Ramson soup, which is delicious and not as anti-social as garlic soup!
Labels: garlic-crop, ramsons
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
End of month allotment recipe: Kale crisps
Kale crisps are delicious and easy to make.
1. Strip some small kale leaves from the plant: this time of year, overwintered plants will be putting out new growth along the stem and that’s ideal.
2. Preheat oven to 160-180 Celsius – use the lower temperature if your oven runs hot, higher if it runs cool.
3. Wash and tear out any large kale ribs – if it’s second year growth there probably won’t be any.
4. Dry in a tea-towel.
5. Put 1 tablespoon vegetable oil and your choice of dressings in a large plastic bag (make sure the bag doesn’t have airholes in the bottom!)
6. Shake to combine, then add kale leaves, blow into bag to add air, grip top firmly and shake again to coat evenly in dressing.
7. Pour onto a large low-sided baking tray and spread out. Put in oven for 10 minutes, take out of oven, shake to redistribute and put in for a further 5-7 minutes.
They come out of the oven crisp and delicious – even haters of greens will eat them. Don’t add any salt, as they are quite salty enough. Delicious served in a big bowl with a roast dinner or eaten while watching a good film on TV on a rainy afternoon.
You can experiment with dressings. We particularly like:
Smoky
Half a teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon walnut oil
Oriental
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Spicy
Pinch ground chilli powder
1 teaspoon mustard seed
Half a teaspoon chilli oil
Half a teaspoon maple syrup.
Labels: allotment cooking, allotment crops, allotment-hungry-gap, allotment-kale, allotment-recipes
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on
Monday, April 30, 2012
Plant and go away propagators for cucurbits
These are my favourite toys, for three reasons:
1. They recycle an otherwise single use bit of rubbish
2. They allow us to plant seeds and go away for a week, without worry
3. They are fun to make!
The wick conveys water so you can be quite reckless about going away and leaving your plants, and as long as you don’t fill to the top, the clear plastic rim creates a nice warm, breeze-free micro-climate that supports squashes, pumpkins and cucumbers for their first few days of growth – after that they crawl out of the planter and take over the windowsill, so hearty are they!
Take a 1.5 litre or 2 litre pop bottle and cut it in half, ensuring the bottom half is slightly taller than the top half
Drill a hole in the lid, big enough to take a doubled cotton-rich string about 40 cm long
Make a knot in the string, so that a couple of inches stick up through the lid and the loose ends hang down beneath
Put the lid back on the bottle
Fill the upper half of the bottle with soil, pulling the loop of string to the centre so it runs up through the compost/potting medium. Fill the bottom of the bottle with water
Sow two cucumber, pumpkin or squash seeds in the soil, edge on – it’s best to label the planter at stage 2, but I always forget until this point!
Here’s the one we made earlier – a bird scarer to hang in our apple trees – it’s over the currant bushes, so we hope it will deter some birds when the fruit begins to set. The key with any bird scarer is to keep moving it around, as birds soon get used to something that’s always in the same place.
This week I was workshopping with people on the subject of the hungry gap. The hungry gap is the opposite of a movable feast – it’s a movable famine! It happens sometime between late February and Mid April, depending on location and weather, and it means there’s almost nothing growing that can be eaten – lots of stuff growing but not yet edible, and lots of last year’s stuff that too old, dry, tough, woody or just manky, to put in a cooking pot.
It’s the time of year when one has to get creative with what’s available. Dried pulses are great at this time of year – we have borlotti beans and soldier beans, both of which are really good when cooked slowly with a tomato sauce and served with a green salad of the first spring leaves, such as rocket and basil, lovage and tarragon.
Also harvestable are purple-sprouting and perennial broccoli, all the kales (recipe for Kale Crisps to follow in next post) and the very last of the overwintered onions and leeks. There may be some bendy swedes, carrots and parsnips still around too, but make sure you cut out the woody cores. All year round cabbages are good now - the whitefly and caterpillars haven't arrive yet but they are too tough and bitter for the slugs and snails to want to bother with, having been established since January.
If you’re lucky you may also have the first of this year’s early radishes, and if the bottom pods are set, and about an inch and a half long, you may want to pick out your broad bean tops and stir fry them in butter – my experience is that if you don’t the blackfly get them, so it’s both tasty and desirable to prevent them having a free meal (and infesting the plant) at your expense.
The rain is stopping us doing very much on the allotment at present. OH has been to the plot today to plant peas – as a cool season crop, peas really rather enjoy the April showers and anything short of total waterlogging will please them more than a hot day.
In between dodging showers we’re doing structural work. The bamboo that we cut from the garden a few weeks ago is still supple enough to be shaped, and while it may not be strong enough to act as a support, it can be strengthened.
The picture shows a bamboo wind-break. It will be sunk into the ground at a point where plot #103 is very windy, or where we tend to cut corners and walk across the plot instead of using the path. If it’s the former, we’ll grow a nasturtium up it, to provide a crop (lovely flowers and leaves for salads and seeds to pickle like capers in autumn) and reinforce the wind-break’s power. If it’s the latter, we’ll hang stuff off it that might come in useful: a couple of bits of wire, some plant clips, and a hook on which to put gloves or a hat if we get too hot to wear them, or hang pruners or a trowel when we’ve finished with it. That way we can just look around the plot at the end of the day and identify all the strewn belongings that would otherwise blend in with the soil. It’s a much easier task to gather up all the tools and kit when we’ve got a series of landmarks beside which we’ve placed them.
OH will be teaching this kind of structure building in September. But in the meantime I’m working on something else – here’s the half-way stage!
Set in a sunny place and watch them thrive!
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