Allotment Blog

Harvesting overwintered onions

2012-05-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

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.

May potatoes, peas and beans

2012-05-14T09:09:00.001-07:00

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!

Garlic: wild and cultivated

2012-05-08T03:28:00.000-07:00

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!

End of month allotment recipe: Kale crisps

2012-04-30T03:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Plant and go away propagators for cucurbits

2012-04-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

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!
Water each planter well from the top, on the first occasion and give it a nice tap to ensure any air pockets inside the soil collapse so the ‘wick’ can convey water easily

Set in a sunny place and watch them thrive!

Pests, Predators and Hungry Gaps

2012-04-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Allotment structures

2012-04-19T06:04:00.002-07:00

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!

Rain, irrigation and seeds

2012-04-12T07:35:00.002-07:00

It’s really easy to get convinced, with spring showers, that there’s enough water. But just in case you’re a water optimist, here’s a great picture to show why we need to check water, not just make assumptions, especially with tender plants and seedlings.

This is one of our espaliered apple trees. Under it, this winter, we planted garlic. Garlic doesn’t like to be overly wet, so I knew that the trees would shield the plants from a lot of the winter rain, but wouldn’t keep the frost off them. They like a good month of zero or sub-zero nights, do garlic. In spring, we put in a couple of rows of shallots - also plants that don't like too much water.

In the trees, through the winter, we put hanging baskets filled with winter pansies etc. They don’t make a huge show, but they do give a bit of winter colour and at this time of year, they keep the birds off the broad beans etc – for some reason birds love to tear at tender foliage in spring, and I’d rather let them have the pansies than tangle them in netting that can tear off their toes. We do put metal mesh over our shallots and garlic until they are well established.

The picture shows a perfect rain shadow, the size of the bottom of a hanging basket, hung in a leafless tree. If I’d planted seeds in that area, they would still be completely arid and unable to germinate, even though the soil either side is nicely moist.

For seeds, soil moisture matters at the depth they are planted. For plants it is anything from ten to forty centimetres below ground, depending on their root system. Checking the surface of the soil is useless in either case, you need to asses the soil at the depth the plant is growing.

Perennial Broccoli

2012-04-10T08:13:00.002-07:00

Sunday’s allotment haul included the first head from one of our two perennial broccoli. I’m quietly pleased by this, as OH was becoming pessimistic about our chances of a harvest, but I haven’t admitted to him that I have some rather different doubts about them.

Those doubts are threefold:

1. How are they going to cope when we take the brassica cage off them and move it to its new location? Will they be destroyed by cabbage whites/birds?
2. How much staking are they going to need? They are already pretty tall, and can only get taller over the next two to three years, and that means quite a lot of support.
3. What do they take from the soil over their lifetime? Brassicas are hungry feeders and perennials always change the soil composition around their root system, so a perennial brassica is going to be pretty demanding of its surroundings.

The seed companies have very little information about harvesting and maintenance of the plants, which I find is an increasingly common problem with seed packets – everything is treated like an annual, even if it isn’t!

That apart, the flavour is excellent and it’s going to be interesting to get these tall plants incorporated into edible landscaping, where they can provide height and structure for a planting scheme that aims to be attractive, useful and environmentally low-impact.

Container growing

2012-04-06T07:10:00.002-07:00

Plot #103 has been given two agricubes to grow things in! They are easy to assemble and made largely of natural materials apart from the (plastic) base and the cable ties that hold the sides together.

I certainly found it easy to assemble a cube on my own, and as I’m pretty ham fisted, this was quite an unexpectedly pleasurable part of the job.

We’re going to be using the cubes through the year to test their utility for container growing on allotments or in gardens. The Grow and Tell workshop team helped me to plant up the first one.

We found several issues in filling the planter:

1. Watering will not be easy, especially with a hosepipe ban. We opted for a drainpipe filled with stones and with downward facing holes drilled into it, to act as a water feed system.
2. Planting seeds between the slats was hit and miss – next time we will try using a seed planter to get an even row, but even then, getting the right amount of soil coverage over the seeds was tricky.
3. We wondered about the performance of the four sides of the planter: the north side will get very little light, the south side will get a lot of sun and the east side is exposed to prevailing winds.

We planted the same crop in the same slat on each side to compare growth and a short row of the same seeds in open ground as a control. To date we have spring onions, radishes, spicy salad, green salad and carrots, with some leftover broad bean seedlings planted in the top along with limnanthes seeds to encourage ladybirds to visit the planter.

Potatoes and strawberries

2012-04-03T04:30:00.005-07:00

The Rocket potatoes we planted as part of the workshop on 18 March are living up to their name. They have broken surface from the trenches in which the students so carefully set them. We planted them on a bed of combined comfrey, grass and friable soil. The comfrey has to be torn so that the ribs, stems and flowers aren’t included in the trench as the plant is invasive and it can definitely take over anywhere it gets a chance to put down roots. It’s an unmatched producer of plant-friendly nutrients though, and in conjunction with grass clippings which offer moisture and warmth, and friable soil that allows roots to push down strongly, it’s a winning combination for growing things like spuds.

So the potatoes are on their way, and that’s great news for those who like new potatoes – which we do, very much!

Strawberries are a different issue though. Our strawberries are in full flower, which is a little early on last year, but given this is their second (optimum) year in the bed, it’s a wonderful sign. The weather isn’t so wonderful though, and after strawing the berries to keep them lifted from the ground, I had a bit of a panic at the weather forecast and went back and put fleece over them to keep the air frost off.

There are differing views about early strawberries and frost. Some say that strawberries take it in their stride, others that it can deform and distort the growth pattern of the berry if it takes an air frost. I know that I like strawberries a lot and don’t like the ones that curl over and have tightly packed seeds which can taste bitter, so for ten minutes extra work, I was happy to get a simple cover over the bed to try and prevent that happening. Of course it’s a lot easier if you have your strawberries in a raised bed, as we do, to cover them, and that’s just one reason I always make a strawberry bed rather than have them in the ground alongside other crops. The other reasons are:

1. The extra height of the soil in the bed ensures that water runs down and away from the berries and water is a major contributor to strawberry mildew.
2. The soil in the bed can be controlled better – strawberries are greedy and need a lot of nutrients.
3. Watering is easier in a raised bed – I can give the plants extra water through bottle watering without losing most of it to the surrounding soil. Strawberries need a lot of water to grow well.
4. Slug and snail control is easier in a raised bed – whether I go for pellets, sand, barrier methods, salt or nematodes, I can use the bed to act as a boundary.

End of month recipe

2012-03-28T08:36:00.005-07:00

I think it would be fun to have an allotment recipe to finish each month, don’t you?

This month it’s time to use up stored squashes and pumpkins, at least in our house. The reasons are threefold:

1. the longer you store squashes, the tougher the outer skin gets, so cutting into an overwintered pumpkin can seem to require power tools - or at least an axe!
2. once we get into the madness of spring planting, and transplanting, and watering and so on, we forget to check our stored foods so well, and we’ve often lost a squash or two because they started to rot and we haven’t noticed the soft spot until the whole thing was unsalvageable (squashes go bad really quickly!)
3. we’re using up stuff that we’ve overwintered: the last of the kale, the purple sprouting broccoli, the last of the overwintered (rather bendy) parsnips and carrots, so it’s a good time to clear out the squashes too, to make way soon for fresh broad beans etc.

This recipe always work for me because it’s random looking and delicious tasting - you don't have to be able to cook pretty to make this, and people will always ask you to cook it again!

Freeform roasted squash parcel

• Around 750 grams butternut or Turk’s turban squash, peeled and chunked
• 2 cloves unpeeled garlic
• 1 large onion
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 100 grams strong cheddar
• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary
• 1 packet shortcrust pastry or home made pastry (around 400 grams)

Roast the pumpkin and the garlic cloves in olive oil for about 30 minutes until the pumpkin is tender when tested. Tip the pumpkin into a colander to cool and squeeze the garlic cloves with a fork to extract the pulp.

Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the sliced onion for about ten minutes before reducing the heat slightly and stirring in the sugar and vinegar and cook for a further ten minutes stirring so it caramelises. Remove from the heat and stir in the pumpkin and garlic and leave to one side to cool a little.

Roll out the pastry between two sheets of greaseproof paper so it forms a large square. Lift the top sheet away and then put the pastry, on the bottom sheet, on a baking tray. Pour the pumpkin and onion mixture into the middle and chop the rosemary, strewing it over vegetables and then sprinkle the grated or crumbled cheddar on top. Pull up on the paper to fold the edges of the pastry in and then pinch them to form corner joins.

Put in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes, until crisp. It's delicious!

Allotment blackcurrants

2012-03-26T08:44:00.003-07:00

This is the time of year when birds peck the tender flowering buds of currants. Nobody seems to be entirely sure why they do this: some say it’s the moisture content of the buds they are going for and others say it’s an astringency in much the same way as dogs and cats tend to eat grass in spring. What I do know is that it can be annoying and even stop there being any harvest at all, come summer!

So we net or cover our currants now, and keep the birds off. But before we net them, we weed underneath and then mulch them.

Mulching is important for fruit, as it keeps in the moisture that allows berries to swell. It also keeps down weeds and can feed the soil under hungry plants. This year, with the hosepipe ban, and the current temperatures, it’s vital to young bushes like ours, or they won’t get off to a good start.

We mulched with grass clippings from the lawn, and if the weather continues hot, after a couple of weeks I will lift them, water underneath, replace them and then put a circle of cardboard over the top to hold down any transpiration of water. If it starts to rain buckets, I won’t bother with the cardboard.

Over our baby plants for spring we’ve put old mesh baskets. By summer they will be tall enough to need nets, but we find these baskets in skips and they are brilliant for protecting plants from birds when the plants are still small.

Chillies on the allotment (or not as the case may be)

2012-03-22T10:05:00.003-07:00

These are the chillies I am growing from seed this year – I will keep two plants (one of each) and the others will be distributed to students and through various plant swaps and so on. These darker leaved seedlings are Royal Black Chillies I also have some lighter leaved ones are an unnamed variety that has mauve thumb-sized fruit, and which have been grown from such a fruit that I found on the ground, under the plant, at a very famous garden that I would prefer not to identify by name! I don't know how they will taste, but as they came from the kitchen garden, I am keen to see if they are as tasty as they were pretty.

So, these two chilli plants will be greenhouse grown throughout the year and then brought into the house in late October and kept there until April. Then they will be planted out on the allotment when I confidently predict they will double the yield they gave in year one. This happens for two reasons. The first is that second year plants are fully grown, so they put more energy into fruit production than one year plants which are still trying to attain growth. The second is that once they are planted outside, they get insect pollinated which is highly effective. If you grow chilli or pepper plants in a greenhouse, you really need to hand-pollinate to get a good harvest, and insect pollination still seems to work better than me with my little paintbrush, moving the pollen around!

Once the plants are outdoors, I harvest all the chillies apart from a few that I leave on the plant to ‘cure’ so that they can be used for seed sowing and let the two-year-old plants die in the first frost. This way I always have a mature and highly productive chilli plant in the ground, and a vigorous but less productive one in the greenhouse or in the house, waiting to take its parent’s place.

As you can see, a mature chilli really is productive. This Royal Black has about twenty mature fruits, about a dozen immature ones (that’s the black fruit you can see forming) and about a dozen flowers, waiting to be pollinated – all in mid-March!

March tasks

2012-03-20T04:30:00.004-07:00

While I was teaching on Sunday, OH was busy building, rebuilding and refining structures. He’s created an amazing new water conservation system based on an airy-fairy idea I had about the compost bins, which is going to be very useful now that the hosepipe bans have been introduced. We now have three water butts, plus the compost bin water tanks, so I think we’ve probably got as much water conservation as we can have.

The idea is simple and while it may get refined as he gets more time and we see how it works, it’s within the range of most people who have compost bins made of pallets. It’s simply some clear corrugated plastic laid over the bins, with guttering fixed to the back of the bins and a nice bit of 2x4 laid across the front on which the plastic rests so that rain and even dew can run down the plastic, into the gutter, down a pipe and into an old header tank from somebody’s loo, which has been covered with a bit of wood to keep insects and potential drowners (cats and hedgehogs, mainly) out.

He’d also been to the plot in the week and put up the pea supports. This year, based on another airy-fairy idea I’d had about repurposing one crop to support another, we’ve got prunings from the apple trees interwoven with twine, and fastened to really solid metal posts. It looks really beautiful – definitely the most aesthetically pleasing pea frames, we’ve ever had, and very much in line with the idea that plot #103 should be an edible landscape.

Getting ready for potato planting

2012-03-12T04:00:00.005-07:00

I've been digging the trenches for next Sunday's workshop when we will be planting first early potatoes. The sprouts on the spuds are lovely. Sprouts should be dark: green, purple or brown, not white which is caused by too little light.

If they oversprout (sprouts get too long, maybe due to not being able to plant through bad weather) just rub off the sprouts with your thumb and a fortnight later they will be ready to plant again!

Planting dates and distances

First earlies - mid March. About 30cm apart, in rows which are 60cm apart. Ready in 10 weeks
Second earlies – mid March. About 45cm apart , and in rows which are 75cm apart. Ready in 13 weeks.
Maincrops - early to mid April. About 60cm apart and with 75cm between rows. Ready in 15 weeks. Heaviest croppers but also at risk of blight.

Put spuds in a trench with some food at the base, I use shredded comfrey, others use manure or compost. Pop in the potatoes, sprouts up (not down, the sprouts grow the leaves, not the spuds!) and handfill (don’t shovel, you’ll either hit a spud or bruise them with pebbles in the soil both of which lead to damage and can then infect nearby tubers) to a depth of about 10cm. You will still have soil to spare. That gets piled over the top as the leaves grow.

Where you are planting more than one row, the rows should (ideally) run from North to South to allow each plant its full share of sun.

If you prepare your plot in advance, it does tend to look like a makeshift graveyard ... and it teaches you that most films are rubbish - digging a grave in a few minutes is impossible as anybody who's dug potato trenches can concur - even great soil requires a lot of work and getting more than a foot down is back-breaking - shallow graves would be possible but they'd have to be very shallow indeed!

By the way, I'm signing copies of Minding My Peas and Cucumbers at Mayberry Garden Centre, Old Shoreham Road, Hove on Saturday 17th March, from 12:00 to 16:00 so if you're in the area, do come along and say hello!

Greenhouse growing and container gardening

2012-03-07T07:16:00.003-08:00

These are mooli (winter radish) – and what they are growing in is an old shoe rack: the kind that fastens around a rail with some Velcro and hangs down. It’s one of the ways that we make maximum use of space in small spaces by showing people how containers can be collapsible, flexible and adaptable. Of course root vegetables grown in little pockets like this don’t get as big as those grown in the ground, but they are much better than not having any at all, and this system has worked well for celery, parsnips and pak choi as well as mooli and is a great way of growing cut and come again salad heads alternating with root crops too. Just sow salad and root crops alternately and the heads of the salads can spill out into the next ‘box’ and not compete for space with other salady neighbours.

In the greenhouse, things are getting busy: the peas are planted in their biodegradable pots – if you worry about such things, check with your chosen local or national paper what inks and dyes they use and whether their paper is chlorine bleached, before using it to make pots. Most publishers have a clear environmental policy that will help you to decide if this is something you want to have rotting around the roots of your peas.

When all risk of frost is over, we plant the pots, each containing three pea seedlings, along the prepared pea supports and let them climb up. It’s a very simple way of planting peas which seems, in our experience, to work better than planting in gutters, which we have found to be prone to drying out or to being difficult to plant out. If you’ve ever tried to carry a row of gutter-planted pea seedlings and tripped, spilling them all over the ground, you’ll know exactly what I mean!

March allotment tasks

2012-03-06T03:15:00.003-08:00

We’re getting ready for the first of the spring workshops on 18th March and I’m watching the long range weather forecast in the hope that we will be able to get some first early potatoes planted. It’s been hit and miss the past couple of years, getting spuds in the ground in mid-March. One year we had snow, another belting rain for nine days. Maybe this year we’ll be lucky! We’ve also got shallots to go in the ground during the workshop, if ground is what we have, rather than a gently moving sheet of surface water.

If we are rained or snowed off from the spuds, we can cram ourselves into the greenhouse and look at the peas and broad beans, and maybe do some sowing of peppers (the chillies are already in their seed trays: one lot of Royal Blacks and another of a similar small chilli that has lilac coloured fruits – can’t say where I obtained them as they were poached … by which I mean the little chilli had fallen to the ground, so I didn’t take it from the plant, but even so, I did take it …), tomatoes and leeks although they’d all need to be in the heated greenhouse, not the unheated one, which can take sowings of outdoor cucumbers, celery and celeriac and salads.

We can try showing people how to hoe weeds and how to hoe for soil aeration, some different approaches to soil warming and a few hints on how to plan for successional sowing.

I love this time of year, when everything is on its way, but I also find it very frustrating to have to try and guess when to sow or plant out crops. If I was in charge of the weather, it would be a lot more predictable, I can tell you!

The photo shows potatoes from 2008 - a year when the ground was under several inches of snow at the normal March planting date: the bucket of spuds was harvested in July.

Radicchio harvests and butternut squash preparations

2012-02-27T03:21:00.005-08:00

Right now we’re harvesting raddichio di Treviso (recipe in the book, Minding My Peas and Cucumbers: Quirky Tales of Allotment Life, if you don’t know how to cook them, or if you’ve grown them and found them too bitter to eat) which, to my mind, is as pretty as any houseleek or ornamental cabbage, and much tastier.

We’ve also been busy repurposing stuff – the bamboo that we cut down is going to be part of the butternut squash frame: OH has drilled the holes in the frame and we’re poking the bamboo stems down to make supports for the squashes themselves. You can get some idea of the scale from OH's hand in the photo!

Butternut squash are relatively heavy and need a lot of sun to cure, so we have to find a balance between their weight and wanting as many of them to last as long as possible. Most people grow them along the ground, where the vines spread prolifically, but we find that they often get slug or woodlouse damage at the point where the young green squash forms and touches the soil, and once that happens the squash does not store well. Also, the last couple of years our wetter late summer weeks have caused many ground-growing butternuts to get mildew.

So the frame: we will tie in the vine to uprights and stretch wire across to make some horizontal supports to which we can attach the squashes – sometimes I’ll crochet a little hammock to support the squash, so it stretches as the squash does. Yes, I know how insane that sounds, but believe me, you can do the same thing with the net bags from supermarkets, as long as the squash has cured enough for the netting not to cut into the flesh and as long as the bag is big enough to stretch to the full size of the squash.

Greenhouse report late February 2012

2012-02-23T05:10:00.002-08:00

Today is gorgeous: sunny and bright after early morning rain, and I can almost feel things germinating in the ground as I walk over it. Unfortunately, the weather this month has made planning very difficult so we’ve played it safe in terms of sowing and are very much behind, compared to last year. At this point in 2011 we already had chilli, pea and lavender seedlings, and poppies, primulas and sweet peas in trays ready to germinate.

This year we have … broad beans.

It’s not that we don’t have seeds to plant, we do. But I just haven’t had the confidence to get them out yet. We’ve lost so many seedlings in the past two years through the soil not being warm enough to plant them out, and there not being quite enough space in the cold greenhouse to keep them going once they’d outgrown the seed trays.

The indoor chilli is covered in little red-hot dried up chillies and has a couple of lilac flowers on it too. It will be planted out on the allotment once the frosts are over and will be amazingly prolific through the summer. Second year chilli plants always double their yield in our experience. We harvest the plant dried chillies as we need to use them through the winter and take all the remaining ones off on the last day of February so the plant can flush into new growth

How not to grow Kelsae onions

2012-02-21T03:58:00.002-08:00

I could have called this post Allotment Wins and Woes – I’ll get to the good stuff in a minute but for now, this is definitely not the way to grow onions from seed.

What happened was this: we had four small trays of seedling Kelsae onions. I potted one whole tray up into individual pots, and then, a couple of days later, OH potted up the other three trays, also into individual pots, and all the pots went into the spare bedroom which is cool but not cold, and light. But what I didn’t realise was that OH had taken my first lot of onions and put them on a lower shelf in the spare room. So, thinking all the pots were on the top shelf, and the unit on which they are housed having a solid back, so I couldn’t see the lower shelf as the pots were facing the window, to get the best light, not the door, where I might have spotted them, I merrily failed, for ten days, to turn or water all the onions I’d transplanted.

Net result: about two of the twenty onions might survive.

The moral is, when two of you are working on a growing project together, try to exchange all information and not to make assumptions!

On the other hand, the broad beans in the greenhouse are doing magnificently. They will be used to replace the ones lost to mice, and although we’ll have to spray against blackfly (which never works: spring sown broad beans always get blackfly, in my experience) we should still have a good bean harvest this year, on the current showing.

Chitting potatoes

2012-02-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

As far as the eye can see, in our spare bedroom, there is a sea of potatoes being chitted. The reason for chitting is that potatoes are only half-hardy, so you can’t plant them early to get a good crop as the cold weather damages them, and you can’t leave them in the ground too late, as they will get slug damage, so getting them off to the earliest start allows the tubers to develop as much as possible before the plants have to be lifted.

Chitting potatoes means that they get to grow stronger, and without having too many sprouts developing that will therefore produce numerous but smaller potatoes. The idea is to get just two or three sprouts that give a suitable number of large sized potatoes and this is done by removing other sprouts, especially those that are too close together to produce substantial spuds, at this time, with a potato peeler. I core out the unwanted shoots to about 5 mm deep so that they don’t regrow. Then after a week I give them a little spray with rainwater to get them developing in the remaining sprouts.

If you don’t chit, some potatoes don’t produce enough sprouts so you get gaps in your potato rows which is annoying when you’ve gone to so much effort to prepare the soil and earth the planted potatoes up.

The potatoes sit in egg boxes until the time to plant arrives, usually, for first earlies, the last week in March but sometimes, given the weather, as late as mid April.

Cauliflowers, leeks and purple sprouting broccoli

2012-02-13T03:53:00.000-08:00

That’s what we harvested from plot #103 on Sunday. We were surprised to find the last of the late late caulis had formed a nice little curd, and although it was a little brown, it tasted perfect made into a tiny cauliflower cheese pie with a puff pastry topping. If your caulis do tend to brown, you can always try bending a couple of outer leaves over the curd and clipping them to the leaves on the other side of the plant to protect the creamy colour, but in winter it’s quite difficult to keep caulis looking pretty and we count eating a fresh a baby cauliflower in February as a bonus, even if it wouldn’t win any bonny baby competitions!

The leeks were frozen, of course, but like most winter veg that gets hit by frost, once cut and cooked (straight from frozen) they made an excellent soup. The purple sprouting was delicious: plump and succulent and full of flavour – it’s a real winter winner with us.

The onions seem to be coping with the sub zero temperatures: this is one of the times that raised beds do come into their own, as they offer shelter from the scouring winds and the improved soil in the bed is less likely to heave as a result of frost action. Heaving is where clods of earth explode as the water inside freezes and expands – it’s good news for those who had digging heavy soils, as winter does a lot of the work for you, but bad news if your heavy soil is around the roots of an overwintering plant, as it can leave tender roots and stem areas exposed to the low temperatures.

February allotment tasks

2012-02-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

It’s always a dodgy month, February. Either it’s hideously damp and the ground is too waterlogged to dig, or it’s horribly cold and the ground is too frozen to dig! This year it’s the latter, and we haven’t been able to do a single, useful, thing for ten days, allotment-wise.

Laughably, we put some soil coverings out just before the intense frost and sub-zero temperatures, but it will be worse than useless given the air temperature and the aridity that results from such low temperatures. We can’t dig, either, although where we did dig in January, the clods will be beautifully shattered by the cold weather.

I have three potting sheds, and they are all too cold to work in! So I’ve been potting on the Kelsae onions on the kitchen table, which is usually forbidden (compost in the teapot and grit in the butter and all that) but there’s been absolutely no choice about the matter – if they weren’t potted on they would have failed, and they couldn’t go outside to the somewhat heated greenhouse, as that’s dropping below zero overnight and Kelsae won’t be doing with such bitter temperatures.

We should be sowing leeks, peas and F1 hybrid broccolis now, but there’s just no point until the temperatures are likely to rise, and with this cold snap looking less like snap and more like a long-drawn-out game of bridge, we can’t start anything off that needs night temperatures above zero.

Allotment Frost!

2012-02-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

Not much to say. Ground frozen, feet frozen, plants frozen and even the ones in the greenhouse going back underground in these temperatures! Only good news – the first replacement broad bean is about to poke its head through the potting compost…