Teeny Tiny Trees

When we started out on our allotment we planted three little 'columnar' fruit trees near the pond, in what was supposed to be our herb patch. They were a red apple, a green/yellow apple, and a pear. The green apple mysteriously disappeared, but the other two have done pretty well, despite the red apple taking on a rather dangerous lean in the last couple of years, and the whole herb bed getting swamped with couchgrass... The apples are great and we get a fair few, for a small tree. But we don't really like the pears on the pear tree and we'd rather have more apples, so this year we decided it was time to change things a bit.

First the pear tree had to go, and I gave it to another allotmenteer and friend from FoodSmiles, who planted it on her allotment just a hundred metres away! Next, we had a go at righting the red apple... We loosened the roots on the side it was leaning towards, pulled it back into a neeearly upright position and tied it to a strong stake, and then flooded the ground with water to try to resettle the roots, working the soil back into the loosened area and stamping it down hard. Time will tell how well we did...

We cleared the rest of the bed, digging out most of the lovage and horseradish, which had both got huge, as well as bucketsful of couchgrass roots. And we planted two more teeny tiny columnar apple trees (from J Parker's). It'll be a few years before they match the height of the original one, but they should be producing fruit by next year.

It's funny seeing this area virtually bare again, since it's one of the first areas we worked on when we got the plot eight years ago! I'm a little bit nervous about planting it back up with herbs since it didn't go too well last time... But we're hoping a few years more experience and knowledge - and the fact that the plot as a whole is much lower-maintenance now - will mean that we can keep on top of weeds this time and make sure it doesn't get swamped again.

Stevia and Oysterleaf

After my chillies, peppers, aubergines and leeks, next on the list to sow this month were two unusual leaf crops; stevia and oysterleaf.

Stevia (stevia rebaudiana) is an extremely sweet-tasting leaf that can be used as a natural sweetener, 150 times sweeter than sugar. I was given some seeds last year but failed to get any to germinate - but ended up buying a small plant at a nursery later on in the summer. It didn't get very big and I didn't harvest more than a few leaves from it, but after its tiny white flowers faded I made sure to save some seeds for another attempt this year.

(Whole stevia leaf isn't approved by the Food Standards Agency as a food for human consumption - even though it's been eaten for centuries in South America and in Asia since the seventies - so it can't be marketed as food in its natural form. You can buy approved stevia extracts (you might have noticed the new Coca Cola 'Life' is part sweetened with a stevia derivative) but watch out for their purity. Truvia, the 'big brand' option marketed as a natural stevia-derived sweetener, has as its main component erythritol, a sugar alcohol similar to sorbitol, mannitol and xylitol, which is fermented from dextrose, a sugar made from corn.)

I haven't managed to find much out about how to sow the seeds, except that it's tricky and they need a lot of light. The seeds are very tiny, so I have sown some under a light sprinkling of soil and some on the surface. It's very easy for surface-sown seeds to dry out, so I've put the whole pot in a plastic bag to retain moisture, and I'm keeping them on a bright windowsill and crossing my fingers... If I have any success, I hope to experiment more with my harvest this year and find some good ways to use it! I'll also try to overwinter a plant (like I should have done last year!) to avoid the tricky germination game next year - I think they grow as perennials in warmer climates...

Oysterleaf (mertensia maritima) or 'sea bluebells' is another edible leaf crop, with round, blueish, fleshy leaves supposed to taste like - you guessed it - oysters. It's not to be confused with salsify - a root crop sometimes known as oysterplant! It's a perennial (you know I'm a sucker for perennial edibles!) and it has really pretty edible purple and blue flowers, similar to borage - it's in the same family. Again, I was given some seeds last year but failed to grow them successfully (I think a snail got them!) so it's round two this year, with seeds purchased from Pennard Plants. There were only five seeds in the pack, so again I'm having to be careful with them! The seeds are relatively big so I've sown them a few millimetres deep and I'm keeping a close eye on them to make sure they don't dry out. They're not going in a plastic bag, as they grow wild in the Hebrides so I don't think they want to be too warm. But I will be keeping them safely indoors, away from snails, this time! (Until they're bigger, anyway.)

In other seedy news, I've also now sown some stock and snapdragon seeds for my new flower patch, and my first aubergine seedlings popped up on Thursday, just five days after sowing, closely followed by the chillies and the leeks after seven days. It's all go!

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!

2014

It's easy to think that winter is a quiet time for gardeners, but there's plenty to be done. Between harvesting winter crops, checking fleeces and stakes, winter digging, construction projects and maintenance, nurturing overwintering plants and looking after little seedlings in the greenhouse, there's also plenty of planning to be done, and it inevitably involves a good look back over the past growing season to see what worked and what didn't.

2014 was a pretty bumper year for us, but there are always lessons to be learned. Our plot was under a couple of feet of floodwater for a week early on in the year, but thankfully it didn't do any real damage or set us back - we just had some extra clearing up to do, and to be patient in waiting for the soil to dry out again. We've settled on a new 'structure' for our plot, with three main beds in a rotation plus a number of perennial areas, and we made several new paths. We failed to cultivate the difficult far corner of the plot or our old strawberry bed, but we did clear them and cover them up to stifle the weeds and make the job easier later. We planted a new perennials bed with asparagus, artichokes, strawberries and herbs - hopefully some perennial kale will go in here too. We built new compost bins in a new area, and grew beans on the super-fertile patch where the old bins were. We also upped our growing game in the garden at home, converting a shrub bed to grow vegetables and adding three raised beds - more on all that in another post.

2013, compost bins. 2014, French beans. 2015 greenhouse!

We tried a new way of adding fertility to our plot; the 'Complete Organic Fertiliser' recommended by Steve Solomon for rebalancing soil nutrients for maximum plant health and nutrition. Though I can't quantify the results or compare to a 'control' area, I have to say everything on the plot just grew better than ever with virtually no problems, and I am quite sure the COF helped that happen. I will be going one step further this year: sending some soil samples off for laboratory analysis and creating a custom mix to balance it even better.

Another thing we trialled was 'Rootgrow' or mycorrhizal fungi, endorsed by the RHS; a mix of natural fungi that forms symbioses with plant roots and gives plants access to more nutrients and water. It's primary recommended use is in planting trees and shrubs, to help them establish quicker and more easily, but it is supposed to help any plant so I used it under every single crop to see what happened. In theory it should drought-proof plants and help fruits and roots to swell more steadily and evenly. In practice, though we had great growth almost everywhere and the new asparagus and artichokes established without a hitch, my container potatoes gave identical yields whether I used the Rootgrow or not, the newly-planted strawberries didn't establish well for some reason, squashes and swedes came in a huge mix of sizes, and my celeriac completely failed to swell, so I'm not entirely convinced...

Potatoes did wonderfully - we managed to grow a kilo for every week of the year. (If only I had somewhere better to store them - they are now sprouting and turning soft). Scab was very bad on our old favourite Kestrel, but we also tried Pentland Crown this year, which makes a much better baked jacket spud, seems to store slightly better, and doesn't suffer as much scab, so we will be growing more of these in 2015! On reflection I wondered if I should have left the lime out of the COF applied to this area, as it probably made it worse.

Carrots were our best ever, even though we couldn't find our enviromesh in time to protect our first sowing so we lost some to carrot fly - our later sowings did brilliantly and they even won a first placing in the allotment association show! We have only succeeded with carrots since we added lime to our soil - perhaps they need the extra calcium.

Pumpkins and squashes did brilliantly too; we brought home 18 lovely fruits and many are still sitting around happily on windowsills and doormats waiting to be eaten. Arguably we might have expected even more squashes from our eight plants - some plants only gave us one or two fruits - but they suffered from quite a lot of weed competition... Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to undersow them with clover; clover actually gets quite big and unruly when it wants to!

Leeks, parsnips, swedes, broad beans and beetroots all got along just fine. Beetroots really are just THE easiest vegetable to grow - nothing seems to stop them. I only wish Eddie liked them better as I'm eating them mostly by myself. The leeks are suffering from some allium leaf miner and I think we should cover them with mesh next year. We only grew one variety of French beans - a local heritage variety called Ryder's Blue Coco - and I sowed them rather late due to a lack of space earlier on. They were delightful - really tender - and we were eating them long after our neighbours' beans had finished, but we couldn't save any seeds from them because they didn't have time to mature before the first frost, which was a great shame. I do have just a few seeds left so I MUST do better at this next year!

Our chard and winter spinach, planted out in late summer, suffered a bit of neglect due to an extremely busy autumn, but though we lost a few to slugs and snails, they grew superbly and we really should have harvested more from them before the winter. We will still be able to pick from them when growth starts again in early spring though. Our first attempt at fennel suffered the same neglect but also grew very well indeed, and again we failed to harvest it in good time. It's certainly one to try again this year though. We also have a few spring cabbages nearly ready which have done really well - a nice compact variety called Pixie which, assuming it tastes good come spring, I will certainly grow again.

2014 was our first year growing both celery and celeriac. The celery did okay, though it was a bit thin and stringy (I don't usually eat it raw much anyway - just use it for soups, stocks and stews - so that doesn't really matter). The celeriac was a huge disappointment; no root to speak of at all, and I'm not sure why or what to do differently next year...

The importance of beneficial insects really, properly hit home to me last spring when scores of ladybirds descended on our blackfly-infested broad beans and cleared the whole lot up for us. I'm pretty sure there were more ladybirds around than before because I'd grown phacelia in the next bed over winter - ladybirds seem to be attracted by lacy foliage and as we cleared it up in the spring there were loads of them among it. I always grow a few flowers here and there, but now I will grow more!

In the home garden, our courgettes and tomatoes were just fabulous and kept me busy finding new ways to use them! The tomatoes succumbed to blight in the late summer, as they always do. We tried a local heritage variety of tomato - 'Ryder's Midday Sun' - but sadly didn't find them up to a good standard; the plants grew slowly, the tomatoes were watery and lacked flavour, and they were first to succumb to blight! Maybe they'd do better in a greenhouse... But while I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to try them, I'm not sure I have the space to persist with them. Cucumbers and salad greens in our new raised beds did not do well at all and I'm sure there was a problem with the soil - more on that in another post... Peppers did okay but gosh, they take so long to ripen! We were disappointed in a new variety we tried - 'Hebar' - which had very thin flesh and not much flavour at all. The seller described it as "particularly sweet and tasty" so I'd love to know what anyone else thinks of them! We have bought a plastic greenhouse to put on the allotment this summer, which should be just big enough to grow a few tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in. This way we hope to have blight free tomatoes and earlier peppers! We'll still grow some at home too though...

Kaibi Round, Ancho Grande, Hebar, Lipstick

The enviromesh over the kale bed got torn in high winds early in the year, and by late summer caterpillars had stripped the plants as I was too lazy to do anything about it... Thankfully some of the plants made a surprisingly good comeback though! Another mistake I will not repeat next year is planting French beans behind courgette plants. After the courgettes had been growing a month I couldn't reach the beans at all, and had to leave them all to pick for drying instead! The mangetout was great - we could hardly keep up with it - and we were really impressed by variety 'Carouby de Maussane' with giant pods! I have never grown ordinary peas, as frozen British peas are extremely good and convenient, and all the podding seemed like too much of a faff, but last year we did grow a multipurpose mangetout/podding pea - 'Ezeta's Krombek Blauwschokker' - and when they got too big to eat as mangetout I was forced to pod a few... They were so lovely that I might just add a few real podding peas to my garden this year...

Carouby de Maussane mangetout - still gorgeously sweet and tender at this size!

The 'perennial salad mix' from Suffolk Herbs turned out to be a mix of chicories and radicchios, which have grown well but... I just don't really like the taste. Admittedly I should have read the back of the pack more carefully, but this picture is a bit misleading I think!

All in all, we will do much the same this year as last, but here are the things we plan to do differently:

• Grow more flowers - to include a cutting-flower patch!
• Do even more to balance our soil nutrition according to Steve Solomon's great book 'The Intelligent Gardener'
• Add a plastic greenhouse to the allotment to grow a few summer veg under cover.
• Don't plant anything behind courgettes!
• Improve raised bed soil.
• Buy more enviromesh, to replace torn piece and cover leeks too.
• Keep squash bed weed-free - perhaps mulch beneath plants - and grow fewer plants so they don't get so tangled.
• Grow some proper peas, perhaps.
• Try harder with celeriac.
• Grow more Pentland Crown potatoes and less Kestrel - and try another new variety too.
• There are always new varieties to try; this year new ones for us include oyster leaf, beefsteak plant, pink banana squash, skykomish tomatoes (supposed to have some blight resistance), marconi rosso peppers, and we're going to attempt to grow cauliflowers for the first time, since we buy them quite a lot...
• We also plan to plant a new fruit patch on the long-neglected and difficult far corner of the allotment, and clear and replant our overgrown herb bed.

Frosty radicchio

Crop Rotation Confessions...

I have a confession to make. Crop rotation on a small plot has always rather baffled me. On a big plot it makes sense - on a big plot you can afford to leave a patch of ground empty in preparation for a later crop, or to sow a green manure in the middle of summer just for the heck of it - but on a small allotment where you want to make the most of every space all year round, it can be a real juggling act trying to get your potatoes out early enough for your purple-sprouting broccoli to go in, or clearing your onion patch in time to sow beans and corn, or figuring out what on earth to grow after you've harvested your squashes as late as October - and who uses exactly the same amount of space for every crop group anyway??

Traditionally, the main groups in a crop rotation are potatoes and roots, brassicas, beans, and 'other veg'. The potatoes are manured to enrich and slightly acidify the soil (preventing scab), heavy-feeding beans follow in the nicely broken-up ground after the potatoes are dug, then (often after an application of lime,) leafy brassicas to make good use of the nitrogen the bean roots accumulate. Then, presumably, you throw sweetcorn, cucurbits, tomatoes, leafy greens and everything else in together after that. Sounds simple enough, but questions abound. Do you grow swedes with the root crops or the brassicas? Aren't tomatoes in the same family as potatoes? Cucurbits take up way more space than anything else! And aren't you supposed to avoid manuring carrots?

I don't know, maybe I overthink these things - maybe I'm just too keen to abide by all the rules and to do it "right". But I think, after eight years on our allotment, I've finally cracked it!

This is partly thanks to slimming down the number of crops we grow on the allotment anyway - we don't grow onions and garlic due to white rot spores in our soil, and we prefer to keep salad leaves and quick-ripening summer crops like French beans, courgettes and tomatoes at home so we can pick them more regularly. On the allotment we grow the lower-maintenance stuff: potatoes, squashes, root veg, broad beans, leeks, and a limited amount of winter brassicas and spinach-type leaves (plus some perennials in a permanent area). We've grouped broad beans, leeks and root veg roughly together: together they take up about the same amount of space we use for more space-hungry crops (potatoes and squashes), and it means we can follow our broad beans (which finish around midsummer) with winter brassicas, thus keeping our earlier-sown swedes in the same area as our other brassicas.

Ladies and gents, I give you our brand new crop rotation plan! (Click pic to enlarge.)

This rotation also allows for two squares to be sown with green manures over winter to add high-nitrogen organic matter to the compost heap, shelter wildlife and protect the soil. Phacelia and field beans are my two favoured green manures since field beans add vital nitrogen to the soil and can be sown as late as November, and phacelia attracts lots of insects and can be sown as late as September. Following squashes with winter-hardy beans means the timing for sowing is perfect; likewise with the winter leaves following the potatoes, and the winter brassicas following the broad beans. And even though we grow most of our beans at home, our allotment soil still gets a nitrogen injection thanks to the broad and field beans. Of course, this rotation doesn't include everything and I should do my best to efficiently rotate our crops at home too, but those on the allotment are the most important ones to rotate: beans for nitrogen, potatoes which are prone to damage from buildups of slugs and eelworms, and brassicas which are susceptible to clubroot, a very nasty fungal disease.

So far it's all going swimmingly. The potatoes are out (an awesome 28kg of Kestrel and 19kg Pentland Crown!) and the winter leaves are in; two rows of chard, two rows of winter spinach and a row of fennel (there's room for more, actually - I must do that). The squashes have finished a little earlier than usual, which means we have plenty of time to clear the soil for winter beans. The leeks, root veg, celery, spring cabbages, kohlrabi and pak choi are coming along nicely and we will slowly harvest them all winter long, making the most of all our space. Brilliant!

There is one complicating factor looming, in that we are planning to clear our old strawberry and asparagus beds (not shown in the plan above) over winter and put them to new use next spring. These two areas don't really fit into the plan so I'm a bit puzzled about what to do with them (and I rather wish we could move our pond and our apple tree into one, which would help us make better use of the other!). Should we grow runner beans or courgettes on the plot again after all? Shall I expand my collection of perennials? Is it time to give in and plant some fruit bushes? Good job I've got all winter to think about it...

Perennial Kale Cuttings

Perennial vegetables have loads of advantages to both the gardener and the planet. Where perennial crops are grown the soil can relax and get on with being great soil with abundant microlife, while ploughed soils for annual crops lose their vitality and are more prone to leaching and erosion. An area filled with perennial plants, which mimics nature, supports much more wildlife than an area that's replanted each year or each season. For the gardener, perennials save on labour and often need less care thanks to their extensive established root systems, and plants tend to suffer less from insect damage. Perennial food plants also get a head start on the new season and can help fill the 'hungry gap' around this time of year, after the winter crops have finished but before the summer ones are ready.

The perennial Daubenton's kale I bought from Backyard Larder last year did really well and was tasty and productive, putting out new shoots at every leaf node, but I neglected to give it the support it needed and it ended up a bit unruly and bent-over - and I had to move it to a pot early this spring to make way for a new raised bed.

Towards the end of the winter it put out loads of new shoots all up and down the main stem, and I saw the opportunity to propagate some new plants from it, to add to my new perennial patch on the allotment and perhaps to replace this original one if it didn't make a good recovery.

I'd never taken cuttings before and I couldn't really find any information on how to take brassica cuttings online, but in January I carefully cut a few shoots from the plant, poked holes in some soil in a deep tray, popped the cuttings in and firmed them down. I left them outside in the cold and made sure to keep them moist. They wilted a bit and some of the outer leaves died off, but then they perked up again and seemed sort of healthy.

When I lifted them after a few weeks, however, they still hadn't formed any roots. So I tucked them back into the soil and tried a second batch, using bigger shoots this time as I thought perhaps they'd have more energy. They looked even worse than the first lot had!

I stuck with both batches though, and after another month or so I noticed some looked different to the others; some looked blueish and dark, while others were a brighter green. I lifted them again and sure enough, the greener ones had lovely white healthy roots.

Another month on, all seven plants have now rooted and are potted up and doing well, albeit at different stages of development! Some of them took as little as four weeks and others took nearly four months, but it just goes to show that a little patience and care pays off. The most important thing is to keep the soil moist and the slugs away! The original plant is now propped up and doing well again but still stuck in a pot, waiting for a new home, and I'm looking forward to planting my new perennial kale plants out on the plot and giving the rest away at our allotment association plant swap this weekend!  :-)