Our allotment's blog

Some photos

2007-06-06T18:46:00.001+01:00

Having now got back into the allotmenteering (and, perhaps, Blogging) spirit, I've been spending quite a lot of time down there over the last couple of weekends getting everything back into shape. It wasn't too bad, but it had been a little neglected earlier in the year.
As well as digging and general muck clearing, I've been diligent about protecting our bumper crop of raspberries from the birds. I've never really bothered with this before, and we've always had a few raspberries to try. However, this is the first year for which it appears that we're going to get lots, and the Allotment Uber Gaffer has warned us that the pigeons (grr - pigeons) are broadening their appetites and becoming ever more voracious. I've also been very careful to build a firm tent, rather than draping the net directly over the bushes; this after the AuG also warned us of finding bits of dead blackbird chick in the net if we did the latter. Apparently they get tangled up thinking they can still get at the fruit, then the pigeons (grr - pigeons) swoop in and mangle them.

While I was in a netting mood, kale and sprouts went in. That's spuds in the background, that is. While we're on the subject, the Pink Fir Apples are coming along nicely. A bit munched by lugs, but all-in-all not too bad.
And, finally, the usual plot overview. It all looks a bit bare, but the plants are a-coming...

Shed porn

2007-05-29T07:43:00.000+01:00

Blogs always look better with a photo at the top, so here's an entirely opportunistic photo of the shed I've been building at the bottom of the garden. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Yes, this does have tenuous links to the allotment.

People in the office have been asking why it's taken such a long time - I started last August. Now they can see the answer. It's not because the shed is particularly complicated or flashy. It's because I'm a tedious detail-monkey. Yes, those are fully working sash windows. Yes, I did make them myself. Yes, all the shiplap is screwed in place, not nailed.

Anyway, now it's all done apart from the paint job (to be painted in Holkham linseed oil paint, colour 'parchment') and some barge boards to go round the roof. I've been scouring the neighbourhood for designs in the vernacular. If I can work out how, I'll take some photos and host a poll here for what gets built.

Return of the Native

2007-05-28T18:35:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been four months since my last update, and everything has changed. In just four months I've been plunged into blogging obscurity. My Google pagerank has plummeted from four to zero, my Blogger login has been rendered obsolete (luckily I have a Google login) and the text editor looks a little - just a little - different to it used to. On the plus side, my last post got seven comments - thanks to all those who left something.

So, why have I been away? Well, unfortunately there's no great life changing experience by which to justify my absence. I didn't write for a long time simply because I couldn't think of anything to write. It's as easy as that. As you can probably tell, by the fact that I'm rambling, I can't think of much to write now either.

This year's allotmenteering efforts got off to a slow start. Some digging happened in March, but April saw the site come to a halt. The early period of dry, hot weather baked the soil to concrete, making digging impossible and sowing futile. April, therefore, was a month in which to complete my super luxury shed (mentioned in an earlier post) in the garden. And, no, mentioning my shed doesn't mean I've come over all lifestyle in the last four months. This was, and remains, an allotment blog. The shed is linked because, as I wrote before, the lame B&Q too-short-to-stand-in, too-flimsy-to-trust and too-rubbish-to-mention effort, with its cracked plastic glass and ill fitting door, that came with the house is now off to the plot as a combined tool store and weak-tea-on-a-rainy-day emporium.

May has seen a return to form. April's hiatus meant that the first part of the month was focused on clearing weeds. Luckily the situation hadn't got out of hand. Doubly luckily, I'd invested in a chillington hoe, the bully most likely to steal the pocket money of all the other, lamer, tools in the shed.

With the land clear, we've been planting in earnest. We have three types of potato in; a standard second early and maincrop variety, and Pink Fir Apples. Other allotment bloggers seem to rave about the latter, so I thought I'd give them a go and stuck ten tubers in. They seem popular with the slugs which probably bodes well for flavour but poorly for use-ability.

Edwin Tucker let us down with onions, with their red onions failing and the bag of white onions they sent us being half rotten but arriving too late to do anything about it. Therefore, we have shallots and garlic but a pretty paltry array of white onions.

We did have some Pak Choi and some Cos lettuce coming on, but the got eaten by the slugs. No matter, May is the demoralising month with the slugs on the rampage every night. Chin up, plant more seeds, start again. There's a good row of carrots (Nantes) and a few scorzonera too.

There is a good crop of grain amaranths and quinoa coming on, both sets of seeds from The Real Seed Company (link to the right). For both the plants are about 6 inches high and growing well. We've also got a job lot of last year's specialities oca, ulloco (yes, I know I said I wasn't going to grow them again but the Real Seed Company tempted me) and yacon.

The garden is full of brassica seedlings, sweet potatoes and squash plants waiting to go out. The plot is clear and ready for them; it's now just a matter of getting around to it, and judging the optimum balance between the weather being too wet and slug friendly and it being too dry and requiring watering every night. If I have my way that balance will be considered struck next weekend, and the lot of them'll be out. "They've got two choices", as my dad always says.

Today has been a day of planting seeds. I am trying more than in previous years to get salad crops going. The beds have been diligently cleared (no hiding places for slugs) and the soil raked to a fine tilth. The following are all in:

Swiss Chard (started off in pots at home in previous years)
Red Para Cress
Chicory (Palla Rossa)
Florence Fennel (Zefa Fino)
Beetroot (Detroit 2 Bolivar)
Spinach (Matador)
Flat leaf Parsley
French Bean (Slenderette)
Lettuce (Paris Island Cos)
Onion (White Lisbon)
Pea (Green Shaft)

There aren't any photos to accompany this post because the plot was really busy this afternoon and, frankly, I was too shy to take them. However, if you're lucky there might be some in the near future...

Egg mysteries

2007-01-11T21:35:00.000Z

There was a brief spell of good weather on the weekend, if good can be defined as "not raining", so I decided to go down to the plot to do some general tidying up. Sow thistles are sprouting up everywhere, and they're ugly little blighters that are best nipped in the bud.

After having cleared the worst of them, I turned my attentions to a little digging. That's when I found the buried egg.

Avid readers (humour me and pretend they exist) will know that I love a good allotment mystery. 2006 saw the Case of the Disappearing Brassicas (solved), the Case of the Cat Poo (solved) and the Case of the Southmead Egg Leaver (unsolved). I thought this was the first case of 2007, with the similarities to the Case of the Southmead Egg Leaver not going unnoticed.

After a few fanciful moments spent wondering if this was a dinosaur's egg (take it home, incubate a T-Rex?) a quick chat to the Allotment Uber Gaffer solved the mystery. It's a goose egg that accidentally got imported with the horse manure. People have been finding quite a few of them, the foxes having been caught moving them around and burying them.

I'll end with a plot overview photo, as there hasn't been one for a while.

Allotment awareness

2007-01-11T07:48:00.000Z

Jane has post an interesting comment in response to my earlier post about Bristol's allotment strategy. One point that particularly struck me was about the advertising of allotments.

I've never seen any! In my experience it's up to the individual to initiate the whole thing - the potential plot holder has to decide they want an allotment, then has to have the information seeking skills to delve into the depths of the city council to work out the application process.

In that case, there must be a strong element of word-of-mouth in the uptake of allotments. So, no wonder there are disparities between communities! It makes me wonder how many neighbourhoods are seething about the piece of derelict scrub land in their midst, completely unaware that it's theirs for the taking?

(Actually, a person-in-the-know has told me that not even city council knows where all the allotments are, but that's another story.)

Anyway, Jane's comment has made me notice that advertising and promotion are conspicuous by their absence in the whole strategy. I've already sent one tranche of feedback to the city council (to be published later) - I now feel another one coming on!

The allotment annexe

2007-01-07T21:44:00.000Z

Well, what with the political thread about Bristol's allotment strategy and the fact that it stopped raining for long enough today for me to visit the plot, I now have a bit of a backlog of vaguely post-worthy material (if you set the bar of expectation low enough). However, the first thing that comes to mind is that the allotment annexe - the extra couple of beds the Uber Gaffer gave us during our short fall in the summer - has been under represented on this site.

At the moment it looks like the photo above; full of spring cauliflowers and leeks, and in need of a going over with a hoe.

We've never had much success growing cauliflowers. We got curds when we first tried about a decade ago on our first plot when we lived in Oxford. However, as soon as we cut the curds open they were full of cabbage white caterpillars.

We've never managed to get cauliflowers to work in Bristol. This year's crop is the most promising yet - actually, that's true of all brassicas. As they're a spring variety, we're keeping our fingers crossed that if we do get curds they might even turn out to be bug free.

We have a lot of leeks - I think we ended planting a couple of hundred - but they're all teeny-weeny. I suspect the very dry summer and the fact we were pretty late planting them out didn't help. Nonetheless, they taste good.

Bristol's allotment strategy

2007-01-06T18:11:00.000Z

I've been reading a post on Jane Perrone's blog about the loss of allotment sites in Manchester. I haven't delved into the details behind the story, but the topic started me thinking about Bristol's allotment strategy. The latest version, to cover the period 2007-2012, is currently in consultation. Superficially, Bristol's approach seems to have some similarities to Manchester's story.

The current strategy (2001-2006) and the new proposals both appear to share the core theme of divesting poorly used or derelict sites, ploughing some of the proceeds into improvements for popular sites. The council's record on this is pretty good. During the period 1999-2005 the council sold off 7 sites (or parts thereof), netting a little under £6.5M, 38% of which was returned to investment in allotments. The improvements are plain to see. For example, the site our plot is on (Ashley Down) has new, high security, palisade fencing, new haulingways and there's talk of a complete overhaul of the water supply.

This investment seems to have paid off. Looking at the 2003 to 2005 period, there appear to be just over 800 new long term (i.e. persevering for the two years measured) tenants. Combining the increased number of tenancies with the reduced number of plots, occupancy rates are now up twenty percentage points to 73%, when compared to 2000. Again, anecdotally, the Ashley Down site has been transformed over three year period we've been there from being half filled with brambles to fully cultivated with a waiting list.

The picture above concentrates on the allotment strategy from a "return on investment" perspective. I'm very sympathetic to this. We live, after all, in a society driven by financial targets. Recent news stories have made it clear that the NHS is expected to make difficult decisions to manage its budget; allotments are small fry in comparison. Selling off unused sites makes a lot of sense.

However, there are two sides to this story. The entry referred to on Jane Perrone's blog takes a more personal approach. She discusses, for example, the fate of plot holders on little used sites who are moved when the site is sold off. As well as the new locations offered not always being suitable, simply offering an equivalent sized piece of land ignores the investment the tenant has made in their existing plot. Years of cultivation, soil improvement and the like can't be moved. Then, of course, once it's gone it's gone. It's very easy to go from allotment site to housing estate, but that's not true of the other way. Irreversible decisions to reduce capacity shouldn't be taken lightly; that's something the railway industry seems to be learning.

Looking at the lists Bristol's strategy documents it appears that under utilised sites tend to be in the poorer areas of the city, although that's certainly not universally true. Yes, having an allotment is somehow trendy again. Yes, there are plenty of stories about waiting lists stretching out for years. But, again anecdotally, my feeling is that it's a bit of a middle class phenomenon.

Does this indicate that the under utilised plots are simply in the wrong place? If they are, the strategy of selling them off makes a lot of sense. They are of no benefit to solving the much publicised long waiting lists, and their dereliction suggests that the local communities could better use the money and space for something else.

Or, does it indicate a lack of foresight by the authorities in promoting allotments to all? I don't want to go too far down the path of crass generalisations about demographics and the role allotments could play in improving access to - and knowledge of the importance of - fruit and vegetables in poorer neighbourhoods, but I can't help my thoughts heading loosely in that direction.

I want to avoid going off on a social comment tangent. My basic point is: Which comes first - the chicken or the egg? Should the council work to drum up demand where there's currently very little, or accept that some locations are a lost cause (for want of a better phrase), get rid of them and reinvest where allotments are winning?

I'm somewhat ambivalent. I can see the case for both points of view.

There's more to write on this, and I may have to revisit this post when I've got my thoughts better formed.

Christmas cheer

2006-12-25T12:39:00.000Z

Ok, I know it's a bit sad writing a blog entry on Christmas day, but the facts are that the Allotmentboss's Boss is downstairs preparing food (and implicitly inviting me not to hover in the kitchen) and I'm upstairs testing out a USB mug warmer I got as a present [1]. So, while I have free hands I might as well.

Anyway, on with the allotment related news. This is, after all, an allotment blog.

First, there's the Brussels Sprouts. Most years we grow the variety Groninger, but this year we tried Wellington. I'm not impressed. You see, I'm the sort that likes bullet hard, tightly packed ball bearings of sprout. Wellington are anything but this. They're like little loose flower heads. I'm not sure whether its the variety or the warm weather we've been having - although we have had the frosts that sprouts are always better after - but either way its back to Groninger next year.
Next, there's the horseradish. As I've written here before, I'm partial to Jerusalem artichoke and horseradish soup. So, I dug both up yesterday to make this year's first batch.

Last year I tried grating the horseradish by hand. I'm still surprised that I came out of the experience alive, even if I have got a bit of squint now and still get flashbacks. So, this year I thought I'd try using a blender to grate the stuff. Big mistake. You see, you get nothing while the thing's whizzing away, but as soon as you take the lid off it's obvious the pain has just been stored up. The ABB found me cowering in the corner, half grated horseradish dashed across the work surface and down the floor, whimpering "make it stop".

All of this makes me wonder what was going through the minds of the first humans to try horseradish. I mean, there must have been some stage of experimentation when people didn't know what plants were edible. Surely, when trying out new plants to eat, you wouldn't persevere with horseradish? What went through that Australopithecene entrepreneur's mind - surely, in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, the sheer pain of preparing horseradish would make it a "nah, I don't reckon we could eat that"?

Still, it makes nice sauce.

Anyway, that's enough of that. I've got a day of drinking and swearing at the Queen to get on with.

[1] I used to be a bit of a freelance scientist when I was young enough to have a full head of hair. So, armed with the knowledge that (pure) water has a specific heat capacity of 4.2 kJmol^-1, there's 100ml of water in the cup and the stated power of the warmer is 2.5W, I ought to be able to work out its efficiency using my home-brew thermometer. Life's not all sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, you know - although at times it would be nice if just some of it was.

What we did on our holidays

2006-11-27T17:27:00.000Z

Quite specifically, what we did on our holidays was wait until it started to rain heavily, then ran outside and shovelled shit.

It all started yesterday. We were down on the allotment collecting a rather fantabulous looking January King cabbage (ok, two months early, but who's counting?) and some kale when we spied the Allotment Uber Gaffer up the path. I made the sign of "could you get me a load of horse manure?" He made the sign of "I've already got you a load over there", which was odd seeing as we hadn't yet asked him for one. This either meant the AuG had had some sort of prophetic vision calling him to get us some poo in advance of our asking, or he'd got a general load in and we were the first people to ask. We decided to plump for the latter as the most likely explanation. This meant the manure had to be moved quickly; it wouldn't be without precedent for the same poo to end up being given to half a dozen different people.

Luckily, the Allotmentboss's boss and I had taken today off, for no constructive reason other than we both had holiday to squander before the end of the year. We set off with our wheelbarrow (freshly pumped up tyre) and shovel just after midday. About one hundred yards from the house it started to rain. It was light drizzle; I wasn't going back. About two hundred yards from the house it started to rain heavily. It was just a passing shower; I wasn't going back. About three hundred yards from the house it was still raining heavily. I was already soaked; there was no point going back.

The ABB quickly found shelter as soon as we got to the allotment site, delegating all non-managerial input to the poo moving exercise to me. In pouring rain I started loading up the first wheelbarrow full, squelching and slipping as bubbles of water-manure slurry gurgled out from under my shoes.

By about the fourth wheelbarrow full I'd got into some sort of rhythm. I was forewarned about the little ha-ha ledge in the path that would tip half the dung out as the wheelbarrow bounced over it. I knew of the slippery mud slopes of death, waiting to send the unwary directly on to their arses, that went down the side of our plot to the lower beds.

With a rhythm in place, I had some time to think. My mind flashed back to my thirteenth birthday, being called outside by my father to help him empty the semi-rotten contents of the compost heap into a tractor trailer. It was pretty clear that once you were a teenager birthdays just weren't special any more. As a thirty-something, that lack of distinction now extends to holidays.

An hour and half and fourteen wheelbarrows' worth later, the job was done. Most beds have now got a pile of manure on, ready to be spread at a rate of about one heavily loaded big wheelbarrow per two square metres. I don't know if that will be enough, but by that stage even I could smell that I smelt bad. And, hanging around for too long with trousers sticking to one's skin, soaked to the knees with horse poo, has limited merits.

Brrr - chilly

2006-11-05T17:41:00.000Z

I was enjoying a quick cup of tea before work on Thursday morning when my eye happened to catch the tomatoes out on the patio. Given the season, they hadn't been doing well recently. However, something much more dramatic had clearly happened overnight: The tomatoes had thrown in the towel, called it a year and died. I opened the patio door - brrr - and peered out. Yes, I could see my breath. Yes, there was ice over the tray of water on the patio. Yes, the lawn was white.

Yes, it had frosted overnight.

No, I hadn't harvested all of the tender vegetables yet.

I couldn't do anything about it on a work day, so the veg. had to endure another two nights of frost. Yesterday morning I was up good and early, equipment in hand to mount a rescue mission.

The allotment was an apocalyptic vision of vegetable carnage. Those that were supposed to have lived - the kale, the sprouts - had lived. Those of a nervous disposition had died. The sweet potato vines were mush, the yacon a few blackened stalks and the Jerusalem artichokes stripped woody stems.

Luckily, things weren't as bad as they first appeared. Digging into the ground, the frosts hadn't gone that deep. The tender root crops had survived.

If, by some miracle of poor judgement, this blog has a regular reader, they'll know that I've been trying out some unusual vegetables from Simon Hickmott's book of the same name. They all came out of it, thus:

Sweet potato - Beauregard "improved" (Thompson and Morgan)
A bit of a cheat this one. It's in the book, so I can count it, even though this is the third year I've grown sweet potatoes. Once again, they were a success. Interestingly, the tubers grew much closer to the stem than normal, making them much easier to harvest. This might be something to do with the weather this year, but I suspect the fact that I had them growing in a bucketful of home made compost in otherwise awful thick orange clay had something to do with it. I can imagine the roots venturing to the edge of the compost and saying "oh no! not for me" in a comedy mincing voice, before retreating to safety.

Of the two varieties of sweet potato that are on offer here in the UK, Beauregard tastes the best, seems to be the most pest resistant, seems to be joint first for yield, stores the best and produces the most consistent and usable sized tubers. To be honest, I can't think of any benefits of the alternative, T56.

Sweet potato - T56 (T&M, OGC)
The poor relation of Beauregard, but the only way I could get my hands on the latter this year, given my home slipping attempts had failed, was to buy ten of these and get five Beauregard free.

T56 is better than nothing, but the taste isn't spectacular and you do end up with a hotch-potch of finger sized tubers and rugby balls. On the plus side, I gave a few slips away to some friends - sweet potato growing virgins - earlier in the year and they both succeeded in growing a crop. Maybe they'll get into the habit. (Actually, that makes me sound like some sort of sweet potato slip dealer.)
I've made good and sure that I get my own Beauregard plants next year by taking some very early cuttings from this year's plants.
Oca (Edulis and Unusual Herbs and Edibles)
The oca started well, but got knocked back by the dry July. They were in a bed with ulloco (more of which below) and leek seedlings, so there was no real ground cover. The soil yawned wide gaps as the month got drier, and the oca wilted. Nonetheless, they bounced back with aplomb in August. The Allotmentboss's boss made a comment about the yield per unit area when compared to potatoes. I made an ill formed and ill informed reply about promoting diversity rather than monoculture. The yield isn't great, but it's not bad either.

Overall, I'd say oca is a bit of a winner. The leaves are like a pleasantly sharp version of sorrel and can be eaten in abundance. The tubers are crispy, but with a lot of moisture. They smell and taste a little of rhubarb crumble, again with the oxalic acid taste of sorrel. Oca is also a pretty plant, with its small hairy leaves and pink stems.Ulloco (Graines Baumaux)
These plants never really got going. I think I ordered them too late to give them any real chance of growing in the short English season, and the drought in July knocked them so hard they never recovered. As a consequence the yield was, well, ... one that placed a considerable demand on the zoom function of my camera.
I'm not sure how much I like them. I seem to remember Simon Hickmott describing them as having a mucilaginous texture (too lazy to go downstairs to check). If he means that they have no real taste but leave your mouth feeling slimy and clammy, I agree.

American ground nut (Edulis)
I've decided not to harvest these this year. They grew pretty well, but I think my chances of getting a decent crop will be improved if I leave them to spread about a bit.

Chinese Yam (Edulis)
Likewise, these are supposed to take three or four years to reach a decent size.

Yacon (Edulis)
The yacon had a poor start. I'm not sure I was the best parent to it. Four out of the five tubers I was sent rotted. The remaining one grew very slowly. In fact, it only really got going in mid June.

Once it did get going it was great, but it was a little too late to be spectacular. The book talks about a giant amongst vegetables. My yacon grew to about three feet high. It was very stately, though, with large arching leaves. Moreover, it produced a modest crop of tubers.

The tubers taste pretty good, sort of nutty and sweet. If you think in terms of a dessert version of a Jerusalem artichoke, you're along the right lines.

I'll be growing yacon again; it tastes good and the plant is attractive. I've taken nine root tubers for next year.

Can anyone identify this fungus?

2006-10-15T21:20:00.000+01:00

The photos aren't the greatest quality, but a few clutches of this fungus have appeared on our allotment. I'm a pretty diligent spotter of the plain old field mushroom; pink gills, peels, smells like a mushroom and has no real ring round the stem. These aren't field mushrooms; their gills are pure white. So, characteristics (differences from field mushroom as I know it in bold):

Smells of ordinary field mushroom.
White gills.
About 5-10 cm across.
The cap can be peeled easily.
Very noticeable ring round the stem.
I didn't see a basal bulb.
Growing on freshly cultivated heavy clay soil - nearest trees are elm saplings 10-15 metres away.

I've been looking around online and I think it's probably some sort of edible Agricarus, but I'm not going to take the risk.

Soya disappointing

2006-09-21T18:11:00.000+01:00

We harvested most of the soya beans today, as the pods looked thoroughly dried out. This is the yield from three plants. Hmm, I may have been overly optimistic when I picked out that size container!

On the plus side, we did have an unusually good crop of onions this year. These bulbous beauties, harvested back in July, should keep us going until April/May, and the shallots even longer. There's definitely something comforting about storing food away for the winter.

Some foodstuff has to be eaten straight away, though, not so much because it's perishable, but because it might not survive the onslaught of the goats at St Werburgh's City Farm! We ambled down there this morning on the way back from the allotment, and received an unexpectedly rapturous welcome from the said goats. Before we knew it, they'd pinched a couple of Swiss Chard leaves from out of our bags and would have had more given the chance. We probably should have known better as they played the same trick with leeks last year.

A bit of a pickle, a bit of a jam

2006-09-19T18:50:00.000+01:00

During September we've been getting jiggy with the art of home preserving. We don't actually have any fruit trees on our allotment, but we are lucky enough to have a few on the communal land immediately above us.

The plum trees have produced a glut this year - like everywhere it seems - so I've made a few litres of plum chutney (some of which is boiling away in the pan above). The nice thing is this has turned into a communal effort. My colleague who sits next to me at work has an apple tree in the garden. His apples have made a few kilos of apple chutney. He's given me some apple wine (not the best) in exchange for some of the chutney. Downstairs sits another man who has a bottle of his home made cider with my name on it.

The AllotmentBoss's Boss has got in on the act, too. She's been taking (after asking) elderberries from trees in the neighbourhood and using them to make jam and cordial. All good, scrumptious, seasonal stuff.

Egg man (Or egg woman, or egg child, or egg monster?)

2006-09-04T20:29:00.000+01:00

The spring cabbage did get planted this evening. For my own future reference:

Pixie has been planted in the normal tray.
Myer's Offenham has been planted in modules.
(Unrelated) Gloucestershire County Cricket Club is doing its annual floodlit match tonight. I must remember to consider going next year. I'm no great fan of cricket, but it does look and sound like an interesting night out.

Anyway, on to the egg man. The other day I was talking to a colleague of mine at work about his allotment. He owns a plot on a site in Southmead, an area of Bristol not far from here. My friend went to his plot the other weekend and part of a row of potatoes had been dug up and snaffled. There, in the middle of the broken earth, was a hen's egg by way of payment. Apparently, this isn't uncommon on his site. There are lots of stories about an egg-person who causes random low-level damage to plots there but leaves an egg in apology.

If the egg bandit is reading I have mixed emotions. Firstly, boo-hiss for monkeying about with other people's plots. On the other hand, congratulations on coming up with something so bizarre.

Long time, no write

2006-09-03T20:11:00.000+01:00

Indeed, nothing happened at all on this blog during August. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the weather has been rubbish, so we've not be down to the plot as often as we'd like. Then, I've been busy at work, having been made redundant then getting a promotion in the same company (figure that one out). However, finally - and most importantly - I've been devoting my time to building a shed in the garden. This effort has vague allotment connotations, because when the glorious new ab-initio Allotmentboss self-build gets completed, the crappy B&Q flimsy effort we currently have gets moved to the plot. With it there not only can I continue to bang my head on the doorframe every time I go in to get a spade, I also get a spot to drink lukewarm tea from a plastic thermos and listen to BBC Radio Bristol on a crackly, tinny transistor radio every drizzly Sunday morning.

While all of this has been going on the Alotmentboss's Boss has been wandering around the neighbourhood denuding elderberry trees of their fruit (well, actually, I've been doing most of the picking, but enough said). We have jars of elderberry and allotment-communal-apple-tree jam and elderberry and clove cordial - all yum.

So, August has been mostly about harvesting things, as the photo at the top of this entry shows. Try as we might, the courgettes have been turning into marrows. We now have a fridge full of green things we haven't been able to eat yet, so much so that we've been passing produce to one of my friends at work. I'm notoriously stingy about giving stuff away, so we must have had a glut.

All of the early potatoes are now up, as are about half of the main crop. Both have done very well this year, with good high yields - the Charlotte earlies netted 24kg of spuds from 3kg planted - and relatively little damage from slugs.

The sweet potatoes are growing on well. They are possibly being a little slower than they have been in previous years, but I don't whether that's down to the poorer soil they're in, the cold drizzly weather, or just my perception. What is interesting is that they're all rambling up the hill of the allotment, despite the fact that the slope faces into the sun, which rises from the bottom left of the plot and sweeps over to set in the top right. While the creepers have ventured, in some cases, over a metre up the plot, nothing more than a leaf has ventured south of where the plants were put in. I'd be interested to hear any guesses as to why...

The squash really enjoyed the incredibly hot patch we had in July, and put on lots of fruit. Here we have an Uchiki Kuri and some maturing butternuts. The slightly dumpy Allotmentboss digits provide a sense of scale.

The cabbages are doing well under their protective nets. I can't remember exactly what variety this one is, but it's something like January King. We have thus far forgotten to plant any spring cabbage seeds, and it's getting a little too late now. If I remember I might stick some in a tray tomorrow evening and let them take their chances.

Finally, as I failed to do one at the beginning of August, here's a general site overview taken on or around the 20th. The first signs of mildew on the squash plants is evident; when we went down there last night the plants looked close to the end.

A little extra bite

2006-07-26T21:56:00.000+01:00

We've been getting close to the animals recently. Just around the corner from our allotment site is St Werburgh's City Farm. This is a great place to go for a bit of light relaxation, not least because the aptly named Farm pub around the corner on Hopetoun Road has a fantastic beer garden. So, the route goes a little like this: To the allotment to dig, weed and harvest. Then, go to the pub for beer and finally on to the farm to stare at the pigs or bleat at the goats. (Ignore the sheep - they're not exactly the most interactive of animals.)

I mentioned chickens in a previous post. Goats would be a serious upgrade on chickens. Feed in any old green stuff in the front, get cheese out of the back. Great. There are three kids and three adults at the farm at the moment. If only they knew that just around the corner from their grass paddock lay 110 plots of fine, fresh leeks, brassicas and other vegetable delights...
There are, of course, also piglets. Pigs entertain me because they're always so grumpy. If it's not "squeal squeal squeal how could you treat me so cruelly?" it's "grunt grunt grunt leave me alone I'm miserable".
Anyway, it's not only the farmyard animals I've been sharing quality time with recently. Yesterday morning I woke up like a shot at 5:30, probably because the air is so still and hot at the moment that we left the curtains to our broadly south facing window open overnight to improve the breeze. Unable to get back to sleep, I jumped out of bed, pulled on some shorts and a t-shirt and made for the allotment. I was hell-bent on getting that last bit of the annexe dug, ready for leek transpalnting this weekend.

Unfortunately, the allotment was absolutely marauding with Blandford Fly, many of which decided quite specifically to maraud around my bare unprotected legs. My shins are now a patchwork of large watery swellings and extremely itchy red bites.

Our site is pretty well known for Blandford fly. The Allotment uber Gaffer tells stories of people needing to go to hospital after getting bad reactions to the bites. I went to A&E last year after I got bitten on the lower arm while digging potatoes; by the end of the next day my lower arm had doubled in size and my lymph nodes were like bright red tracks running up through to my neck.

The only thing I don't understand is where they come from. A quick search on the web shows that they like to be around rivers (the Stour in Blandford, for example). We don't have a river nearby, but we do have some slightly stagnant water butts? They're also apparently most active in the middle of the day, whereas I've only ever been bitten around dawn and dusk. Maybe what we've got isn't true Blandford Fly but a Bristol variant. I don't know. All I know is it bites anything below about half a metre from the ground, it draws blood and at the moment it itches like crazy.

Courgette recipe #462

2006-07-23T21:02:00.000+01:00

It was the Allotment uber Gaffer that set fire to the grass on our new allotment annexe. Unfortunately (actually, irritatingly) the fire has burnt a hole in our nice new - and expensive - pigeon netting. We only draped it over the plants last week. I'm a bit miffed, but he did pull out all of the stops to find us the extra space, so I'll let him off. More impressively, I've found out that he keeps chickens on his plot. This makes him some kind of minor deity in my book, and therefore beyond any form of mortal reproach.

I got talking to our allotment neighbour today. Well, I say neighbour, but she's kind of our neighbour squared, being on the plot sandwiched between our two bits. She's been on there since last year, but we've never really got to know her (although we did give her vegetable spaghetti plants earlier in the year). We're rarely around at the same time and when we are we're both intent on getting on with work. Anyway, she's interested in chickens too, so some sort of communal chicken madness scheme is hatching in my brain. Unfortunately Fluffius Muppetus has already taken the best possible chicken names. "Hen Solo" and "Princess Layer" makes me chuckle every time.

Anyway, enough of that. I'm about to enjoy a bowl of courgette and courgette flower risotto. Last night we had courgette pasta. Tomorrow I'm looking forward to courgette bake, with the promise of courgette ice-cream for pudding. A few weeks from now we'll be able to wash it all down with courgette wine sipped from glasses made from hollowed out courgettes, before freshening up with courgette toothpaste and a quick once over with courgette facial scrub.

In case I'm not being clear, we have a lot of courgettes. A lot. We have a lot of French beans too, but that's another story. On a more practical note, we're most of the way through harvesting the onions, and it appears that we've got a lot of them as well.

They're home

2006-07-20T22:07:00.000+01:00

We got about a third of our new allotment annexe cleared last weekend and planted it up the calabrese and cauliflowers. The remainder had the grass hacked off and left. We both went down this morning (to collect courgettes, natch) and the grass strimmings had all been burnt. Now, the question is was this a bush fire (maybe sparked by a bit of glass making a lens onto the tinder-dry grass) or did the Allotment uber Gaffer decide to make the clearance a bit easier for us?

They're not funny, but they are amusing me

2006-07-18T08:18:00.000+01:00

I was stood down on the plot last night, hands on hips, having a hearty, if slightly irrational, chuckle at the squash plants.

I think I'm finding them funny because they're growing like plants possessed at the moment - I suspect due to a combination of the very hot weather and the bucket full of the Allotmentboss's home made compost each is sitting in. Either way, each time I go down there another half dozen six foot long tendrils have made a bid for freedom, crawling over the neighbouring beds or neighbouring allotments.

I also find the fact that they like to hold hands so very tightly amusing. One of the beds above the squash contains potatoes, and the squash have got their tendrils wound well and truly round them. Every time I dig up a potato plant I can almost hear the attached squash whine; "Nooooo. Don't take him away. He's my fwiend..."

The brassicas have a home in waiting

2006-07-15T15:06:00.000+01:00

I went down to the plot on Thursday night to see if there were any more courgettes to collect (there weren't). On my way back up to the main gate our Allotment uber Gaffer flagged me down, waving his arms proudly.
"Ahhh, just the man! You'll see that a young couple have taken over the bottom half of that plot next but one to yours. You can have the top half."

I did the maths in my head quite quickly. The site on offer is a field of dense couch grass, and that's what I wanted the least. Milk thistles, sow thistles, even isolated and controlled knotweed are just fine, but digging out a mat of couch grass rhizomes for ever more is certainly not my idea of fun. On the other hand, it is next but one to my current plot, and it is next to one of the all-too-sparse water butts. There's also a thing about gift horses and mouths and the inverse relationship between begging and choosing to consider.
"Ahh, thank you Allotment uber Gaffer, I'll take it."

I went down there early this morning to survey the scene in a bit more detail.

Yes, it does look like a fairly dense field of grass, and one that's set seed too. In the middle of everything there's a bed of broad beans that are chocolate brown and well past their best.

As Roots Manuva says, "chin high, puff chest and get right to it". So, I've spent the rest of the morning with my sickle (it's surprising how many glances a six foot four man with a shaved head gets when walking through the centre of Bristol with a sickle) and fork trying to bestow some sort of order. Despite the fairly promising looking patch at the bottom of the area (foreground) I decided to start at the top, where the grass was at its worst; something to do with woolly thinking about saving the best 'til last.

I'm really glad I started at the top.

First of all, it hasn't been grassy for that long, which means that the grass is easier to get out than I'd anticipated.

Secondly, the last incumbent clearly put a lot of effort into caring for the soil up there. As I wrote above, it's only two plots along from mine but the soil is much darker, more crumbly and obviously in better heart. I'd say lots of good stuff has been added to it over previous years.

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, as I was tidying up to go home the couple who have taken the lower half of the plot turned up. After exchanging pleasantries we talked boudaries, and it appears the Allotment uber Gaffer has promised them the bottom half to include that clear looking bit I thought we were inheriting. I'll need to catch up with the AuG on this - he's never that decisive with his adminstrative bureaucracy. (Indeed, I'm not even clear whether we've been given this extra patch only to solve an immediate brassica crisis, or whether we can have it in perpetuity.)

However, as things stand I leave with the sense of having avoided needlessly doing someone else's work for them, coupled with a slight sense of guilt that I'd spent the entire morning offloading our weed roots and other rubbish onto what turned out to be their allotment... doo de doo de doo...

Got them!

2006-07-09T19:18:00.000+01:00

The rain abated so we got to the allotment in time to harvest this year's first courgettes before they turned into this year's first marrows. In true courgette plant style, we'll need to go again on Tuesday to harvest the next batch.

Last weekend I took lots of photos of things growing that I didn't get around to including in a blog entry, so I've put them all together below in a sort of medley format. From the top, and left-to-right, we have: Soya beans, french beans, squash and sweetcorn, celeriac, fennel, white onions and brussels sprouts.

Ahhh, rain

2006-07-05T22:57:00.000+01:00

Rain, and lashings of it, which means I won't have to get up stupidly early in the morning to water everything before work. However, will it stop raining in time to allow me to get the first courgette of the season (photographed on Sunday) before it turns into a marrow?

A correction (perhaps)

2006-07-03T21:58:00.000+01:00

On reflection, I don't think my post from yesterday makes much sense. I wrote about our potato plants suffering from blight, but it not having been too serious in previous years. Well, blight is serious, and there's no reason to believe that our plants have some sort of special dispensation to contract it but only in a mild form.

So, the suggestion is that what our potato plants have is not blight, but something else. Something that leads to black spots and general yellowing of the leaves, would strike early in the season and yet still allow production of a good quality (and large) crop by the time the plants are lifted later in the year.

A quick skim through Hessayon suggests that what we have is a magnesium deficiency. Photo 161 on the following website is a pretty good example of what our plants look like.

Whatever we've got, it's probably not blight. Either way I'm happy. The potatoes we harvested yesterday tasted nice, and past precedent also suggests that our crop will store well. What else can you want?

It's the start of the month!

2006-07-02T12:16:00.000+01:00

Which means it's time for the now customary pictures of how the plot looks. What follows is a lot of photos with very little commentary.

General site overview
While it may look like there's some spare space in the left foreground, there isn't. It's just that the plants that are there are too small to be picked out by my camera. (Notice also the rare glimpse of the Allotmentboss's Boss.)

Unusual vegetables
I don't really have a good definition of unusual. I suppose in this context it means "things we haven't grown before".

The one and only yacon is growing quite strongly but slowly. Despite the dry weather it's being a bit of a martyr to slugs. The Chinese yams are doing well. Simon Hickmott, in Growing Unusual Vegetables, writes that they're unlikely to make much progress in their first year, so that they're about 18 inches tall seems pretty good.
The American ground nut (Apios Americana) is similarly climbing strongly, but it's hardly a mass of dense foliage. I'm not too worried; both plants appear to be happy enough.
The ulloco have put on a good spurt of growth over the last few weeks. That may be due to the hot weather, or it may be due to the lashings of home grown compost I've given them.
Finally, the oca are definitely the early winners of the unusual vegetable competition. They're fairly big plants now, and the leaves taste wonderful. While I'd like there to be tubers at the end of the year, oca is definitely worth growing just as a salad vegetable.
(In the foreground is a line of Swiss Giant Zermat leeks.)

Usual vegetables
(Or, "things we have grown before".)
Firstly, it looks like our first early potato plants are just beginning to get some black spots on their leaves, indicating the first signs of potato blight. It's not too bad so far, but the maincrop plants will need to be watched carefully to ensure they're lifted before it gets too much of a grip. In each of the three years we've grown potatoes we've always ended up with blight, but we've never had a problem lifting and storing a good supply of perfectly healthy tubers. Blight always comes, but it nevers seems to get a killer grip on our plants.

Anyway, given that the blight is coming, that we'd like some new potatoes for our dinner, that we need the space for brassicas and that it's always nice to harvest things, we dug a few up (hence the empty patch down by my feet). Four kilogrammes of near flawless tasty looking salad potatoes (Charlotte) - great!
The space was immediately replanted with kale (Pentland Brig). Over the coming week I'll probably lift all of the Charlotte plants, and replace the whole bed with brassicas, thus partially overcoming our little space crisis.

Slightly above the potatoes are the sweet potatoes; Beauregard in the front row, T56 behind. This is not the best bit of real estate on the plot. It's laced with large clumps of heavy yellow clay, and it's noticeable that there aren't even many weeds growing up here. Comfrey and grass survive, but not much else is tempted. Still, it was the only space we had. In typical Allotmentboss style I threw in two large bags of home made compost, and so far so good.

Our other allotment's blog

2006-06-30T18:41:00.000+01:00

The brassicas continue to get bigger, and we continue not to have anywhere to plant them. All of our plants were pricked out about a month ago, and they were all approximately the same size. The following picture is of various plants - kale, calabrese and cabbages - that were planted out in 100% home made kitchen waste compost.

This tray, on the other hand, was planted out in chipped bark compost:
That's a fairly substantial difference; an abundance of rich growth against stunted yellowing plants. Either way, both sets now definitely need planting out - before one dies of starvation and the other gives up from overcrowding.

We're still completely out of room on our plot. We have space for a few plants, and we could get creative - planting between onions that will be coming up soon, for example - but essentially there is no obvious place for everything to go. So, it's time to think radically. It's time to get an overflow allotment.

We're on Bristol's Ashley Down allotments. The site representative has got a plot he can let us have, but it needs a notice to quit served on the tenants. They've let it become overgrown with milk thistles and other weeds, but it is mercifully free from couch grass. Unfortunately a notice to quit takes a long time. Even worse, half of the plot is full of Japanese knot weed. In itself, that's not too much of a worry. We don't need the whole plot, so we could just give it a wide berth and leave it to its own devices. The worry is that Bristol City Council are currently on a bit of a mission to eradicate knotweed from all sites, which means they're spraying it with some pretty unpleasant chemicals. What's bad for knotweed is certainly bad for cabbages, and I doubt it's great for an Allotmentboss either.

So, it's time to look at other sites. We have plenty to choose from locally. My cycle home from work takes me past a cluster of sites that are about half a mile from home - roughly the same as our current plot. Tonight I made a recce, as follows (includes blurb from the Council's allotment website):

Dovercourt Road
Number of plots: 30
This level and vehicle accessible site has seen a decline in recent years but has great potential. The site has a water supply and a new parking area.
I couldn't actually get in, because the site is well protected by a fence and barbed wire. There were clear signs of life on this site, with lots of plots in cultivation. However, the unused plots seemed to be mostly covered in metre high grass - far too much of a challenge at this time year, and a sure sign of chafer grubs/leatherjackets ready to saw off anything planted there. There's also a high voltage power line running along the back of the site, and it's the furthest away of the sites I looked at.

Downend Road
Number of plots: 6
This site is adjacent to Horfield B allotments and is level.
The site description says it all. This is much less of an allotment site than it is a strip of land to one side of an access road to a line of garages. Three plots appear to be in good use. A further three are covered in black polythene, although there's no way of telling if that's council polythene or if the plots are already rented.

All in all the site is in very good order, and is probably the closest to our house, but the lack of any sort of security fencing is a worry - especially given the site is readily visible and easily accessible from the road.

Horfield B
Number of plots: 33
The site is almost fully let following recent site improvements that have included the erection of green palisade security fencing. The site is flat with a good water supply and an active site representative. It is hoped to install new haulingways in the next few years.
This is clearly the place to be, with ready access, lots of very tidy plots and water butts. It also has good security fencing. Maybe this is why there's a very large sign on the gate saying "Fully let with a waiting list". That'll be a "no" then.

Horfield A
Number of plots: 16
A medium sized site that currently has only a few tenants. The site is level and has water.
Utter madness. Enchanting madness, but madness nonetheless. To get to this site you go past the well trimmed order of Horfield A, round a very large bush blocking your path, and set off down an overgrown path. On your right is a waist high gate that leads to a field of shoulder high brambles. There are occasional signs of life here. Someone's mowing paths through the site, and there are half a dozen locations where people have dug blocks a few metres square and are successfully growing potatoes, onions and cabbages. Strangely, if you wander all the way through the brambles you get to a large area that appears to be a very well kept lawn.

While this site is no quick fix, it is utterly enchanting simply because it's so difficult to get to and so derelict. Also, as the grainy photo shows, I wasn't there alone.
It's madness, it's pure folly, but the romantic in me is hooked.

Good fortune at the Vegan Festival

2006-06-19T13:53:00.000+01:00

A couple of weekends ago the Boss's Boss and I went to Bristol's annual vegan festival at the city's old docks. I'm by no means a vegan but I am keen on days out that are free and include plenty free food tastings. The vegan festival fulfilled these criteria.

Strangely enough, one of the first stalls we visited was selling random odds 'n' sods of vegetable seeds; mainly left overs from normal packs that had been divied up into envelopes. (Why do standard suppliers sell cabbage seeds in packs of two or three hundred?) A quick hunt through the pile soon uncovered six or seven achocca seeds in an envelope, and a virgin pack of Chinese Celery from Future Foods. Both were liberated for a grand total of 60p.

Hot patio action

2006-06-15T22:15:00.000+01:00

Life's not all about the allotment. There's plenty of action on our hot (south facing) patio too. After a less than impressive start, the aubergines are growing away with aplomb in pots of pure kitchen waste compost.

The chilli peppers are planted up in the same. They're still pretty small, but no smaller than the ones the local greengrocer's - soon to be closed, along with every other shop on our thriving high street, if Storegap and succeeds in pushing through a planning application to destroy the neighbourhood with a "new foodstore for Bishopston" - is selling.
The sweet potatoes (these are Beauregard) are still in 9 inch pots in the outhouse. They'll be going out this weekend into the last available space on the plot. Three years out of three now they've been on the left hand side of the allotment. What are the chances of that, eh? [1] If I were a contestant on Deal or no Deal I'd probably attach particular significance to it and spout some mumbo jumbo about my "system". Luckily, I'm rational, and I know they've only been on the left each year because I've put them there.
The brassicas are really starting to nag for an answer to the question of where I'm going to put them. I still don't know. I may be the AllotmentBoss, but sometimes not even management have all the answers.

[1] Assuming there's an equal probability of the plants going on the left and the right, and that my choice of where to site them each year is random - namely, that it's a stochastic process in sweet potato location space - which is broadly true as I don't include them in crop rotation plans, the answer is 1/8. Frighteningly, there are people I work with who would maintain that they'd have to go on the right next year. "I mean, tossing a coin and it coming up heads four times - next time it would have to be a tail, right?"

A squash squash

2006-06-12T21:25:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine visited Bristol shortly after we took on the allotment in early 2004. As he had also recently taken on a plot, I was keen to show off my handiwork. So, I took him down, full of enthusiastic stories of the things I was going to plant. When we arrived, I started the tour with the first patch I'd dug, an area about 1m x 4m that was the result of fingertip weed removal the weekend before.

"How long'd that take you?", he asked.
"About four hours on Sunday", I replied.
"Well, my digging technique is much better than yours. In four hours I'd dug my whole plot".

I couldn't help but point out that, apart from my plot being substantially larger than his, he was on virgin sandy soil in flat but royal Berkshire. I was digging heavy clay soil up a hill in Bristol, on land that could well have been a repository for the National Couch Grass Collection, were it not apparent that the Bramble and Horsetail Fanciers Association had also staked a claim.
"Yeah, well, whatever. My digging technique is still much better than yours."
He may well have been right. It did take me the next two seasons to get everything clear. Only in spring this year could I finally, and officially, declare the plot open. (Plans for a visitor centre, or shed, are to follow.)

A policy of building more roads may well keep the motorist happy, but will also bring more cars and more congestion. My policy of opening up more allotment has led to similar results. The more land I've cleared, the more plants I've grown to put in it, with the latter scaling much more quickly than the former. We're now out of land but nowhere near out of plants to put in it.

As an example, this year we've grown a ridiculous number of squash plants. We have four or five each of six varieties of squash and courgettes. They've all been squashed into two beds that are each about 1.5m x 6m. With so little space to go around, any thoughts of keeping them about a metre apart - as recommended - go straight out of the window.

I simply have no idea where the brassicas will go. Simply no idea.

Mass planting has started

2006-06-05T21:14:00.000+01:00

Being both an Englishman and a gardener, I am honour bound to complain about the weather. At the moment it's too hot and too dry. That's great news for sitting out in the garden, drinking elderflower cordial and reading a good book. It's also great news for cycling to work, although it's less good for everyone else who shares the route with me, all of whom now have to endure the sight of my etiolated freshly-in-shorts legs.

The established plants are loving the weather, but for the young seedlings 24^oC of blazing sun is too much for their tender leaves and short roots. The tenure of an Allotmentboss too lazy to move them into the shade (not that there's much of that to go round) or water them twice daily doesn't help. We've lost a few celeriac seedlings; the ones planted in plastic modules have done well but those planted in old toilet roll tubes have dried out too quickly to be kept alive by a once-daily water. Similarly, I came home the other day to find a fair fraction of the various brassica seedlings frazzled. Luckily we have enough left of each variety to exceed our needs.

It's a new month, which means the by now obligatory start of the month overview photo.

Once again, not much appears to have changed since last month's photo, apart from the light getting distinctly brighter due to the sun. In fact, this photo was taken last Sunday, and has been hanging around on my PC waiting to be posted; Blogger seems to have been having a few problems this week. Since last Sunday, a lot has happened. I've been taking plants down in the evening - most of the squash are now out, as is the first batch of celeriac, french beans (see photo), soya beans and fennel.
Right at the top of the plot, near the compost bin, there are a few canes. These aren't for runner beans - I don't grow them - but for Chinese Yams. (These have doubled in size since the photo was taken.)
Hopefully I'll have everything planted out by the end of this weekend. With any luck our patio - which is currently covered in trays of things - might just be usable again by the end of Sunday afternoon.

A pleasant dilemma

2006-05-30T19:16:00.000+01:00

The bees are clearly in love with our phacelia flowers. The comfrey, also flowering about 30 metres away, barely gets a visit. This leaves me with a minor allotment quandry. The phacelia, pretty as it is, popular as it is, is now getting in the way. It's slap-bang in the middle of the space set aside for squashes and sweetcorn; the squash can wait for a couple more weeks, but the sweetcorn is going to get seriously pot-bound if it's not put out soon.

The final reason for my reluctance to cut down the phacelia is that it's on the verge of setting seed; it seems a shame to dig it all in now when I'm probably only a couple of weeks away from harvesting next year's supply.

The first tray of French beans is also looking keen to go. These are due to go where the squash went last year, so there's no conflict with the phacelia. They'll go in over the next few days.
Having heeded yet another note-to-self from last year's experiences, I've been spending the last few days earthing up the potatoes. Last year tought me that this is absolutely essential to early crops (Charlotte - a 2^nd early - in our case).
Finally, having taken a few general photos with the broad beans at my feet, I thought I'd let them take the limelight. I'm sure they're not the prettiest broad beans ever grown, what with their windswept 45^o angle and the chomp marks out of their leaves - but I'm equally sure they'll produce a usable crop.

A suspect revealed

2006-05-28T20:59:00.000+01:00

Tonight's recce of the scene of Thursday's crime has revealed a suspect. Officers failed to apprehend on this occasion, but hopefully the 1950's community policing technique of a discreet clip round the ear - which in this case manifested itself as me running down the allotment at the crim'nal shouting "Ayayayayarghh! Get Off!" [1] - will serve as a sufficient deterrent.

[1] I'm not really that bothered about the cat getting orf me allotment, but a cry of "Ayayayayayargh! You are welcome here but please reserve your poo for elsewhere!" struck me as being far too subtle.

An "oh I wish I hadn't done that" moment

2006-05-25T22:38:00.000+01:00

The last couple of weeks have been a game of cat and mouse, dodging the ineluctable heavy rain and 20 mph winds to grab a few quick moments down on the plot to keep up with basic hygiene. I managed an hour or so on Sunday afternoon for a bit of weeding, trimming of grass borders and transplanting of leeks. (One of my notes-to-self at the end of last year was that "you can never have too many leeks". We've now got 80, with one variety left to plant out.)

I've also managed a quick ten minutes this evening, when I popped down to dig up some chinese artichokes for a colleague at work and to squish any pugnacious asparagus beetles that might have refused to do the decent thing after my previous attacks and die. While down there I saw that one of the oca plants had been pulled up. I immediately thought that it must have been pulled up by something rabbit like rooting around for the tuber underneath.

I can't quite say which sensation - the soft slimy feel or the overwhelming smell - came first as I scooped my hand in to re-dig the hole to put the plant back in. Either way, it soon became clear that I'd just put my hand in a cat poo. You might be thinking "yuk" as you read this but, trust me, it's not half as yuk as I felt when I'd done it. Still, they say a problem shared is a problem halved, so at a rate of about 20 hits a day I know I'll be feeling about 2^-20 less yuk about it by this time tomorrow.

On a lighter note, the Organic Gardening Catalogue delivered their sweet potato slips today, which were duly planted up in 9" pots of peat free grow bag compost mixed with chicken manure. This is probably overkill, but I like to ensure that when they go into the allotment they do so with plenty of light, open compost and food. I've also transplanted the celeriac seedlings, which have been growing rather quickly over the last couple of weeks.

Seeds, seeds and more seeds

2006-05-14T19:29:00.000+01:00

Today has mainly been one of mass seed sowing:

Brassicas
In previous years we've had very little success with these. We've never successfully grown cauliflowers, and nearly everything we overwintered from last year got eaten off by pigeons. Still, we live in hope. This year I'm quite deliberately planting them all a little late in an attempt to avoid flea beetles, which absolutely ravaged our early cabbages last summer.

Kale Pentland Brig
Kale Nero di Toscana
Broccoli Bordeaux
Broccoli Red Spear
Cauliflower Snowdrop
Calabrese Pacifica
Cabbage Vertus
Cabbage January King
Cabbage Marner Storing Red

Greenhouse things

"Greenhouse things" isn't a very good collective noun, but I mean things that live in growbags and like warmth:

Okra Clemson's Spineless. I've never had any success with okra when sown early. If I sow it at around the same time as I sow peppers and tomatoes (February) it germinates very quickly, but soon after it becomes etiolated and straggly. Soon after that it becomes dead. So, this year I though I'd try a very late planting.
Melon Blenheim Orange. Last year we were almost successful in growing a melon outside in our cloche. A fruit began to swell but we didn't notice. We only saw it when we'd decided to give up on the plants and dump them in the compost bin. I'll have a little more patience this year!

Salads, successional sowings and herbs

Sorrel
Wintercress
Spinach Matador
Rainbow chard
Paracress (red)
Lettuce Paris Island Cos

Others

Ipomea. Might as well try to make the place look nice!
Asparagus Mary Washington

Fennel, French beans and sweetcorn have all germinated from last Sunday's sowings.

I only spent a short time down on the allotment today, mainly cutting round the grass borders that are threatening to encroach on the crops. I saw my first slow worm of the season, which hopefully means our resident population is now out and about chomping slugs.

A less welcome allotment resident that's now out in force is the asparagus beetle. There aren't many eggs yet, but there are a lot of beetles. They've already managed to strip quite a lot of bark from one asparagus frond. Last year I found them quite easy to keep in check so long as one is diligent and checks the plants over every night. I don't have any sophisticated techniques for dealing with them; I just pull them off the plants and squish them with my thumb nail.

After clearing the asparagus of beetle and clipping round the borders my final two allotment tasks were to transplant some leek (Natan) seedlings into 1" spaced rows, where they'll grow on before dibbing out, and watching the bees enjoy the brilliant purple phacelia flowers in the last of the day's sun.
Back at home the tomatoes have now all been potted up outside, and the squash, courgettes and ulloco are about to enjoy their first night on the patio too. I'm conscious of the fact that this may be a little early in the season - we're not yet beyond the risk of a cold snap - but even more aware of the fact that we're seriously running out of floor space indoors.

Oh, and one final piece of news while I think of it. In the last few days something has eaten off all of my skirret seedlings. I have a sneaky hunch it was the sparrows. I have no idea whether sparrows eat skirret, but they were definitely sniffing around it the other night.

A general update

2006-05-08T21:25:00.000+01:00

With several topics to update, this is bound to be a bit of an untidy post. It's probably best to start with a general picture of the allotment as it is today.

Admittedly, not a great deal has changed since the April photo. It has been raining hard all day so I didn't fancy crouching in the wet brambles at the bottom of the plot in order to get the broad beans in; they're pretty much at my feet in this photo, and about a foot high. The following planogram probably makes things clearer - this photo was taken with my feet in the horseradish plot.

The planking of the beds is coming on well, and I think it's making a real improvement. The soil is naturally levelling off into steps - without intervention from me - and that's making it much easier to work. Not a great number of new crops have gone in. Instead, the focus over the last month has been on getting the plot ready for things. The bare patch of earth in the foreground, for example, will be planted up with these in about a month:
(These being squash plants of various types and courgettes). If we run out of room in the back garden we might also add some tomato plants:
There is one major direct crop addition to the allotment, and that's right in the foreground of the overview photo. Oca has become this first of the unusual vegetables I've tried this year to make it out into the wilds. In fact, so far it seems to be a very strong grower, having withstood a few very cold nights out on the patio in March and April. If I remember rightly, Simon Hickmott writes that oca is related to, and looks like, giant wood sorrel in his book. I have no idea what giant wood sorrel looks like, but here's oca so I guess it must be similar:
Over the weekend I sowed a few more seeds to go out on the plot. In trays on a windowsill at home we now have French beans, soya beans, fennel and sweetcorn planted.

Finally, the size of celeriac seedlings seems to be a bit of a topic of discussion on Jane Perrone's blog. Comparing her photo to our weedlings (see below), I suggest she's got nothing to worry about!

Les ulloco Français sont arrivés!

2006-05-06T11:04:00.000+01:00

The title I intend for this post is "The French ulloco have arrived", but whether that's what it actually says very much depends on how well I've remembered my schoolboy French. I was expecting them to be about the size of a small seed potato, but they're actually surprisingly small. The photo above shows a tuber; it's about 1 cm long. At least I get the added fun of playing "hunt the tiny tubers in the large bag of compost they've been sent in". So far, after a really good rummage, I've found two out of the ten that are supposed to be in there.

Graines Baumaux have also sent me a free packet of what appear to be radish pod seeds.

It's all going bonkers

2006-04-26T18:01:00.000+01:00

The last time I went down to the plot was two weeks ago, over the Easter weekend. I omitted/forgot/was too lazy to post that time, which was a shame because it marked an important event. I planted our potatoes. Admittedly, that doesn't mark a particularly significant allotment epoch in its own right. No, the important event was that I planted the chitted tubers far enough apart to be able to earth them up and walk between them to weed the rows. Again, not in itself significant, you might say. No, the significant part is why I remembered to do this. It's because last year I wrote a blog entry at the end of the season reminding myself to. Maybe I didn't actually write that entry, maybe I just mapped it out in my mind but was too lazy to type it. It doesn't matter, either way this blog has actually proved to be useful, which was my original intent. To think the luddites say that blogging is just vanity publishing [1].

Of course, the downside of remembering to plant the potatoes far enough apart is that they took up far more of the allotment than I'd intended. Clouds. Silver linings. Move on.

Anyway, enough about what happened two weeks ago. I went down to the plot tonight to collect some spinach, and it has all gone bonkers. The weeds are at it with a vengeance. We've even got the first of the bind weed through, a summer pest when compared to most. Luckily, though, the horsetails have so far mostly failed in their annual game of "dislodge the onion sets", having come up between the rows.

The other friends that have been out in force are the slugs. They've completely harvested the turnip seedlings - they were tiny, so not unexpected - and had a good go at the Jerusalem artichokes. I'm too much of an old hand to be too concerned about this. I've been doing this for enough years now to know that, while the slugs may score some early victories (such as the turnips), they can't ever hope to defeat the almighty artichokes.

Oddly enough, there were also a lot of ladybirds crawling about on the plot tonight. I guesstimate 2-3 per square metre, which might not sound a lot until you think about it. When I was at university I used to come home to a summer job stacking beer onto the shelves of a supermarket in Burnham-On-Sea. I remember one year in Burnham there was a plague of ladybirds. One couldn't help but step on them, they were covering the pavements so completely. In fact, even the road noise changed as cars were effectively riding along on a bed of them. My one abiding memory of that summer is that crushed ladybirds really stink, really really stink. I wonder if I'm in for a repeat olefactory experience. Naively, though, I can at least hold out the expectation of there not being much trouble from aphids this year. (Yeah, right).

Thanks, finally, to Mike, who left a comment on an entry from earlier in the year pointing out that there's a supplier in France who does ulloco. I've put a link to them in my side bar. My schoolboy French was good enough to navigate through the site, but not good enough to work out whether or not they post to the UK. Luckily, I work for a French company so I've got one of the locals to sort it out for me. Hopefully the tubers will be coming my way next week. It may be too late for them this year, I don't know. It doesn't matter: I've now completed my set.

All of which means I choose to assert, somewhat arrogantly, that I'll be the only person in the UK growing ulloco on an allotment this year. Now, if that isn't a cry from a vanity blogger for comments saying "oh no you're not" to give him the oxygen of publicity, I don't know what is.

[1] Actually, I have no evidence of the luddites, or, in fact, anyone else, saying that. However, it's the sort of sweeping statement that is very difficult to refute, so I'm standing by it.

Everything's coming alive

2006-04-09T19:33:00.000+01:00

First of all, I must administer a slapped wrist to myself for not writing a post here last week. Last Saturday was a glorious day and I spent most of it either down on the allotment, or doing allotment related things.

Things that happened last week

Dug over beds for potatoes.
Started to put in reclaimed pallet boarding to make tidier edges to beds. (This exercise in reclaiming pallets is ongoing. If you happen to live near Gloucester Road in Bristol and you hear a bump in the night, followed by your skip having been denuded of pallets in the morning, that was me - sorry.)
Sowed parsnips, beetroot and turnips straight into the allotment.

Things that happened today

The only practical thing that happened this today was that I transplanted the tomato and aubergine seedlings from their seed tray into their first grown up pots, with grown up compost. They look a bit week and feeble at the moment, but they should now spurt on over the next month or so.

The main work that's been put in over the last week or so has been done by the plants themselves. Everything is now starting to look alive. Indeed, last week we even harvested some unforced rhubarb for the first crumble of the year. (Well, it would have been crumble if I hadn't been greedy and just eaten it without a topping.) The following are now up and about:

Oca. Yes, despite Simon Hickmott's book telling me to delay planting and protect from frost, my oca tubers forced the issue and sprouted about two weeks ago. They were promptly put into 6 inch pots on the patio, where they're now just showing themselves above the soil.
Broad beans. As of today 14 of the 20 seeds have come up. I know that in an earlier post I said I'd never grow broad beans because I didn't like the taste, but that was before I'd tried broad bean dip at Cafe Maitreya. Now I'm a convert!
Chinese artichokes. They're teeny tiny, but they're there. I wasn't too keen on them last year; the yield was very low, I wasn't convinced of the taste and, to make matters worse, most of the tubers I bought died. However, I'll find a spot for them, seeing as they've made the effort. They were quite attractive plants.
Jerusalem artichokes. Only just, but there are a few signs of leaves pushing through.
Asparagus. Last year our asparagus plants were pitiful. I think this was mainly because they got savaged by asparagus beetle the year before. We didn't realise what was happening until it was too late and all the foliage was dead. They got attacked again last year, but we were on the case much more promptly, squishing the larvae as diligently as we could. The plants grew strongly until the end of the season and we've given them a helping hand over winter with a thorough mulch from our compost bin. The think shoots I've seen today bode well for a better year this time round.
Horseradish. Yes, I know: Congratulations to the man who got an invasive perennial weed to grow. Yeah, well, whatever, cos they taste nice so I'm like sooo not bothered.
Early raspberries are budding well on last year's canes, and...
...late raspberries are putting up new canes.
Garlic (background) and red onions (foreground). While you're at it, notice the tasteful, dare I say almost professional looking, pallet-board edging to the bed above.
White onions and shallots are just on their way up too.

Finally, to round of this orgy of allotment related photos here's a picture of the whole plot. Bare and dull, yes, but ready for planting. Before you ask, no, the shed in the background isn't ours.

Garlic up, onions in, ho hum.

2006-03-19T22:50:00.000Z

Well, as this post's slightly pathetic photo shows, we have garlic, albeit only by about a couple of inches. The red onions have rooted and should be on their way soon too, if the couple I had to manoeuvre back into position after the earth around them wriggled away are anything to go by.

Today I finished the onion planting extravaganza by putting in the shallots (about thirty bulbs) and the white onions (about 150 bulbs). This might seem like a lot of onions, especially given that they're so cheap from the supermarket, so probably don't make the most cost effective use of the limited space available. However, every year I lament having to start buying onions about now simply because we didn't grow enough. So, hundreds of the things it is. I'm sure we'll squeeze the other plants around them somehow.

The man on the plot next to me was burning his compost heap as I was working. I can't think why anyone would want to do that, but he wasn't particularly forthcoming when I said "hello" (probably because of our slight digging excursion onto his bit - see a previous post) so I didn't feel inclined to ask.

Compost. Yes. Naturally, I've made no progress whatsoever with the double bayed compost bin. I need a good source a pallets. I see lots when I'm cycling to work, but none within foraging distance of the plot. (Frankly, a more accurate excuse is that I'm also all mouth and no action when it comes to these things).

Allotment envy is a very childish thing.

2006-03-13T19:55:00.000Z

It's very childish indeed, but I felt a pang of it last week when my friend (who keeps an allotment near Reading) told me he'd just built a double bay composting bin on his plot. A double bay bin is pretty close to the ultimate allotment accessory, as far as I'm concerned, so long as, natch, it's got removable fronts for easy removal of the output. We've only got a tiny standard-council-issue plastic cone; it's not even in same league as a double bayed wooden masterpiece.

The job of building a more substantial compost bin has now moved much closer to the top of my to-do list. After a visit to the Centre for Alternative Technology over the weekend, I have a plan to trump my friend by building a double bay bin, where the compost is heated by geothermal power raised through pipes of water buried deep in the subsoil, the water in the pipes being pumped by a homemade wind turbine. Perhaps that's getting silly. Perhaps I should just content myself with the knowledge that my plot is much bigger than his. Much bigger.

(And, and... my Asian friend at work gave me the largest bag of coriander seeds I've ever seen today. A big ole bag of "special home brew" coriander seeds for a big ole allotment. No, it's not working; I keep coming back to the inferiority of the small bin.)

Anyway, moving on...

She who laughs last laughs longest, and that last laugher this weekend was Mother Nature, who decided to give us a downpour of snow yesterday. That put paid to any intention on my part to plant shallots and onions over the weekend. I did nip down to the plot yesterday evening to harvest a few leeks - nearly the last of the crop - and nothing is growing yet; neither garlic, red onions, nor broad beans.

Rain and potatoes

2006-03-07T19:43:00.001Z

Well, the last part of our order from Edwin Tucker finally arrived today, so the living room carpet is currently covered with egg boxes full of seed potatoes and bags of onions and shallots. I guess I know what job I'll be up to on the weekend! (Planting onions, in case you hadn't guessed.)

It's also rained today, ending a long period of cold dry weather. Presumably this marks the start of the spring race. The question is, how good was our preparation over winter? Which will win, the vegetables we want to grow or the weeds we've hopefully dug into temporary submission?

A murder mystery solved

2006-03-05T19:24:00.000Z

One of the items in the post that went missing around the end of January was that some mystery pest had eaten all of our standy-upy brassicas. Whatever this varmint was, it left no trace of itself. Well, when I last went to the allotement (last Sunday) it had returned and polished off the last of the savoy cabbages. This time, however, it made a mistake. It left a clue, and that clue was lashings of bird poo. Therefore, we have our villain: birds. The only problem with this is that I like birds-in-general, so I don't like the idea of them being the villain of the piece. Luckily, the dollops of guana were big enough for me to focus my accusatory digit not on birds-in-general, but on pigeons-in-particular. That all works out nicely, because I hate pigeons, or 'rats with wings' as I prefer to call them. I can't think of an animal with less merit, although, strangely, it seems to be one of the few that our government isn't limbering up for a cull of (see ruddy ducks and badgers, for example). Actually, having thought about it, maybe a cull of the irritating people who insist on feeding the things, bringing this urban plague to our doorsteps with their left-out breadcrumbs (despite the forest of Bristol City Council signs telling them not to), would be more effective than culling pigeons themselves. Anyway, I digress.

There's a whiff in the news of a drought over summer, with hosepipe bans and compulsory domestic water meters being mooted in the south east. (In both cases I say "about time too"). I don't have the necessary knowledge to confirm a drought, but I can say it hasn't rained here for quite a long time. In fact, I don't really remember it raining this year. The ground on our allotment is cracking; not gaping wide cracks yet, but nonetheless reminiscent of the soil in August, after a dry, hot summer.

Having not gone to the plot today, I contented myself instead with the first seed sowings of the year. Tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and brussels sprouts have all hit the seed trays.

Perfect allomenteering weather

2006-02-18T19:55:00.000Z

A bright blue sky, and a slight nip in the air - not cold, but fresh - makes for perfect allotmenteering weather in my book. Even better, there was rain at the start of the week, but the last few days and nights have been dry and frosty. So, the soil is moist and friable.

I've started to lay out permanent borders for beds with planks reclaimed from old pallets. I want to get a consistent set of paths in and I want to mark out the borders of what needs to be weeded and maintained: I have a sneaky suspicion that we've encroached upon a neighbouring plot with a little digging 'mission creep' over the last two years. Still, no-one has complained and we can do with the extra space...

I planted out approximately 100 Red Baron red onion sets (Unwins, 99p, local hardware store; we ordered from the OGC last year but they failed to deliver, so this year we played safe), sowed a few broad bean seeds and scattered a bed with buckwheat. The latter will either be dug in as a green manure if we need the space, or grown on to be harvestable if we don't.

Oddly, I've justed posted this entry and the one from January 29th, about the first plantings of the year, has disappeared. Maybe that's because I added it after the 29th and massaged the date backwards? That shouldn't cause a problem - it's an advanced option in the Blog editor - but perhaps it did in this instance. Anyway, for the record, I planted out the garlic on the 29th. I don't think much else happened.

Time to start planning for 2006 - part (iii)

2006-01-15T12:59:00.000Z

First of all, thanks to everyone who has left comments to the previous few posts. I'm pleased to learn that I'm not the only person who does the digging at a time that's convenient (namely, now) rather than horticulturally correct.

For what it's worth, the digging is going well. It's surprising how the odd hour or two of effort every weekend adds up. Hopefully, we'll be in the position of having the whole plot dug in a few weeks. If that happens, it'll be the first year that we've had everything ready for use in the spring.

We've done a few more plant orders over the last few days. We ordered the following from Edwin Tucker:

Vegetable	Variety	Cost (£)
Asparagus	Mary Washington	1.00
White onions	Centurion	2.80
Shallot	Red sun	3.20
Garlic	Printanor	6.50
Potato	Charlotte	3.80
Potato	Sante	3.60

I forgot to mention that a while back I also bought some tubers for some unusual vegetables from Edulis:

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa).
Chinese yam (Dioscorea batatus).
American groundnut (Apios americana).

While on an unusual vegetable theme, I have some pink oca and yacon tubers coming to me from Unusual Herbs and Edibles. They've also reserved some mashua plants for me; I'll be getting those later in the season. I've drawn a complete blank on a supplier of ulloco. If anyone knows of one, please let me know. All in all, my foraging for suppliers of unusual root veg. has gone really well. Apart from the ulloco, I have everything I was looking for.

Other allotment related jobs that have happened recently are:

After a little thought I came to the conclusion that I don't want any globe artichoke plants. I know they're supposed to be a delicacy, but the plants are very big. The flowerheads get infested with blackfly, are a pain to harvest and we never really eat them anyway. So, I've uprooted all of them. Fortunately, the fleshy leaves do make good compost...
Our first full batch of home made compost (kitchen waste) has been added to the asparagus and raspberries.
In the past we've had problems storing our seeds in some sort of order. So, I turned my hands to a bit of carpentry (in the warmth of indoors) and made a seed storing thingy. I'm particularly proud of the fact I've built in the option to swap between 6 and 9 compartments, as well as the special catalogue-holding nook at the end. So, I've smuggly made it the subject of this entry's photo! (And, yes, I am being slightly tongue in cheek about how proud I am of it.)

Time to start planning for 2006 - part (ii)

2006-01-02T15:37:00.000Z

The plans for this year have now got to the stage where we're placing seed orders. After having done some analysis using spreadsheets (we are both office workers, after all) we've come to the conclusion that things will work out cheaper if we avoid the Organic Gardening Catalogue where possible. Most organic seed packets are cheapest from Tamar Organics, so here's the order we're placing with them:

Vegetable	Variety	Cost (£)
Aubergine	Black Beauty	1.10
Chard	Rainbow	1.25
Radicchio	Palla Rossa	0.99
Courgette	Nero di Milano	0.99
Parsnip	Halblange White	0.99
Swede	Helenor	1.25
Turnip	White Globe	0.99
Squash	Blue Kuri	1.40
Squash	Buttercup	1.40
Squash	Early Butternut	1.05
Squash	Red (Uchiki) Kuri	1.05
Wild Rocket		1.10
Tomato	Brandywine	0.99
Tomato	Yellow Perfection	0.99
Basil	Lettuce Leaf	0.99
Leek	Musselburgh	0.80

Potatoes, onions and so on are cheaper (in our case) from Edwin Tucker, so we'll be ordering these from them.

Time to start planning for 2006 - part (i)

2005-12-28T15:50:00.000Z

I'm feeling considerably less brave about the cold weather today than I was yesterday, but I am still motivated to get some allotment related things done. So, now is the ideal time to start planning for 2006 - a task that can be completed entirely from the comfort of indoors.

I've started by drawing a rather-too-detailed picture of what went where this year. It's a bit of a silly shape because I'm nerdy enough to have tried to keep it to scale: the plot is approximately 20'x70'. In order to see the detail it might be necessary to double click on the picture and zoom in. I've broadly tried to split the vegetables into the groups suggested by Joy Larkham in her book 'Grow Your Own Vegetables'. As we've often grown more than one crop in each bed the split is sometimes a little arbitrary. However, it should help with the overall aim of growing brassicas in areas where nitrogen fixers were the year before.

Overall, there are a number of things about the plot's current layout that bug me:

Almost all of the globe artichokes have to go. They're very big, and we really don't eat enough of them to warrant the plants we've got. It might be nice to be left with one plant, but no more.
Either the strawberries are marooned in the middle of nowhere, or the raspberries are in the wrong place. Ideally, I'd like to get all of the permanent beds nearer the top of the plot.
Likewise, I'd like to get all of the asparagus in one place.
I planted the horseradish at the start of 2005. I dumped them in the bed at the bottom of the plot because it was a fairly uninviting place at the time, my logic being to put annoying tap roots in places that I'd never want to use for anything else. However, after one season that bed has broken down into very nice soil. On the other hand, we've discovered entirely free range comfrey in the horrible soil next to the compost bin. I might be tempted to move the horseradish up to join it, on the understanding that it hasn't yet put down long enough roots to become a pest in both places.

A very cold allotment

2005-12-27T18:26:00.000Z

It's been a month to the day since I last posted here. That's partly because my girlfriend told me that my last post - about "super seasonal vegetables" - was a load of nonsense. I tried laughing it off, telling her that she only thought that because she hadn't understood the true power of my argument, but in reality the rebuke smarted. It took a couple of weeks for me to recover my pride, by which time the only thing happening on the allotment was digging. There's not a lot one can write about digging:

December 15th: Did some digging.
December 16th: Did some digging.
December 17th: Dig some digging. Found a worm.
...

It gets very repetitive, very quickly, doesn't it? In fact, even the digging has been on hold for the last week or so; the weather is now sufficiently cold to squish my meagre enthusiasm for the job completely.

There's only one known force of nature powerful enough to get me outside digging at the moment, and that is the urge to go outside and run around after having sat inside, idly twiddling my thumbs, over Christmas. So, this afternoon, as the thermometer stuck on the outside of our south facing kitchen window struggled to find a positive number, I set forth for the plot. Even though my nose is now running, I can't feel my fingers and my legs have been pelted with shrapnel from a passing gritting lorry on the way home, I'm really pleased I went. Yes, it was deathly cold, but it was also great to get outside and do some exercise.

The plot is now looking in a really good state, being as close to fully dug as it's ever been under our tenure. Most of the greenery in the far bottom left hand corner of the picture is green manure. The plan is to get the two or three remaining beds dug over the next week, ready for a large van load of well matured horse manure in a fortnight's time.

As for harvesting, this week we shall mostly be eating this savoy cabbage. I know it doesn't look particularly appetising, with the odd frost mark and slug hole, but it is 'in the raw'. There's no sexing up of this vegetable, apart from giving it a good soaking in water - a technique that seems to be standard form in TV adverts for American fast food (and I use the word loosely).

We'll also be eating leeks, Jerusalem artichokes and a whole host of non-vegetable things we haven't grown on our allotment, but you don't want to see them.

Postscript: Before anyone leaves a comment about digging in this weather being bad for the soil's structure, leaching of nutrients from bare ground, or any such I should point out that I know. All of these things are interesting, but the important point is that it's much easier to dig now than in the spring, when the soil is waterlogged (read 'extraordinarily heavy') and it's raining. Digging in the autumn is also not a viable option, on account of autumn being in the past.

Super-seasonal vegetables

2005-11-27T16:03:00.000Z

I think it's interesting just how seasonal some vegetables can be. I'm not just referring to the fact that different vegetables are harvested in different seasons. That's fairly straightforward, and has made sense ever since I was taught the ways in which plants reproduce at secondary school. Plants survive and reproduce in different ways, and we eat different parts of them as a consequence.

No, what I'm referring to is that some vegetables are only nice in certain seasons, whereas others, like potatoes or carrots, taste nice all year round. Take Jerusalem artichokes. In autumn and winter, when the weather's cold, wet and dark outside, their chestnutty, earthy, smoky flavour is just right. They richly deserve a place in the premier league of top veg. But in summer? The same flavours would just be wrong. Somehow, they'd clash with the season.

It strikes me, then, that Jerusalem artichokes have two types of seasonality. Firstly, they're only harvestable (available) for a short season. Secondly, their taste only fits at certain times of the year. For want of a better phrase, and because it makes quite a catchy title to this post, I'll call this characteristic super seasonality.

Anyway, pidjun food psychology aside, it's now autumnal, and I am in love with the taste of the Jerusalem artichokes we are now harvesting. One of my favourite recipes for them is a soup with horseradish. I originally found it years ago in a BBC Vegetarian Good Food magazine. I can't remember the recipe exactly, but my roughly paraphrased version is as follows:

Ingredients

Some home grown Jerusalem artichokes
An onion
Some stock
Some horseradish sauce (see below)

Method
Put artichokes on baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and put in oven (180^oC-ish) until squidgy. Spoon out insides and discard skins. Meanwhile, fry off onion in olive oil. Then add artichoke gunk, stock and horseradish. Simmer until cooked. Blend. Eat gluttonously.

Of course, buying horseradish sauce is deeply unsatisfying, especially when horseradish is so easy to grow. I had a go at making my own this morning by digging up one of the plants we planted in spring. I'm usually fairly immune to things like slicing chillies, but grating a horseradish root had me in tears; real, flowing, "the pain! the pain!" tears. I might be reduced to having to use goggles.

Snow!

2005-11-25T09:53:00.000Z

After two weeks of weather cold enough to force me to buy my first new jumpers in about a decade, we woke up this morning to a covering of snow. The weather people warned us that snow was coming on the TV last night, but I didn't believe them. The usual trend is that the snow hits pretty much everywhere in the UK except Bristol. Well, I was wrong, and this morning we had a settled dusting that was probably 1-2 cm deep. It's already burning off under the warm winter sun that's shining through the clear blue sky, but it was pretty while it lasted.

(The building in the background of the picture above is a Muller Orphanage; if anyone's interested Wikipedia's entry on George Muller can be found here).

The observant (or pettifogging) amongst you will have noticed that this entry has, so far, had absolutely nothing to do with our allotment. Before you all scrabble for your money back I'll make an opportunistic swipe at some allotment news: The physallis plant I planted down there as an experiment is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. When I last looked, about two days (or, more significantly, two frosts and one snow shower) ago, it was a shrivelled brown mess.

Patience pays off

2005-11-12T17:13:00.000Z

It appears that the sweet potatoes have answered my "will they, won't they?" machinations from earlier in the year with a clear "yes, we will". We have a crop and, if the above tubers from a single plant are anything to go by, they have been as successful as last year.

I know they look fairly muddy and unpalatable, but (a) every book I have ever read that offers advice on the subject warns against washing vegetables that are due for storage, and (b) if you've read this far through this blog entry you're probably into allotments, and not at all mud-phobic.

As the judiciously placed Organic Gardening Catalogue shows, some of the tubers are very big (the 'big fella' at the back weighs 900g). Having very large tubers seems to be a feature of this T-bla-de-bla variety. This isn't necessarily a good thing; the tubers are much too big to eat in one meal (there are only two of us), and remnants don't store well in the fridge. Much as I dislike the supermarket model of homogeneity and uniformity, there is a certain logic to the "six inches long, as fat as a cucumber" standard they seem to have adopted. In this respect, as with taste and texture, Beauregard performed much better than this cultivar when we grew them both last year. However, unfortunately, it seems that Beauregard has disappeared from the catalogues; it appears that T&M and the OGC are both only offering T-what-not next year.

Of course, it's particularly irksome that I had a perfectly good Beauregard plant that I could have used to slip my own plants next year, if only I hadn't rashly decided to dig it up in September...

Mushy tomatoes

2005-11-09T22:40:00.000Z

I took these photos of our tomatoes three or four weeks ago. Alas, the plants don't look so healthy now that the cold and the wet have arrived. But I thought I'd resurrect them on the blog as a reminder of sunnier times.

So, my judgement on our tomato crop this year is as follows. From eleven plants, we produced a reasonable number of tomatoes, despite some initial problems with blossom end rot. Overall, though, the eating quality was disappointing. For some reason (weather related, I presume), the fruit didn't deign to start ripening until the end of August and I think this may account for their inferior texture. They were still good enough for soup and the odd salad, though, so I'm not really complaining.

We grew four varieties:

Matina

A cordon variety from the Organic Gardening Catalogue with leaves like a potato's. We had two plants: one on the patio and one on the allotment. The one on the allotment was very prolific but keeled over from blight before we could harvest much. The one on the patio fared better. Of the four varieties, this was the most flavourful, which is surprising, because last year we thought Olirose tasted better. It just shows what a difference weather conditions can make.

Olirose
Another cordon variety from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. We had five plants, all on the patio. Based on last year's performance, I'd grow them again. On this year's, I wouldn't. In practice, when the seed packet runs out we'll probably try a different variety anyway, for curiosity's sake.

Unidentified variety number 1

A bush variety kindly supplied by Andy. This produced an abundance of cherry sized fruit, which tumbled over the patio. See the picture at the top on the right. Good for tomato, mozzarella and avocado salad with lots of basil and some balsamic vinegar.

Unidentified variety number 2
A cordon variety which randomly sprang up in our flower border. These haven't gone red yet, so we'll probably use them for green tomato chutney.

Time for the chilli harvest

2005-11-06T13:20:00.000Z

Most of the plants normally touted as being best grown in the greenhouse - tomatoes, chillies, peppers and aubergines - are now looking pretty close to the end. So, this weekend has seen the start of the process of harvesting and storing the fruit, then composting the plants.

We always get a good crop of aubergines, but only ever enough to eat as we go. We have only grown aubergines for three years, and during that time we've grown Tres Hative de Barbentane from Organic Gardening Catalogue. The plants have been very reliable, each producing about six fruits per stem, despite being grown outdoors on our patio (we don't own a greenhouse). The only complaint has been that the immature fruits do have a tendency to rot at the slightest sign of cold or damp weather. Having only grown this variety I don't know whether this is a specific problem with it, or whether aubergines in general are quite rot prone. Anyway, with no fruit left on the plants there was nothing to do but snip the plants down and add them to the compost bin.

Despite their slow start, most of our tomatoes turned red and have already been eaten. There are a few stragglers left over, but their texture is pretty awful. In fact, most of our tomatoes have been mushy this year. I wonder if this is a symptom of their having taken so long to ripen? Anyway, once again, this was largely an exercise in chopping and composting.

This year we grew four varieties of chillies from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. As with the aubergines, we've grown these same varieties for the last few years (being too parsimonious to buy new seeds when there's most of a pack left from last season). My thoughts on these are:

Boule de Turquie
Heavy cropping and reliable. The small round fruits are the first to go red in the season. They also seem highly resistant to shrivelling up or rotting. They're pretty hot (hotter than a Jalapeno). On the downside, their skins are too chewy and leathery for my liking, and the small spherical fruit (1-2cm in diameter) are a bit awkward to deal with - especially if you want to de-seed them.

BdT do pickle well, and the picture at the top of this post shows yesterday's efforts. Without wishing to turn this into a cooking blog, I used 50:50 white wine vinegar to water, adding a teaspoon of salt per litre.

Verdict: Good to grow, fine outside.

Early Jalapeno
Probably the best all-rounder. Crops quite heavily, but most of the fruits remain green in our garden. Good taste, heat and texture.

Verdict: Good to grow, fine outside.

Purple
The fruit are small (caper sized) and there aren't many of them! They also seem to shrivel at the drop of a hat; only very occasionally does a purple chilli make it all the way to turning red. I tried growing one of these plants in the office this year, and it performed as badly as the plants outside. On the plus side, the plants do look pretty, with their distinctive purple foliage and flowers.

Verdict: Wouldn't grow again.

Habanero
Not a great success outdoors. The plants grow more weedily than Jalapeno or Boule de Turquie, and fruit much later. Outside the fruits remain small, but there is a reasonable crop per plant. They are just beginning to turn yellow now. My plant in the office was much better, producing large, early maturing yellow fruit. The only culinary note I'd add is "my mouth burns"!

Verdict: Ok, if grown inside.

Jerusalem artichokes, squash and fennel

2005-10-08T12:43:00.000+01:00

We went down to the allotment for the first time in two weeks this morning. Everything has held up really well; we even took a reasonable crop of spinach from the Matador plants we put in a month or so ago. Looking back through the blog it looks like we actually planted these out on the 1^st September. They were really weedy plants back then, so six weeks to harvest at this end of the season is pretty amazing. I'm also really pleased because this is the first bunch of spinach we've been able to produce on our allotment, despite two years of trying. Back in our university days we grew spinach on an allotment in Oxford, and it grew like weeds despite student style neglect on our part. Here in Bristol it has always bolted. Maybe it's the fairly religious schedule of watering and feeding these plants that has made the difference, or maybe it's simply that we are growing them very late in the season.

Our Jerusalem artichokes have come into flower, providing a welcome splash of sunflower like colour against the fairly heavy grey sky. Given that everything else is beginning to die off and looks a bit miserable, I've added an extra big photo of the flowers at the top of this post. You'll have to excuse the slightly graceless addition of my hand scrunching the flowers into view; they're perched about 9-10 feet in the air.

While on the subject of things looking a little dead, most of our squash plants have now given up the ghost (which, I've just learnt, is a Biblical quote). There are a few plants that are just about managing to survive. These have some small squash on, mostly butternuts that are a few inches long and green, so we're leaving them alone at the moment on the outside chance that they might come to something. However, for the most part we've taken the plants out and harvested the mature squash. It hasn't been a bumper season, but we have more than enough to keep us going through the winter.

Our fennel are beginning to swell up nicely. This is the first time we've grown fennel, and we were worried that we'd left it a bit late because they didn't seem to do anything for quite a while after we'd planted them. The bulbs are now about the size of a fist, so plenty large enough to harvest. However, we'll leave them where they are for a few more weeks.

I'll also be leaving our sweet potatoes alone for a while yet. I had a dig round under the plants this morning and all I could feel were roots about the thickness of a thumb. This is very much like the plant I dug up in September. I've also remembered that the plants don't appear to have flowered at all this year. We didn't get many flower last year, but I do remember seeing a few small bindweed like blooms on the plants. Even though it's getting very autumnal and overcast, there doesn't appear to be much serious threat of frost yet. The sweet potato plants are still putting on new growth fairly rampantly, so they can stay where they are; the application of wishful thinking and a few more weeks in the soil might yet lead to a crop. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that we harvested them as late as November last year. I remember the leaves curling, suggesting they'd been touched by a light tinge of air frost.

Other jobs that happened today are:

I transplanted some skirret plants - these germinated fairly rapidly after they were sown.
I sowed some hop seeds, from the hideously expensive pack I bought from the Eden project. I suppose the price serves me right for buying them from a tourist attraction.
Lots of general hoeing around the allotment to cut off the dandelions and other rosette style tap rooted weeds that seem to have flourished over the last few weeks.
The potato bed has been covered in phacaellia seeds, so hopefully we'll get some good green manure there over winter.
We harvested what is probably the last of the French bean crop. There are a few more beans on the two remaining plants, but we're leaving these to swell up into next year's seeds.

A busy weekend part (4) - stuff planted

2005-09-18T19:35:00.001+01:00

Our final job of the weeked was to plant out some spring cabbage. Apparently we are for once keeping up with Monty Don; I am told that planting spring cabbage was one of the 'jobs for the weekend' on this week's BBC Gardener's World. While I'm on the subject of Gardener's World, I'm going to allow myself a small rant. I can't stand the programme. Monty Don is better than Alan Titchmarsh (not a great achievement), but it's still cloyingly twee. If you ask me it's the sort of thing that gives gardening a bad name.

Anyway, back to the plot. Here's a photo of our cabbage plants, freshly planted out and fed with some comfrey tea. While in their tray they got a bit eaten by caterpillars. It's suprising how quickly these pests struck; one day the plants were fine, the next day they were full of holes. However, the plants have now all been carefully checked over and any little monsters or eggs removed.

I also planted out some of our Winter Density lettuce, leading to another photo that's right at the limit of my camera's ability to zoom and focus.

A busy weekend part (3) - no oca or yacon

2005-09-18T19:25:00.000+01:00

Berkeley Castle held a specialist plants fair today, and Edulis were due to be there. Edulis sell oca and yacon, so I made the trip especially to see them. Unfortunately, Edulis didn't show up. I spoke to the organisers and they had no idea why.

What with Future Foods going out of business and Edulis going AWOL, the omens aren't good for us growing these vegetables next year. If anyone has found a good U.K. supplier of them please let me know.

A busy weekend part (2) - sweet potatoes

2005-09-18T19:15:00.000+01:00

I was going to tack this onto the end of the previous post, but I decided to make a separate entry so that I'll be able to find it next year.

I tried digging up a sweet potato plant yesterday. Last year we dug them all up in one go, which meant we had a 15kg glut of the things. They stored fairly well, but the stored tubers didn't taste anywhere near as good as the fresh ones. So, the idea was to see if we could stagger the harvest. Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is 'no'. The roots of the plant had begun to swell to finger size, but there was nothing there yet that could be eaten. I didn't keep a note of when I took the harvest last year - recording these things is one of the main reasons I've set up this blog. However, I think it was around the middle of October; I remember it being cold and wet. I suppose the lesson is to keep them in the ground for as long as you can.

On the positive side, the plant I dug up was one of the ones I slipped rather than bought. It looked like it was going to crop, so home slipping appears to be successful.

A busy weekend part (1) - potatoes

2005-09-18T18:40:00.000+01:00

As the title suggests, this has been a busy weekend of allotment related work; it will also be no surprise that this post is going to be about potatoes!

We dug up our remaining first early potatoes and all of our main crop, a job which took some time and needed to be broken up with a spot of lunch and a nice cup of tea. (To be honest, it was more of an overnight rest). The first earlies were fairly pest free but, as noted in an earlier posting, we didn't get round to earthing them up this year. This meant that a significant proportion of them were above ground, hence too black to eat. The pile of potatoes spoiled in this way can be seen in the photo below.

The maincrop potatoes didn't suffer so much from not having been earthed up; very few of them were black. Unfortunately, we estimated that about 50-60% of them did have slug damage. It seems to be the mottled white and black slugs that did most of the damage. Quite a few potatoes actually had them inside, which wasn't pleasant.

Now we have a large patch of bare earth in the centre of the allotment. We will leave this for a week or so before giving it a thorough military-style forking over to check for any waifs and strays. Leaving the soil for a week or so should also give the weather a chance to break it down a bit. Potatoes do a fairly good job but, as the photo shows, they do tend to leave it quite clumpy. This might be a function of the way potatoes grow, or it might be because they form quite a dense canopy that means it's difficult to perform other maintenance, such as hoeing, that can help break the soil up. Towards the end of September we'll sow some phacaelia as a green manure. We used this last year and it broke the soil up nicely over winter. It was easy to dig in too.

Some random potato related thoughts that we should remember for next year:

Always earth them up. Not only does this stop them going black, but it also serves as a good clue as to where to dig. When all of the foliage has died back (i.e. now) you need all of the hints you can get.
Plant rows about two spade widths apart (two feet, say). This leaves plenty of soil for earthing up, but it also leaves room between the rows for...
...weeding. Do it! Fighting through bindweed and horsetails doesn't make the job of digging up potatoes from plants you can no longer find any easier.

Autumn

2005-09-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

This has been this year's first truly autumnal weekend. Yesterday afternoon we attempted to go Bristol's Open Doors Day. As we were approaching the queue for the tour of Clifton's funicular railway (this year's star attraction), the heavens opened and we were treated to a deluge the likes of which hasn't been seen around here since May, or possibly June. The big annual daylight clock is now also making its clear sinusoidal swing downwards. We went to the allotment this afternoon at around 18:30, and the birds were already settling into the trees. By the time we left, around an hour later, it was noticeably dark.

As we walked home we could smell a coal fire burning somewhere on our street, although we couldn't locate the tell-tale smoking chimney that would have signalled those enjoying it. It seems a little early yet to be lighting a fire; the weather is still warm and humid, and the two densest baubles in my Galileo thermometer are still immovably sunk. However, when we moved into our house last year the lady next door proudly told us she had lived there for forty years. Her naturally heat retentive twenties and thirties are past. Maybe, for some, now is the time of year when fires need to be lit.

Today we harvested four substantial patty pan squash, our best yield yet. The French beans continue to crop unabated, as do the sweetcorn. The spinach and swiss chard plants are growing well. I also managed to make a good number of slug kebabs - skewering the fat juicy blighters on pea sticks - a clear reward for being down there at dusk after a weekend of warm rain.

My final allotment achievement of the day was to plant a tray of Skirret (latin name Sium sisarium var. sisarum). Simon Hickmott, in his book "Growing Unusual Vegetables", writes that the "roots have a reputation for being woody [...] it might be this that detracts from them ever becoming popular". I'll have to report back on this, but at the moment I am a little concerned that a woody carroty-parsnipy tasting crop may not be the greatest vegetable ever. That it was popular with Tiberius, a Roman emperor with questionable other tastes, doesn't do anything to improve its reputation with me.

On the other hand, greatness is a relative thing. I wasn't alive in the fifties and sixties, or, for that matter, the greater part of the seventies. I'm led to believe that back then not only did people have to update their blogs by punching out posts on small cards, but boffins predicted we'd all be wearing tin foil and eating nutritionally balanced meals-in-a-pill by now. Relative to meals-in-a-pill, Skirret definitely gets my vote, regardless of any faults it may have.

Beetroot, reduced

2005-09-09T18:55:00.000+01:00

I haven't added any posts to this blog for a while now. This isn't because the allotment (or blog) is moribund. In fact, the allotment is in rude health. We're harvesting lots of different vegetables. Patty pan squash, French beans, baby sweetcorn, aubergines, peppers and calabrese are all being eaten. The problem is more that nothing much is actually happening. There are only so many times that I can get away with a fresh post showing pictures of the vegetables we've harvested.

So, what has been going on over the last week? Well, I planted out our winter spinach plants, and pickled the beetroot I harvested a week or so back. (I was far too lazy to deal with them quickly, but they had lasted well in the bottom of the fridge). I also found out that there is no current UK supplier of Ulloco, now that Future Foods seems to have given up the ghost. I have no idea if Ulloco is worth growing; it was just another vegetable on my 'odd stuff' wish list.

Seedlings planted

2005-09-01T21:21:00.000+01:00

Given the hot, sticky, weather outside, it seems a little strange to be writing posts about preparing for winter. However, it's only a few months away so now is the time to get the winter crops in.

After a slight delay yesterday, due to the heavy rain and thunderstorms all afternoon, we got back to the allotment today. The nights are now beginning to draw in quite quickly - it's dark by 20:30 - so we didn't get much done. We planted out the spinach (Matador) plants that were sown at the start of August. Most of these had one pair of adult leaves. They are summer spinach plants, so I don't how long they will last (or how productive they'll be) before the bad weather gets them. We have some winter spinach seedlings to follow, which should be able to take over.

We also planted out a few more of the swiss chard seedlings. If the slugs don't get at them, we'll have fifteen swiss chard plants, more than enough to get through the winter and early spring.

Now for some rewards

2005-08-29T14:58:00.000+01:00

Three slightly oversized beetroot that will still be fresh and sweet, a small handful of calabrese, more green beans than we could ever hope to eat in a couple of days, and some apples too. Add these to our home grown potatoes, mix in a few cobs of mini sweetcorn, and what do you have? Yum.

Did I mention the aubergines?

Swiss chard

2005-08-28T21:39:00.000+01:00

Planted out six of our swiss chard seedlings today, with the obligatory slug resistant collars. Notice that I didn't say "slug proof". No matter what they tell you, nothing is slug proof. Nothing. In one of the Alien films - I can't remember which - they had three aliens in a highly protective cage. Two of them killed the third in order to break free from the enclosure; something to do with their acid blood melting the floor. I am convinced that slugs are capable of similar levels of cunning.

Living in a city means...

2005-08-28T21:20:00.000+01:00

...pollution. Our allotment is right next to the main Bristol to London train line. It seems to be at exactly the point where the trains leaving Temple Meads (Bristol's main train station) accelerate, sending billowing clouds of spent diesel smut into the air.

Actually, a bit of necessary vegetable washing aside, the railway is a good neighbour. We're pitched on the steep embankment down to the line, which (hopefully) renders our site virtually immune to development. What's more, train drivers always always reciprocate if you wave at them...

Physalis makes giant leap for allotment science

2005-08-28T20:54:00.000+01:00

Recently, I've been involved in a bit of mini-thread on Jane Perrone's blog about physalis plants. If I've caught the thread correctly, other people seem to be growing their plants on their allotments. I assumed they were fairly fussy, like aubergines, so I've been growing them in a pot on my patio. I've been doing a bit of reading around, and I think pot growing is preferred. It seems that a bit of root constriction provokes fruiting rather than leaf growth.

However, my reading did get me thinking. A few authors have suggested that the plants might make it through the winter outdoors, if protected. As English climates go, we have two things in our favour; the allotment is in the south west of the country, and it's right in the centre of a large city. Winter can be wet and windy, but we don't really get deep or prolonged frosts here. While this isn't universally a good thing - the pests don't get knocked back, and they're out nice and early in the spring - it does mean that if a physalis plant can make it outside, it should be able to do it here.

I assembled my physalis plant cuttings and asked for volunteers. Choosing such young plants probably reduces the chances of success, but there's no way I'm risking my adult plant. Its fruit are swelling noticeably and I'm licking my lips. So, the cutting that drew the short straw is now engaged in the almost certainly suicidal mission of overwintering on the allotment. It'll get plenty of mulch and a covering of enviromesh to help it.

Brassicas (or "some you win, some you lose")

2005-08-28T18:45:00.000+01:00

Our brassicas haven't been particularly successful this year, for a number of reasons. Firstly, we tried sowing the seeds in peat free compost. I've mentioned the problems we had with this a few times already. Basically, very few of the seeds germinated, and those that did were weak and feeble. The seedlings we did get grew very slowly, and no amount of feeding or watering helped.

Those small plants that did come on were attacked by pests as soon as we put them out on the allotment. Quite a few got eaten by slugs, but by far the worst problem was flea beetles. We tried the remedy proposed by Geoff Hamilton in his Organic Gardening book, namely covering a piece of card with petroleum jelly and passing it about an inch or so over the plants. The theory is that the flea beetles should jump up into the sticky goo and get stuck. This didn't work for us, and the plants ended up getting stripped.

The good news is that the flea beetles seemed either to disappear, or to stop inflicting significant damage, around the beginning of July. Since then, the plants that survived the earlier slug attack have been growing pretty well. In the two beds shown in the photo above we have about half a dozen of each of red cabbage, broccoli and calabrese. Earlier postings have shown that we're just beginning to cut calabrese. Our efforts aren't going to produce industrial scale yields, but it should be more than enough for us.

In amongst our other brassicas we do have one lonely kale plant (Nero di Tosca, Organic Gardening Catalogue). I'm not convinced by either the flavour or texture of this variety. It's very bitter, and very very chewy. We had about twenty plants last year, and I'm not overly disappointed that our mishaps this year have pared us back to one! It is, however, very hardy, and provides some much needed fresh greenery (or, "greeny-blackery") when everything else is looking fairly dead.

Finally, we have half a dozen spring cauliflowers dotted around the plot. These are fairly small at the moment, but they were planted out quite a lot later than everything else. At the moment we're willing them on with a mixture of kind words and comfrey feed.

Future Foods

2005-08-27T14:11:00.000+01:00

If the posting on their website is anything to go by, Future Foods, the U.K. based supplier of unusual vegetables, has stopped trading.

One of the things that makes me excited about having an allotment is the ability to try unusual things. For me, there are two qualities that make a vegetable unusual:

It isn't readily found in a supermarket, unless it's wrapped in shiny packaging complete with instructions¹, shunted to the specialist section, and priced accordingly. Scorzonera and physalis fall into this camp.

It isn't common to find it growing here, even if it easy to buy it. Sweet potatoes are a good example in this category.

The vegetables that Future Foods sold satisfied both of these definitions. I don't suspect there will be many U.K. readers with fond childhood memories of eating freshly grown oca or pepinos from the garden, and a request for either would flummox my local supermarket.

I only found out about Future Foods a month or so ago, and I was poised to make an order along the lines of 'some of everything, please' for next year. It looks like it wasn't meant to be. I suppose I'll have to make do with the packet of T&M's soya bean seeds² we recently bought from our local garden centre, and some chickpeas from Seeds of Italy, as next year's novelties.

In order to whet my appetite for soya bean plants next year, here's a picture of a bed of plants at the Eden Project, which we visited earlier this month.

¹ One supermarket I visted recently suggested "boil, mash, or fry" as ways of preparing butternut squash.
² Maybe soya beans open up another definition of unusual, namely vegetables that are dangerous if not prepared correctly. The packet comes with a warning on the back; apparently bad things will happen to my proteins if the beans aren't properly boiled before consumption.

No pictures, just rambling

2005-08-26T13:40:00.000+01:00

I'm in the office, and it's a bright sunny day outside. I have 15 minutes until I have to go to a meeting. Going to this meeting won't be a trivial affair for me - no slinking off into a corner for a Friday afternoon snooze - as I've been billed as the main speaker. This is unfortunate, because I haven't actually got anything to present. Ah well, it'll be a good opportunity for hand waving and waffle.

Waffle. That brings me back to my point. As an office based corporate stooge, I've long felt that our allotment should have a mission statement; something that establishes a clear strategic space into which it can expand and grow in the face of stiff competition from other allotments; something that brings motivational alignment to our cabbage plants, raising the bar so they give it 110% across the line in today's turbulent vegetable growing environment.

My chosen mission statement is "Grow what we eat, not eat what we grow". I don't like radish. I don't eat radish. So I'm not going to grow them, even if it's pretty easy to.

This explains why we haven't ever grown broad beans.

Transplanting and seedlings

2005-08-21T17:06:00.000+01:00

As the picture shows, I have just transplanted some Myatt's Offenham spring cabbage seedlings. These are from the seeds planted on 7^th August. I've also planted some lettuce seeds; winter density and Paris Island cos (both from the Organic Gardening Catalogue).

The deep tap-rooted weed we have on our allotment, that I mentioned in my first post, turns out to be wild comfrey. Apart from the fact that comfrey is a bit of a wonder plant when it comes to making plant food, I am quite tickled by the fact that our comfrey did come free!

Physalis

2005-08-20T11:56:00.000+01:00

I was reading someone else's Blog the other day, and they were growing a physalis plant. I can't find that Blog again now, but I do remember them wondering whether the plant they had grown was indeed a physalis. So, I thought I'd post some pictures of our plant.

We're growing it on our patio, in a similar way to tomatoes and peppers; a 9 inch pot and growbag style compost. It's about a metre high. It got badly damaged in a storm we had about two months ago, and the main central stem broke off. Here are the remaining side stems, well supported with a framework of canes and string. We took some cuttings from the dead main stem. These all took, and are shown in a picture in one of my earlier posts.

We haven't had any fruit yet, but lots are coming on. They look really delicate and pretty; see the photo below (this level of focusing is right at the limit of my camera's capabilities). I just hope the weather holds for long enough for them to ripen.

Today's pickings

2005-08-19T18:03:00.000+01:00

This is what we harvested from the allotment today, namely french beans, baby corn, calabrese, apples, plums and a custard white marrow. The custard white marrow is the same as the one shown in the photo on 13th August, ie last Saturday. It's the first of the season, as is the calabrese.

First early potatoes

2005-08-16T10:51:00.000+01:00

A shoebox full of first early potatoes (International Kidney, Edwin Tucker). This is probably about 1/3 of our total first early crop. There are quite a lot of green potatoes, because we forgot to earth the potatoes up. This is definitely a lesson for next year - earthing up is important! In order to be able to earth the potatoes up properly, we need to plant the rows about two spade widths apart.

Baby corn

2005-08-14T11:58:00.000+01:00

I'm posting my first blog entry, having been pestered into it by Allotmentboss.

This is a photo of our baby sweetcorn plants, grown from Minipop F1 kernels supplied by the Organic Gargening Catalogue. They were planted in various batches - some directly in the ground, others in pots - hence some are bigger than others.

We harvested our first one yesterday. In the picture, it's the one with pink tassles coming out, a little to the left of centre.

We've never grown Minipop before, or sweetcorn for that matter, so the whole thing's been a revelation. In my ignorance, I thought the cobs grew out of the top of the plant, but, no, they're attached to the side of the stem. I've also discovered that, when you unwrap the leafy layers, you find the cob attached to lots of silky hairs, the ends of which are the tassles you see coming out of the top.

The cob itself looked and tasted like baby corn from the supermarket, though fresher. I suspect these plants may not yield much given the space they take up (the catalogue says you can expect 3 or 4 cobs per plant), but I like their structure.

Squash

2005-08-13T19:01:00.000+01:00

This is our first patty pan fruit. I insisted we grow these instead of courgettes this year. This was a big mistake. Courgettes are ready much earlier in the season. While everyone else had a glut of courgettes we had nothing. Next year I'll listen to my girlfriend; she told me I was making and mistake, and suggested we grow both. Still, I hope these are nice when they do mature. They certainly look interesting.

Our first vegetable spaghetti are beginning to swell to a reasonable size. These squash crop very heavily, and, despite being sold as a summer squash, they store very well too. We still have a couple left from last year's crop. Eaten as a summer squash they have the strange spaghetti like texture that gives them their name. After storing, they become more like a standard squash, albeit with a fairly bland flavour.

Scorzonera

2005-08-13T16:37:00.000+01:00

Just in case I was starting to give the impression that I was obsessed with root vegetables, here's something different; scorzonera (Hoffman's Long Black, Edwin Tucker). Actually, no, hold on... these are root vegetables too.

I have no idea what these are going to be like. We've never grown them, and I've never eaten them. My girlfriend bought the seeds earlier in the year, along with salsify. The latter didn't germinate - see my previous post about peat free compost - but we've got plenty left to try next year.

Bob Flowerdew (and just about every other author I've read on the subject) writes that scorzonera tastes wonderful. I have high hopes; the plants seem to be thriving. Maybe we'll grow lots next year.

Chinese artichokes

2005-08-13T15:26:00.000+01:00

This is the first time we've grown these. We bought 18 tubers from Edwin Tucker's catalogue, and potted up half indoors, half outdoors. None of the indoor ones survived. Most started to shoot, but they all rotted off shortly after putting on their first leaves. Of the outdoor ones, four survived. So, we ended up with four plants. We used peat free compost in our pots, and I think that was the problem. Quite a few of the plants we tried to raise in this medium failed.

After putting them out on the allotment one was promptly terrorised by slugs, hence the attempt at a beer trap in the background - I'm not an alcoholic or any sort of tramp.

Three plants from eighteen is a fairly poor yield, so they'd better taste nice! They had pretty nice flowers, similar to salvia, that are just going over now.

I don't think we really put them in the best spot. They're next to the Jersualem and Globe artichokes at the top of the plot. They should get full morning sun, but they must get fairly shaded in the afternoon. Future Foods suggest that they're perennial, but not frost hardy. If they are nice I'll try moving some tubers to a sunnier spot when I dig them up later in the autumn, protecting them from frost over winter.

Jerusalem artichokes

2005-08-13T12:30:00.000+01:00

The first crop we planted last year, when we took the allotment on, was Jerusalem artichokes. The variety we chose was Fuseau, purchased from the Organic Gardening Catalogue.

This is a great crop. Apart from a bit of slug damage when the new shoots come up at the beginning of the year, it looks after itself. We had a lot of tubers to eat last year, and the bits we inadvertently left in the ground when we dug up last year's crop were sufficient to provide this year's plants.

There are two other great things about Jerusalem artichokes. Firstly, the plants are big and dense, so they manage to squeeze out most weeds. They're no defence against horsetails or brambles, but they do seem to keep most other nasties at bay. Secondly, they're related to sunflowers. This means that they bear a good display of small, sunflower like flowers in late summer.

One of my favourite Jerusalem artichoke recipes is Jerusalem artichoke and horseradish soup; a recipe that appeared in BBC's Vegetarian Good Food magazine a few years ago. We planted three of our own horseradish plants this year, and then promptly spotted that the rest of the allotment site is covered with it.

Finally, I have a friend who's growing Jerusalem artichokes for the first time this year. His allotment is near Reading. I'd like to point out that my plants are bigger and better than his.

Sweet potatoes

2005-08-13T11:54:00.000+01:00

Here's a close-up of our sweet potatoes. This is one of my favourite crops. It's related to bindweed, of which we have plenty, and it grows like it too. Thankfully, it's killed off by the winter frosts.

We bought slips from Thomson and Morgan. As far as I know, they are the only suppliers in the UK. They advertise a cultivar called Beauregard, which we bought from them last year. They had a wonderful colour and texture and were really sweet.

When we bought our slips last year, we were also given a small trial quantity of a new cultivar called something like T56X. This cropped very heavily and stored well, but its taste and colour were not as good as Beauregard.

We were successful at producing some of our own slips of T56X, but we didn't manage to slip any Beauregard. So, our plan this year was to grow a few T56X from our own slips, and a lot of Beauregard from T&M. Unfortunately, T&M couldn't supply Beauregard so replaced our order with - can you guess? - yet more T56X.

I wonder if it's possible to slip and grow the tubers you buy in shops?

Finally, the allotment

2005-08-13T11:22:00.000+01:00

We both went down to the allotment this morning. So, after a number of posts that have nothing to do with it, here are some photos. First, here's a view of the whole plot from the bottom. The crops you can see on the left are (foreground to background): beetroot, scorzenera, lettuce and french beans randomly arranged in a fairly bare patch of earth; sweet potatoes; leeks; corn.

On the right are a few globe artichoke heads popping into shot; first early potatoes; main crop potatoes; calabrese, red cabbage, savoy cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower mixed. You'll notice that the potatoes are interplanted with the national horsetail collection. Right at the very top, in behind the recycling bin, there are some more globe artichokes, asparagus and jerusalem artichokes.

Here's another photo of the whole allotment, this time taken from the top. Our plot starts at the grass path running just in front of the cone shaped compost bin. That's me in the photo. Please remember that the camera adds 10lbs.

Seedlings germinated

2005-08-13T09:26:00.000+01:00

Some of the seeds we planted last week have germinated. In the foreground are Swiss Chard seedlings. In the middle tray are spring cabbage (Myer's Offenham). In the six module tray at the back there's one lonely spinach (Matador) seedling.

Chilli plants

2005-08-08T19:24:00.000+01:00

Again, this post has nothing to do with the allotment.

I went back to work today, after a very enjoyable week out on holiday. On my desk I have two chilli plants, and they've grown really quickly over the last few days. The photo shows them. The larger one is a Habanero chilli, the other a Purple chilli.

Neither has flowers or fruit on yet, but they both have flower buds coming on. We also have a number of chilli plants in our back garden; Habanero, Jalapeno, Purple, and Boules de Turque. The BDT are fruiting, but none of the others are yet.

A photo...

2005-08-07T20:12:00.000+01:00

I just ran downstairs to announce to my girlfriend that I'd set up a blog about our allotment. She came upstairs and said "ok, but it would look nicer with a photo, wouldn't it?" So, here's a photo.

Admittedly, this photo doesn't have a great deal to do with the allotment. A few years ago we built a small cloche to put on our patio. This was 2003 - the very hot summer in Europe - and was our first year of growing aubergines. The cloche has survived for two years, and this photo shows it on our patio with some aubergine plants that are just coming into fruit.

Behind the aubergines, probably not visible, are some melon plants on upturned terracotta pots. We tried to grow melons for the first time last year, but they failed. This year looks a lot better, with some fruits looking like they might begin to swell.

In the foreground are two tiny physalis cuttings that have just rooted. This is the first year we've tried growing these, and Bob Flowerdew recommends growing them as perennials. These will form next year's crop, after being overwintered somewhere indoors. Finally, the trays contain some seeds that I've just sown: spinach, lettuce, winter cress, spring cabbage, and swiss chard.

Oh, and there's a dahlia in the foreground too.

Let's begin!

2005-08-07T18:28:00.000+01:00

Well, this blog will (hopefully) become a diary of our allotment. For what it's worth, our allotment is in the middle of Bristol, a reasonably large city in the south west of England.

At the moment everything is growing in full swing. The weather is hot and sunny, and there really isn't much to do except keep the weeds down. Ah, if only it were so trivial. We have lots of weeds, including some of the big nasties. We have horsetails, brambles, bindweed, couch grass, and something with a really deep tap root that I haven't been able to identify yet.

The soil is heavy clay, and we're perched on the steep slope of a railway embankment. This is our second year on the plot, which appeared to be derelict before we took it on.

It doesn't sound promising, does it? However, we did manage to grow sweet potatoes last year, so it can't be all bad...