Sown

Well, I haven't blogged lately because I don't seem to have the organisation it takes to charge some batteries for my camera, to update you properly. But I thought I'd at least come and tell you that I have been busy sowing seeds. Later than usual, but considering what the winter's been like it's probably not a bad thing.

As previously mentioned, the plan is to grow less on the allotment this year and more in the garden. The allotment will have lots of potatoes and sprawling squashes and pumpkins; raspberries and strawberries; onions, shallots, leeks, carrots and parsnips (all of which I've had plenty of success with before - well, except the carrots but I'll keep bashing away anyhow...), salad greens in raised beds to hopefully give them a better chance of surviving the grass; and just a few courgettes, beans and swedes. All but the squashes will be direct sown, as and when the space is dug over... In the garden I will grow more salady stuff, tomatoes and cucumbers, french beans and mangetout/sugarsnap peas.

Planted in the allotment so far:
30 raspberry canes (10 'Glen Cova' - June/July fruiting, 10 'Malling Jewel' - July/Aug, 10 'Tulameen' - Aug-Oct)
27 strawberry plants (9 'Florence', 9 'Mae', 9 'Lucy')
3 rows broad beans ('Bunyards Exhibition')

I've got garlic waiting to go in among the strawberries, and onions and shallots still waiting for the next area to be dug! Is it too late to plant garlic and shallots? I dunno, but I guess I've got nothing to lose...

Planted in the garden so far:
9 leftover strawberry plants!

Sown at home:
3 pumpkin 'Jack O'Lantern' (which were fabulous last year)
3 cucumber 'Wautoma' (from realseeds.co.uk - the closest I can find to the fantastic Moneta I grew my first year, although I didn't have much luck with these last year...)
3 courgette 'Black Beauty'
3 'Summer Crookneck Squash' (similar to courgettes - I had to make my Real Seeds order up to £7!)
3 winter squash 'Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato' (great storers - I've still got some from last summer)
3 winter squash 'Waltham Butternut' (because whatever variety I tried last year were tiny, and these from Real Seeds are supposed to be better suited to our climate)
3 winter squash 'Burgess Buttercup' (making up that order!)
5 tomato 'Sub Arctic Plenty'
5 tomato 'Moneymaker'
5 tomato 'Red Cherry'
5 tomato 'Gardener's Delight' (that's far more tomato plants than I've got room for - I will probably give some away)
5 pepper 'King of the North' (another Real Seeds variety grown for the UK climate, promising excellent large green peppers - my favourite!)
5 Jalapeno chilli
1 large planter of Little Gem Lettuce
1 windowbox of various basil and parsley
1 windowbox of rocket, mustard and 'Wrinkled Crinkled' cress (here's hoping they have enough room)
1 big pot of chives
20 perennial sweet peas
12 'Giant Single' sunflowers
3 bushy sunflowers
a tray of petunias to grow under the asparagus

Phew! Before the end of the week I must get some beans and peas started too...

Will quickly share some slightly blurry mobile-phone pictures of the allotments taken a few weeks ago, when they flooded due to a very high water table after all the snow and rain! Luckily ours was untouched - it was just high enough to escape - but the plots adjacent to ours on two sides looked like this:


Not a good start to the season for some, but thankfully it's all cleared up now in time for the real action to start!

2009

Yes, I'm still here!

I'm planning to get back on top of this in 2010, but I thought I'd better recap last year first so you know where I'm at.

2008 ended pretty badly, with our whole potato crop ruined by wireworm, tomatoes ravaged by blight, neglected beans drying on the plants, pumpkins mysteriously exploding (yes, exploding) and most everything else drowned in weeds. We did get some stupendously big parsnips, but they were too big - the middles were all woody!

2009 was more of the same - not enough time to do everything, broad bean plants turned to blackened stumps for reasons unknown, crops going to waste on the plants, weeds just everywhere...

And we decided we'd give up. We'd given it a good shot but we obviously didn't have the time to do the plot justice, and there are plenty more people out there on the waiting list who deserve a shot at it probably better than we do.

So off we went in September to harvest what was left; a few pumpkins, potatoes, onions and parsnips. And we were amazed. There was so MUCH. Four of the most beautiful pumpkins, a huge bag of parsnips, dozens of squashes from a plant I'd given up on months back but had seemingly revived itself. A big bag of healthy potatoes, despite last year's wireworm problem and losing half the plants to a very rushed and careless earthing-up job. So many lovely onions! And we thought, well, we grew all this with hardly any effort at all. Maybe we're just doing it wrong.

Duh!

So we're going to simplify. Fewer crops, given more space each. Add some more permanent things to the allotment (raspberries, raised salad beds) so we no longer have the daunting task of digging over the WHOLE lot. Fussy plants requiring more work will grow in our home garden, in pots or growbags, or not at all.

And maybe, just maybe, this year we'll get this thing under control...

Staving off the blog-guilt

I know, I know - it's been ages, I'm sorry.
The plot overwhelms me in the summer, and life's so busy even without it. And just as the blog and the allotment are supposed to motivate each other, so allotment-guilt perpetuates blog-guilt, and vice versa, in a paralysing vicious circle.

But two things have happened so exciting I had to write at least a quick post to tell you.

I harvested my shallots!

18 planted, 64 harvested. Doesn't seem like a bad turnover. Now I'm going to have to find somewhere to store them. The house is too warm, my onions told me last year, but if I put them in the shed I'm worried the rodents will get them. We have a pretty bad rodent problem.

Do rodents even eat onions?

And look at THIS!

Ok, so the plants don't look too healthy. Not sure why - it's not nearly destructive enough to be blight and I'm pretty sure they're getting enough food and water. But anyway I've eaten a good handful of the very first Nomegrown tomatoes now and they're delicious. A little thick-skinned (is that just down to variety?) but delicious!

The toms on the allotment are doing pretty well too, and despite my complete inability to prune them they're carrying a pretty decent amount of fruit.

The beans are doing incredibly well, and so is the sweetcorn and most of the squashy things. Two of my obelisks are covered in spaghetti squashes, the pumpkins had made a break for plot-domination and started over the top of the cabbage-patch netting when we returned from another holiday recently, and I swear we carried home nearly my body-weight in courgettes the other day. The cucumbers aren't doing so well, unfortunately, though this small-but-perfectly-formed specimen was delicious (the difference between shop-bought cucumbers and homegrown ones is astounding).

First year I grew them it was in grow bags, and I've just never had such good results since. I think next year I will have to try growbags again!

I Can Grow Carrots!

And they're SO delicious!

As you can see by the variety of sizes, I can't thin carrots, but one step at a time eh?

I was disappointed to find a couple had carrot-fly holes in them, and several more had little white eggs round the tops. This is from a row planted amongst nine rows of onions, leeks and shallots! This companion-planting lark seems a bit hit and miss to me. Ah well. Won't stop me trying...

Thank you for all your kind words, encouragement and advice after the last post - I knew I could count on you guys : )


You'll be pleased to know we did get the sweetcorn, pumpkins (above) and summer brassicas (below) planted out before Glastonbury (and we had a great time too!), and the brassicas have all been safely netted (although it was a bit of a rush job - don't laugh!).


This is our lettuce patch.

Oops. If I had time, I'd pull it all up and start again, but I just don't. I wonder if I can save seed from all the mustard, mizuna and cress which has bolted... In fact a lot of what you see here is bolted crops, presumably from the stress of weed-crowding (and lack of thinning, of course).

But who wants to talk about weeds? What's important is that the eating part of this whole enterprise has really got going now.

Tonight I cooked this amazing summer chicken stew, from a recipe I saw on Market Kitchen yesterday (which you can find here, if you like, and I highly recommend it) with Nome-grown potatoes, carrots, broad beans, onion, peas (the mangetout and sugar snaps have been getting huge under all those weeds) and lovage and mint! I have yet to master the art of food photography - the picture below looks rather anaemic - but WOW, it was well worth trudging to the plot in the rain after work for!

'The Wall'

I think I've hit 'the wall'. Just like last June too. It's weeks since I've done any decent amount of work at the plot, weeds are swamping everything, there are still two beds to dig over before I can plant out my summer cabbages, pumpkins and corn, and I just can't face it.

But this blog and the allotment have always motivated each other - that's why I started it in the first place - so here's a quick update on not very much to try to get me going again.

GOOD NEWS: The strawberries are fruiting away; no great amount but a decent handful every few days.
BAD NEWS: Actually considering they're mostly under two feet of grass they're doing pretty well, but the slugs and millipedes are eating quite a lot too.
GOOD NEWS: The asparagus is looking SO healthy compared to last year, with no beetle trouble at all, and my pride-and-joy seed-grown red petunias are flowering beautifully underneath it.
BAD NEWS: Still haven't planted out the replacement pea plants I started at home, and they're getting all tangled up.
GOOD NEWS: The beans are doing really well, with hardly any slug trouble. I've started a tubful at home too, and they're great.
BAD NEWS: The lettuce patch is so completely overgrown I don't think I'll get anything else out of it this year, unless maybe the beetroots are still ok under all that grass, or unless I clear it and start new sowings.
GOOD NEWS: My water lily is spreading its leaves on the surface at last and the pond and herb patch are looking lovely.
BAD NEWS: I've been persuaded that a lot of the slug-damage on my brassicas is actually pigeon damage. I thought pigeons only went for the flowering parts, but apparently I'm wrong and they need netting from the outset, so I'm kicking myself for leaving them unprotected.
GOOD NEWS: The broad beans are looking good. I don't really know when I'm supposed to pick them, but I think they're about ready...
BAD NEWS: Loads of the red onions are flowering already. Does that mean I won't be able to eat them? How can I stop them flowering??
GOOD NEWS: Some of the white onions are ready to eat already, so we've started harvesting them as needed, just as last year's supply ran out. This means we haven't bought onions in a year!
And REALLY GOOD NEWS: The tomatoes I thought were disease-stricken are all growing away healthily and happily now! Woo!

There.

Now I've got Thursday, Saturday and Sunday off and maybe some free time tomorrow afternoon, and the weather's looking pretty good, so there's really no excuse for not going down there and kicking some serious couchgrass butt before next week. Those pumpkins and sweetcorn WILL be planted before I go to Glastonbury...
Right, Eddie?