Allotment Tour

We finally made it to the allotment this week, after having not managed to go at all during December, and did some much-needed catching up.

Here it is:

Of course, it doesn't look like much at the moment, but there's plenty going on, and considering what a battle we've always had with couchgrass and other perennial weeds we're pretty pleased with it. But it's been a long time since I took or shared any pictures of it, so let me give you the tour...

It's split roughly into seven sections, more by accident than design, with woodchip paths in between them, lined with bricks and some cheap weedproof fabric that isn't quite doing the job any more.

Section one, above, is where our compost bins are. We built them last spring to replace our old ones, in another spot, which were falling apart, and we relocated them here because it's under the shade of an elder tree and the soil is full of roots - everything we've grown here in the past has struggled a bit, so it's a good spot to use for something other than plants! The area covered in weedproof fabric over there has also been problematic, but we're determined to get it under control this year and plant a new fruit patch here, mulching heavily between the plants to try to beat the couchgrass!

Section two is the first of our three rotation beds. Last year we grew potatoes here - now the near half is covered in a phacelia green manure (and quite a few annual weeds) and the far half has rows of spinach and chard (again with the weeds...) There's also a row of scabiosa I planted out too late to flower, but it seems to be coming through the winter a treat! After we clear this patch in late spring we'll grow squashes and pumpkins here.

Section three (our second rotation bed) is where our root crops were grown, though it's beginning to look a little sparse now. The spring cabbages in the foreground are at a variety of stages - we picked our first this week but others are not ready yet, and one has rotted! :-( Beyond that is a small row of calabrese which should produce in the spring, some carrots, parsnips, swedes, celery and leeks. We've just finished the beetroots. When this patch is clear in early to mid spring, we'll plant our potatoes here.

Section four (our third rotation bed) was pumpkins and squashes last year, but now it's bare, which is pretty disappointing because I sowed most of it with field beans (a green manure) and broad beans in November. (The cardboard is there to protect a patch I left unsown, intending to make a second sowing in March.) I guess I left it just a little too late; they say early November is the latest you should sow but we did it near the end of the month. Still, never mind, there's plenty of time to sow more broad beans, and our root veg and leeks will go here from March onwards.

Section five is what we call our perennials bed, though it's not the only one! We planted it last year with asparagus (along the left hand side) strawberries (in the raised beds) and globe artichokes (far end, under little mounds of woodchip mulch and black plastic to protect the crowns from frost), as well as some parsley, sage, lavender and lemon balm. It's done okay so far but the plants are still getting established - hopefully they will be even better this year. I'd also like to plant some perennial kale among the sage - supposedly sage keeps cabbage white butterflies away, but we will see!

Section six is home to our pond (far end), two columnar 'spur' fruit trees, and our old strawberry patch (this end) which is now under a mulch of thick cardboard until we can dig it over. There used to be a really nice herb garden planted around the pond and the trees, but over the years it's become swamped with couchgrass and very few plants are left, so this area is up for redevelopment this year... We will replant the herb garden - perhaps through a membrane to keep the grass down - and the old strawberry bed will become a flower patch! We'll also be giving away the pear tree - we don't like the fruit! - and we need to right the very wonky apple tree before it goes over! We'll have to do this soon while the trees are still dormant - they won't like having their roots messed with.

Finally, section seven is where we keep our tools in our storage bench, and it's where our old compost bins were (on the right). That spot is now a lovely fertile patch where we'll put a plastic greenhouse this year for a few tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. We've also got a little comfrey patch here which we use to feed the compost and make plant feed, and at the far end is a little bed which used to grow asparagus, though it's almost all been choked out by grass - another redevelopment project for this year. I think it's just big enough for a couple of bean teepees... or I might decide to grow the beans at home and grow sweet peas here instead, or some more fruit! I'd also like to narrow this path a bit to maximise the growing space in section six on the left.

You'll notice there's not much space here for summer fruiting crops like French beans, courgettes and tomatoes, nor salads or brassicas. A few years ago we decided we were better off only growing reasonably low-maintenance veg at the allotment, since we struggle to get here enough to look after them. It's working out really well, and we can still grow those things at home where we can keep an eye on them and pick them regularly! We don't grow many brassicas simply because we find them so problematic (what with flea beetles, whitefly, rootfly, slugs, three kinds of caterpillars and pigeons all wanting a share!) but we are adding them to our repertoire gradually. And we don't grow onions or shallots because we have dreadful white rot in the soil which destroys the crop, but we manage a bit of garlic and plenty of spring onions at home, and I'm sure we'll return to onion-growing at some point...

During our trip on Monday we pruned the apple and pear trees and made a good job of weeding and tidying the perennials bed, cutting down last year's asparagus ferns, herb flower spikes and sunflower stems. Here's a 'before' picture!

There's much more weeding to be done before things start growing again in spring, and we need to make a start on that digging very soon too. We're all crossing our fingers for no flooding this year, so we can keep at it!

Beezzzzzzzz

We grow a little patch of comfrey beside our bench on the allotment specifically for the purpose of cutting it and adding it to the compost, or rotting it in water to make plant feed. Comfrey has super-deep roots that draw all sorts of minerals and nutrients up from the subsoil, so it's very useful this way and can add a lot of nutrition to your garden. The best time to cut it is just before it flowers, as that's when the plants have the most energy which can then be passed on to the compost. But can I ever bear to cut it then? I'd miss out on the lovely flowers, and the bees would miss out too, and then I (and my beans and courgettes and strawberries and raspberries and squashes!) would miss out on all the bee action!

Sadly the bees eventually ruin all the delicate little flowers - they make a hole at the base of the flower for easier access, and their clingy feet bruise the petals!

Some of them still do it the old-fashioned way!

The comfrey is now hacked back down to the ground, and the old leaves decomposing quietly on the compost heap. The bees hung around for ages afterwards wondering where all the flowers had gone! Comfrey makes a quick comeback - there will be more flowers soon!

Flowers and Fruits

Aah, June. The warm weather, the heavy showers, the mild nights. It's always June when everything goes crazy on the plot, the weeds take over, and we run out of steam. It's always June when I abandon the blog.

Not this June.

I don't know why so many things are so behind this year (I could blame the cold winter and late spring, but I see on other blogs that many other people are not so affected) but they are certainly getting a move on now.

The first tomato flowers are opening...

The peas are finally flowering...

The broad beans are starting to appear...

The french beans are getting ready to flower...

And we have our first tiny cucumber beginning to swell...

Our first tiny courgette...

And our first tiny pumpkin...

I have finally harvested enough strawberries to call a snack, not just a nibble - though not from the plot where frost nipped the flowers, but from this tub in the garden...

The sorrel flowers look beautiful, even if I am a bit bitter about not having any leaf now...

And the bees are loving the comfrey, as well as all the veg flowers and nasturtiums dotted about the plot...

Aah, June.

Update

As promised, here's a rundown of some of the things we've been up to on the plot over the last seven days!

The main task has been to clear and dig the pumpkin patch - which is actually three of our square beds. These grew completely wild last year and were covered in nettles, creeping buttercups and teasels, and the year before that they suffered from tomato blight (the far square) and onion white rot (the near square) and had diseased plant matter left on them. (Careless I know. Must do better...) Because of this, we didn't want to put any of the weeds and soil from here into the compost, so we think we've solved the problem by clearing and digging two of the squares and piling all the organic matter onto the farthest bed, hotbed style.

I think I'll cover it in black plastic too, to try to stop anything in there growing, and I'll plant some of the pumpkins and squashes through the plastic into pockets of fresh compost. Hopefully the hungry squashes will enjoy the extra nourishment, and by the end of the year everything will have composted nicely and the disease will be pretty much dealt with by the lovely composting microbes. What do you reckon?

Everything's been enjoying the sun; myself included. The comfrey is bursting into flower, which the bees are loving.

And the broad beans are flowering too, even though they're less than a foot high! What's that all about? Can plants this small really bear that many beans??

The salad greens are coming on really well, and are due some thinning.

The near bed contains spinach and little gem lettuce. The far one has, from left to right, some rather pathetic red spring onions, three little rows of head lettuces and lollo rossa, some patchy beetroot, some very enthusiastic and very crowded radishes, and lots of green spring onions.

But the warm weather has brought these little blighters out too:

Since I started growing petunias under my asparagus, I've hardly seen any asparagus beetles, and certainly never had any eggs laid on my crop. This year there are quite a few about, and quite a lot of eggs too, so I squished as many eggs as I could, quickly weeded the bed again and planted out this year's petunias.

They usually hate being planted out, but these ones are settling in very well and are untouched by slugs too, which is a first! And do you see the row of sunflowers at the back of the bed? They are rather frostbitten, poor things, but I think they will pull through.

While I was weeding the asparagus bed I found a lot of these:

Has the asparagus self-sown? Or is this some weed I haven't seen before? They were all over the strawberry bed six foot away as well!

I've also planted out my runner beans. Well, all five of them. Only five out of 25+ seeds germinated - the rest rotted in the pots! So I have direct-sown some more.

I bought these obelisks a couple of years back to try to train cucumbers and trailing squashes up. It didn't really work, but I couldn't just get rid of them so now I'm using them for beans. On the top and left of this picture you can just about see my courgettes and crookneck squash as well, thriving in their new outdoor homes.

These perennial sweet peas are planted out right next to the compost bin to grow up and over it throughout the summer. I will pin some strings or mesh to the front of the bin to help them, and hopefully they'll die down in time for messing about with compost over the autumn and winter, then come back up next year. Well, that's the idea anyway. I'm not very familiar with sweet peas so I'm looking forward to seeing how they grow. And if it doesn't work there will be plenty of self-sown nasturtiums around, as always, to step in.

Tomatoes

Thanks for all your comments about the tomatoes! They were sown mid-March in brand new shop-bought multi-purpose compost, kept indoors on a sunny windowsill until daytime temperatures were decent, then put in the plastic greenhouse (open during the day) and brought in at night for a while, and then kept in the greenhouse permanently for the last month or so.
I have discarded the worst of the plants (I started far too many anyway!), pinched the spotted leaves off the rest, and planted them out (gulp). Some of them look perfectly healthy still, the others just had one or two spots. Hopefully the improved growing conditions wil sort them out. I'm going to try a homemade bicarbonate-of-soda-fungicide when I have time, too, and keep a close eye on them. And I've started a few more seeds in the garden, just in case!

I've planted them in three rows of six, with a row of garlic and a row of basil and parsley each side. And I've sunk a plastic bottle into the soil between each pair of plants for deep watering when they get bigger. I wasn't really sure what to do about support, but the 'Florida Weave' method sounds sensible so I've put up a cane either side of each pair to facilitate this. I put some canes at the top to stabilise things, both along and across the rows, and now the whole thing feels like a big cage! I realise I should probably be using something a bit sturdier than canes but for now it's all I've got, so I'll have to keep an eye on things and maybe bring some guy-ropes into play at a later stage...

Assuming the plants actually grow that is!


Yesterday I made a start on some 'comfrey tea' as well, which will be great for feeding the tomatoes in a few weeks. The comfrey plants are next to our bench, and so big right now they were starting to encroach on our sitting-space, so after cutting the plants down (not completely - the flowers are so pretty!) I had a big pile for the compost heap too!

For those that don't know, comfrey leaves are incredibly rich in nutrients because the roots go so deep and draw up nutrients deep in the soil that few other plants can reach (nettles are similar in this way, and make great fertiliser too). They're great for the compost heap, or can be made into a high-potash liquid feed, or 'comfrey tea', by soaking the leaves in a bucket of water for a few weeks. (Beware though; I'm told it stinks to high heaven...) I actually bought my plants for this purpose a year ago when I first got my plot, only to find out later there's a whole plot at the far end of my allotment site given over to the stuff !