A Wildflower Lawn

We don't have a very big lawn in our garden, but it still managed to be a lot of trouble - it had become infested with couchgrass and lots of weeds, and was always trying to escape its brick boundary and creep across the paths. So last year we decided to turn it into a wildflower lawn, where 'weeds' could be at home, within reason, and we wouldn't have to worry about keeping it looking tidy and even and flawless.

We covered it up with black plastic for a couple of months in the late summer, to kill off the exisitng growth. That seemed to work fine for the lawn itself but the couchgrass, dandelions and creeping buttercups still kept going, so it's been a battle since then to get rid of all the weeds, and I spent a couple of weeks in April hoeing regularly to cut down any new weed seedlings.

We bought a low-flowering seed mix from Wildflower Lawns and Meadows which contains 26 different flowers including buttercups, daisies, agrimony, selfheal, ragged robin, camomile, creeping thyme, cowslips, clovers, yarrow, fox and cubs, wild orchids and more, as well as a mixture of grasses. It's supposed to have a very long flowering season, to be tough enough for light traffic, and to reflower rapidly after mowing, which will only be needed around once a month. And of course it'll be wonderful for bees and butterflies!

After much weeding, hoeing and raking, I scattered the seed about two weeks ago and we've been keeping it watered to help things germinate. The first seedlings are beginning to show now - I hope they are the seed I sowed and not other things which were already in the soil! (Of course, some of the old 'weeds' were species which are also in the seed mix, so it's not all bad!)

There are some tough older weeds rearing their heads again too - obviously I missed a few - so it's going to be an ongoing task to weed out docks and couchgrass for a little while...

Though I'd really like to be using the lawn this summer, I think it's going to take quite a while to grow strongly enough to walk on. But I'm sure it's going to be worth the wait and look lovely when it's established!

The Importance of Edges

When I started out with an allotment, I wish someone had told me the importance of edges. I thought we could just dig the plot over and it would be dug, and grass free - I see some others doing this in pictures online, digging over neat square beds amidst grass paths, and sometimes it seems to work for them. It doesn't work for us. The grass on the paths moves in so fast and so vigorously it's a constant, time-consuming battle to keep it back. It swamps everything. Even the low raised beds we put so much time and effort into a few years ago didn't help - couchgrass roots went right through the plywood, and could easily get underneath a thin barrier like this!

Pretty, but pretty useless.

When we divided our plot up with paths that the grass couldn't penetrate we hit on something; the grass couldn't get past one of these paths. By dividing grassy areas from cleared ones, we finally kept some places grass-free. Hurrah! We also began digging small trenches along the sides of the plot, alongside the grassy paths, about six inches deep and six inches across, and this too slowed the grass down enough to concentrate on doing other things during the growing season! The trenches need some maintenance a couple of times a year (and we do occasionally fall in them!), but they do the job. Woohoo!

So we've been maintaining our borders this week - the cheap weedproof membrane we used for our paths first time round was obviously not made to last and grass was starting to creep through in places - a situation that was bound to only get worse if left.

 

We invested in some heavy duty woven groundcover fabric, and with the paths already in place, it was a simple enough matter to move the bricks aside, lay the new fabric over the existing woodchip, replace the bricks and top up with more woodchip. The council delivers woodchip to our site regularly for things like this, which is really handy.

One day... one day I will eradicate all couchgrass from our plot!

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.

An Alternative Fruit Patch

The bottom end of our allotment has never been very productive - unless you count couchgrass and nettles. When we first dug it over the soil was very dry and fully of woody matter and old roots, not to mention half an ancient greenhouse, in small pieces. It's also in the shade of an elder tree and next door's little shed for part of the day.

We grew outdoor tomatoes down here and they very quickly succumbed to disease. We grew artichokes here and they all died. We grew raspberries here, and even they didn't do well! The couchgrass seems to move in here faster than anywhere else but nothing else seems to thrive.

Last year we moved our compost bins to this area - it seemed a better use of land that won't easily grow crops, and it would help to stamp out some of the grass and nettles that kept invading. But that still left our overgrown raspberry patch to deal with. Half the raspberries had died and the rest were swamped in a jungle of grass.

We took out the old raspberry plants and dug the bed over three times to get rid of every last grass root we could find. Then we laid a new weedproof-fabric-and-woodchip path down one side of it, dug a trench along the top where it meets the next (derelict) plot, and put a border of weedproof fabric along the end of the plot too, so it should be much harder for new roots to find their way in.

I was keen to keep the area as permanent planting, since our three main rotation beds are working nicely now and perennial planting has benefits for the soil and wildlife as well as my workload! But I wanted to try some new fruits; I do like raspberries but I'm not a fan of the other usual berries and currants people tend to grow on allotments, and I fancied trying some new things I'd been hearing about. So our new fruit patch will feature... Japanese wineberries, Chilean guavas, and Cape gooseberries!

Botanist James Wong famously promotes a number of unusual crops, and his book 'Homegrown Revolution' encourages gardeners to ditch some of the 'old-fashioned' stuff we've been growing for generations but that is actually quite tricky in our climate (aubergines and cauliflowers, for example) in favour of more exotic crops that actually grow very easily here. I have only just bought the book this week, but the above fruits all feature in it - and I'm rather tempted by one or two others he recommends too - perhaps another year!

EDIT: Whoops, the Japanese wineberry isn't in the book - I think I heard about it in a conversation about unusual crops which centred around the book and assumed it was.

Japanese wineberry is similar to raspberry but with striking red stems and lime-green leaves, and the fruits are surrounded by a spiny calyx that means birds don't usually go for them. It can handle a little bit of shade, so the shed shadow shouldn't bother it. I'm not really sure what its growing habit is going to be like - I'm kind of expecting it to be like a bramble! - but I am well prepared to train it up some canes if need be...

Chilean guavas are small berries that ripen in the winter on a rather attractive evergreen bush. I bought these plants nearly a year ago when I saw them on sale and they have been waiting patiently in pots at home until now! (I have two more in large containers at home too, from which I got just a few berries last year, though I think I picked them before they were ripe!)

Cape gooseberries (or Inca berries, or golden berries) are perhaps better known, and sometimes seen served at wedding receptions and posh restaurants, usually with smoked meats. The fruits are similar to tomatilloes, but sweet and golden yellow, and come in a papery husk. They're grown as an annual in this country, so it's not exactly permanent planting, but it also means I can change my mind easily and try a cocktail kiwi or something here next year instead if I like... I've sown the Cape gooseberry seeds at home (no seedlings yet...) and I'll plant them out here in June or so.

I'm not really sure how big these plants get so that's all I'm putting in for now, but I hope my alternative fruit patch will fill up some more in time. For the moment I've put in some biennial flowers too - foxgloves and wallflowers I had in pots at home - and I might just put in some perennial achillea or summer bulbs or something... The biennials should have been planted out in autumn really so I'm not sure how they'll get on, but the part-shaded spot behind the shed must be about perfect for foxgloves so I hope they will self-seed there and I'll keep a small patch of them going.

I'm very glad this troublesome corner is under control again, and I hope the trenched and covered edges will help it to stay that way!

Patience...

Despite having a long list of jobs I need to get done before the growing season starts again, very little is happening on the plot at the moment; a week or two of bitterly cold and wet weather has made digging unpleasant at best and impossible at worst. I wouldn't mind so much if it would just snow properly, like it has in much of the country, and make the place look pretty for a while! But all we've had is yucky icy sleet and lots of rain.

I've also been very busy with preparations for our first FoodSmiles AGM last week, and the FoodSmiles seed order this week! If you think figuring out what to grow on your own allotment can take a while, try figuring out what you need for a giant veg plot for 25 families using strictly organic seed only!

There's still plenty to harvest from the allotment and this week we brought home these carrots, leeks, parsnips and the last two (very small!) swedes.

We have made some progress on what is to be our new 'alternative' fruit patch, shown above. It's always been a tough corner of the allotment, this, and the couchgrass has really colonised it again, so we've dug it over once and we're halfway through a second go to pick out remaining roots. I was hoping to finish it off tomorrow and start planting it up, but if the weather is as cold as forecast I won't even be able to get a fork in the ground, and we'll have to settle for a trip to the garden centre instead - I think I have finally sated my seed-buying urge now, but there are still seed potatoes and compost to buy. Now it's February I'll be counting down the days to sowing my first seeds in the middle of the month... Better get the propagator out and clean up some pots!

Allotment Week, Part Two: Goodbye Digging!

Think about allotments or growing-your-own, and digging is probably one of the first activities that comes to mind. But digging, it seems, is not the best choice for the soil, and more and more gardeners are giving it up. I've been following the work of gardening author and teacher Charles Dowding, who promotes no-dig gardening, and the efforts of Roy and Tanya from Pushing up Dandelions, who created a wonderful and productive no-dig plot from scratch last year by bringing in mulch, manure and compost from offsite, and the advantages are clear:

• It preserves and protects beneficial soil life: the six legged kind, the wriggling kind and the oft-forgotten complex fungal organisms that weave their mycelia through the dirt.
• The soil develops a more stable and open structure, which admits air and water, drains well and can be walked on (carefully) without compacting.
• The soil surface stays loose and is less likely to harden into a crust.
• Leaving roots and other organic matter in the soil to decompose naturally adds structure and nutrients.
• Regular digging means old weed seeds in the soil are constantly brought to the surface where they can germinate and grow.
• Most crops actually establish better and grow faster in undug soil, thanks to its improved structure and microlife.
• Digging takes a lot of time and can be jolly hard work!

(For more about no-dig gardening, check out this handy leaflet from Garden Organic.)

When we started out with our plot, I don't think we could possibly have avoided digging: the couchgrass problem was severe, and we couldn't have afforded to ship in enough compost to just cover it up - and anyway we wanted to grow in the fertile allotment soil, not shipped-in compost from goodness-knows-where! But now, having dug annually for a few years and finally gotten rid of most of the grass across the main growing area of the plot, we're making the big switch to no-dig gardening...

The two beds in the foreground of the pic above have only needed hand-weeding for the last year or so. We helped the third one along last year by basically digging all the soil out of it to about a foot deep, lining it with a couple of layers of thick cardboard to smother the grass, and putting the soil back minus the grass roots! Our squashes grew well here last year and again, it only needed hand-weeding. The cardboard will decompose eventually, but hopefully it will take long enough to smother and kill off any remaining perennial roots below.

Our card-lined no-dig squash bed!

The fourth bed, way over near the compost bin, is still chock-full of grass. We're planning to grow potatoes there this year and Eddie has started to dig it, but those plans may yet change to no-dig plans...

You will have noticed we've put in some (hopefully) permanent paths now, too, lined with weedproof fabric, edged with bricks and filled in with woodchip. This added structure will really help us keep control of things better, I think, and provides something of a barrier to any remaining weeds and those creeping in from the sides.

Taken last summer

So anyway, now we've got a big weed-free area, we're giving up on our thoroughly weed-ridden strawberry and asparagus beds, and planting a new perennials bed was our other main task for 'allotment week'. Below you can see how our old strawberry bed looks right now, and the asparagus bed is in the same state. Hand-weeding them every year when the couchgrass is obviously still so established is just soul-destroying. We were obviously very naive about how long it would take and how hard it would be to get rid of the perennial weeds!

Our old strawberry bed - yuk!

Our new perennial bed has 24 strawberry plants in two raised beds (Florence, Mae, Lucy and Albion runners transplanted from the old bed and from home) and two new rows of asparagus (10 x Gjinlim and 10 x Backlim). Eventually we'll also plant some globe artichokes, a perennial kale or two, and some herbs!

Asparagus crowns going in the ground

So here it is: our new perennials bed (with fox protection on the far raised bed, as we keep finding decomposing animals and bones in it!). There are still a few swedes and leeks here too, but we're getting through them fast now. It won't be long before the asparagus is popping through the soil and the strawberries start leafing up again!

In the meantime, I've taken some cuttings from our perennial Daubenton kale to go here...

...and I'm raising Green Globe artichokes from seed at home. They say you get a lot of duds growing artichokes from seed, so I started by sowing 20 seeds, and culled the weaker ones from the 16 that germinated, so now I have ten. I'll be sure to get rid of any others that don't keep up, and if there are still more than I can handle, I'll take the surplus to swaps! I have bought artichoke plants before but they struggled and died (they were in the troubled bottom end of the plot, where the compost bin now is) and they were expensive! Seed is much cheaper!

Of course, there's still some digging to do: we need to start from square one on the remaining grassy areas now, including the old strawberry and asparagus beds. But it's great to know we can now start to say goodbye to that back-breaking chore we had to get through each season before we could start the fun stuff, and I know the plot's going to be much more productive for it!

Allotment update. Gah!

I'm finally starting to face up to the fact this is a bad, bad year for growing. Between torrential rain and scorching sun, and thanks to weeds thriving through the mild winter, we still haven't cleared enough earth to plant out our sweetcorn, beans, sunflowers and squashes, and they're languishing and potbound at home. Grass is taking over everything and slugs are eating everything else. We've had the worst asparagus crop ever, and the spring hail that blasted blossoms off fruit trees and bushes is going to mean a pretty poor fruit crop too. All my cucumbers and gherkins (at home) yellowed and died for reasons unknown - I suspect they just couldn't take the prolonged cold, wet, dull weather - cutworms (or something) mowed down 90% of my broad beans, and my shallots have inexplicably gone straight to flower without swelling to any kind of decent size.

At least the potatoes are doing okay.

The garlic is looking good and the onions are doing all right, albeit with rather liberal applications of (organic) slug pellets to try to keep it that way.

And despite a lot of slug damage and a few weeds as always, we're picking plenty of strawberries, which are always a joy.

We've achieved one of our allotment goals at least - we've finally planted up the corner patch we hardly ever use (hard, root-filled soil) with some artichokes, perennial cauliflowers and heritage kales - all planted through weedproof fabric to try to keep things under control...

I'm gradually covering it with stones to protect the fabric (it's gonna take a while!), and plan to plant some sage between the brassicas to try to keep caterpillars at bay - apparently cabbage whites hate the smell. I'll believe it when I see it...

At home, our tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, herbs, mangetout, chard and French beans are doing all right, I've resown a couple of cucumbers, and I might actually manage to grow some aubergines this year - they're loving the extra warmth of the plastic greenhouse - so all is not lost.

But I'm gonna have to accept we're just not going to get everything done on the plot this year. Sigh.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Come on now, this is getting silly. I know we're in a drought situation (whatever that actually means) but we still need sunshine too, and the man on the telly said only winter rain could help us so your efforts are wasted. I swear most of my warm-season plants have just stopped growing - even the ones that didn't get smashed to bits by hail - and a few are just rotting in their pots, including the artichokes I spent good money buying. The slugs and snails are doing so well, in the meantime, that the remaining plants barely stand a chance, and after frost got my first early asparagus spears, the next wave has been so slow to grow without sunshine that most of it's been eaten before it's big enough to cut! Beans sown under fleece have not sprouted yet, and I strongly suspect they're rotten by now. There's a serious amount of weeding to do before I plant my maincrop potatoes and it's such a muddy job when the ground is practically waterlogged. I bought one of those weed wand thingies to burn the weeds but I can't do that when they're soaking wet, can I? Frankly, it's just depressing and uninspiring and motivation-crushing when the skies are grey and gloomy all day every day, and I'm not usually one to complain about the weather, but seriously, we don't usually have three (or is it four?) solid weeks of the same. Enough, okay?

Of course, I try to look on the bright side. The early potatoes and most of the herbs are doing well (except the rosemary which doesn't like to be wet), and the peppers and cucumbers in the relative warmth of the greenhouse are doing okay, if a little slowly.

The strawberries are pretty happy and green, with a few flowers appearing, and a couple I thought I'd lost to vine weevil have suddenly bounced back. The radishes, lettuces and mizuna are doing really well, too, although it's a constant battle keeping the slugs off them.

The tiny pots in which I've sown my brassicas are getting a constant watering where usually it'd be a fight to stop them drying out! And I have now harvested the first of my asparagus, even if it doesn't look very appetising.

Having battled with the allotment weeds for five full years now to virtually no avail, I've given up on digging and bought, as I said, a 'Weed Wand' to kill 'em all with. The environmental (and financial) cost of the gas canisters is not ideal, but as long as I'm economical with them and dispose of them properly, I think it's got to be better than either of the other options, which are using chemicals, or throwing in the towel. The cell-damage to the weeds is supposed to kill the whole plant, so I have high hopes that with this we'll finally be able to gain control, and it's going to be so much easier and less daunting than all that digging! Once the weeds are dry enough to start, anyway...

I'm also delighted to report the arrival of the year's most awaited seedling! After the hail killed all my ancho peppers - the ones I was most excited about growing - I sowed the last few seeds I had to replace them. And I waited... and I waited... and everything else I sowed came up but them. Finally, one has arrived! I hope more will still follow in the coming days.

At this time of year I'm usually starting to think about the likelihood of any further frosts and looking forward to planting things out, but everything's so far behind this year! So come on, rain. Enough!

Barley Straw for Poorly Ponds

Three weeks ago the allotment pond was absolutely choked with blanketweed and algae. The tadpoles were hatching but they could barely move, poor things, and it looked a disgusting foaming green mess.

Eleven days ago I put a bundle of barley straw in the pond.

Today, the water is crystal clear! I'm so impressed. Admittedly my pond is very small - I guess around one cubic metre - but I never expected it would be that effective. And the tadpoles are all grown up and loving it - you can see them chilling out all over the white rock in the picture below.

Barley straw for ponds comes in small packages wrapped in net, so all you have to do is tie a weight to it and drop it in. Blanketweed, duckweed and many algaes thrive in water where there is an excess of nitrogen, usually caused by too much organic matter decomposing in the pond. The barley straw works because as it rots it actually uses up all that excess nitrogen, and the weeds die. Some say the chemical reactions it produces also create a very low, constant solution of hydrogen peroxide (bleach) which inhibits further algae growth - this appears to still be under discussion... I'm hoping it should help my duckweed problem too with a bit more time. Hurrah!

This centuries-old all-natural multipurpose balancing treatment for ponds is not allowed in most of the EU due to 'insufficient research' - can you believe it??

My only question now is: if it's that effective in my tiny pond, will I be overdosing the water if I leave it in for the several months it will take to completely decompose?

If you go down to the woods today...

Well okay, it's hardly a picnic, but with everything springing back to life after winter there is a lot of free food to be had out there right now.

We went out looking for edible greens earlier this week and brought home this lovely lot - all from within a short walk of home; a mix of stinging nettles, garlic mustard, goosegrass, chickweed, hogweed, dead nettles and ground elder! I'm pretty proud of how my foraging is coming along!

Everyone who was ever a child recognises stinging nettles, the most commonly-used wild green.

Dead nettles look very similar but don't sting - they look sort of softer and less hairy, are generally smaller, and have either white or purple flowers. The leaves are best picked, I'm told, while the plant is flowering.

Goosegrass is that fuzzy stuff you used to stick all over classmates' backs in the playground, otherwise known as cleavers, and abundant around here.

Chickweed is a very common garden weed with teardrop-shaped leaves, pretty little white flowers and a low branching habit, which I am always pulling out of my pots!

Garlic mustard grows tall upright stems in the summer, but now you can already spot its first clumps of leaves appearing. Crush a leaf and it will smell subtly of garlic.

Hogweed is lauded by some as the tastiest wild green. Its large leaves are quite distinctive, and its furled new shoots are apparently delightful lightly steamed and served simply, like asparagus. Must put this on my to-try list...

While many gardeners are plenty familiar with ground elder, you do need to be sure it's ground elder, as water hemlock can look fairly similar (though it only grows in wet places) and that's not a mistake anyone wants to make! Pick the leaves before the plant flowers. (And do, of course, be sure you know what you're doing picking any wild food - not all weeds are edible and some will give you a nasty stomach upset or even kill you. If you're not already familiar with these plants, this page may not be good enough for identification purposes! Try to forage away from roads where plants might be polluted, and be careful where people walk their dogs. Eww.)

So, what to do with a bagful of greens? Like spinach and other leafy veg - kale, chard, collards - all these leaves are pretty versatile and can go in virtually anything you like. Pastas, risottos, pies, stews, egg dishes, cheese dishes, sides, soups, salads (well, don't try eating nettles raw...)

But being the sort of person for whom one challenge at a time is just not enough, I decided to attempt my first-ever souffle. Frugal meets fancy. And here it is!

It sunk a little while I was getting my camera out - it was higher than that when it first came out the oven, honest! It was light and tasty. You could serve it just with toast and/or salad, or with salty meats like sausages or bacon. We had it with sausages and a simple tomato sauce, which was lovely. For a posh starter, make it in ramekins and reduce the cooking time to 10-13 minutes.

Wild Greens Souffle
(serves 4)

• Butter a one litre souffle dish thoroughly. Preheat the oven to 200C, and in it place a large roasting dish with an inch or so of water.
• Wash 150-250g foraged greens, and place in a large saucepan with an inch of water and a pinch of salt. Steam until all the greens are well wilted, stirring occasionally to turn things over. Drain them and squeeze out as much water as you can, then chop them quite finely.

• Melt 25g butter in a pan, and stir in 2 tbsps plain flour to make a roux. Cook, stirring, for a minute or two, then gradually add 150ml milk, whisking all the time, until you get a smooth sauce, and simmer gently for a couple of minutes.
• Remove from the heat and stir in 80g mature cheddar. Then add the chopped greens, 2 or 3 teaspoons Dijon mustard, a pinch of cayenne pepper and a generous grating of nutmeg, and season well. Stir in 2 large egg yolks.
• In a separate bowl, whisk 4 large egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks.
• Fold the egg whites into the cheese and greens mixture, gently and a little at a time. When it's all well combined, spoon into the buttered dish.
• Place in the preheated roasting dish and water, and bake for 20-25 minutes until the souffle is golden brown and nicely risen.
• Handle gently and serve immediately!