Annual Review (part 2).

Picking up where I left off yesterday, the next crop for the annual appraisal treatment is the strawberries-

Strawberries: 9 out of 10.
I had a lovely harvest of fat, sweet, delicious strawberries last Summer. They went down very well at home and also with a pedestrian blackbird which is often seen walking around the allotment site. Presumably it is too full of allotment produce to take off or perhaps it has a strawberry tucked under each wing. The strawberries also surprised me with a small late crop in the Autumn long after I thought they had finished for the year. I hope that the Autumn crop hasn't upset their biological clocks for production this year. The Strawberry plants have sent out a few off-shoots which have grown in my pathways. I will dig these up and re-plant them when I get round to the long overdue job of weeding the strawberry bed.

Rhubarb: 7 out of 10
The rhubarb bed, like the asparagus bed, is still in the early years of a long term project and so last year I took care to harvest conservatively so as to give the plants the best chance to get themselves well established ready to produce masses of crumble fodder for years to come.

My main criticism of the rhubarb last year was that some of the stalks were a little on the thin side. I put this down to a failure on my part to adequately feed the soil. I have sought to remedy this over the Winter by spreading a layer of compost over them along with a good barrow load and a half of manure. I feared the worst at the end of March. Where other plot-holders had good early growth of thick red stems and luscious green leaves I had nothing more than a pile of dung and a huge thistle.

My neighbour Rick took pity on me. His rampant rhubarb was on the march and was threatening to occupy a vast area of his plot. He fought it back with the flashing blade of his spade and presented me with a huge chunk of root which was sprouting some healthy looking stalks. Within a week of planting Rick's rhubarb, in a spot next to the greenhouse, my own rhubarb bed dragged itself out of hibernation and it is now shooting proudly and relentlessly skywards as if to mock me for ever doubting it.

Carrots: 6 out of 10
I had mixed results with carrots last year. I found that the above ground appearance of the carrot gives no reliable indication as to what you can expect to find growing underground. It was often the case that I would take a firm hold of a large bushy green carrot top expecting to tug and tease a long length of orange root out of the ground only to find that the masses of verdant bush were attached to nothing more than a two inch tiddler which resembled a well worn Ikea pencil. On other occasions I would take hold of a weak looking carrot top with the intention of thinning it out from the row only to find a fully grown, perfectly shaped carrot attached.

Late on in the season some of the carrots were attacked by carrot fly grubs but the carrots had grown so large as to still leave a decent edible portion for me even after the blackened carrot fly tainted area had been excised.

I will persevere with carrots this year, not least because they are a vital ingredient in my beetroot chutney. I have already sown three rows of carrots in a manure free raised bed and I will sow more over the coming weeks. At the moment the carrot-fly protection consists of a fleece tunnel over the carrots and a row of onions surrounding the bed but when I get some time I intend to construct a raised screen to protect the bed from carrot-fly attack.

Onions: 8 out of 10
Red onions and yellow onions grown from sets did reasonably well last year. This year I have already planted a couple of hundred sets in one of the raised beds. This is in addition to those which I have planted in the carrot bed. I still have some others to squeeze in somewhere. Learning from mistakes made in previous years I have planted the rows of onions a little further apart than is suggested on the packet. By doing this I will, hopefully, have left enough room between the rows to allow me to reach weeds with my narrow headed hoe without disturbing the onions, even when the onions have grown nice and fat.

To be continued...

Beetroot - Best Root

I had a go at growing beetroot this year for the first time. It was a very simple crop to grow and has been one of my success stories for this year. I set aside a 6ft x 4ft corner of the plot and sowed a few rows of Boltardy Beetroot seeds, about 6 inches apart, directly into the ground in about late April or early May. I had pre-prepared the ground by digging it over and lining each row with an inch or two of home made fine brown crumbly compost. I then left the beetroot patch undisturbed for about four months.

I had pretty much forgotten about the beetroot until the end of August when I was scratching around on the plot to see if there was any reasonably attractive produce which would fit into any of the classifications at our local agricultural society show on the August bank holiday Monday. Through the weeds which had invaded the beetroot bed I could see that there were a few decent sized roots protruding slightly above the surface of the soil and so I picked three of them, trimmed them, washed them and gave them a gentle scrub with a vegetable brush. They looked ok to my untrained eye. I have no idea what a show judge looks for in a beetroot but I entered them into the show anyway. 

I was surprised at the high number of entries in the beetroot class. My heart dropped when I noticed that everyone else had left long trailing roots on their beets. I had tidied mine up by snipping the roots off with a pair of scissors. Being an absolute novice I assumed that I had made a fatal mistake and that my castrated entries would be laughed out of the show tent. I left my docked efforts on the display table and went off to enjoy the rest of the show and to have a couple of consolatory beers in the beer tent.

I returned to the show tent about four hours later. I hoped that the hilarity caused by my eunuch beetroots would have died down by then. As I approached the display table I could see that one of my beetroots had been sliced in half. The judge must have liked what he found inside the beetroot because, to my total amazement, he had awarded second place to me.

During September and October Mrs PlotNotes boiled up a few beetroots every now and then and I enjoyed them sliced onto a cheese sandwich. Three or four weeks ago I realised that there were a lot of beetroots still in the ground. There were more than I could consume in cheese sandwiches alone and so I decided to do something else with them. After a bit of research I decided to make beetroot chutney.

I had never attempted to make chutney before. I don't really do very much cooking at all. It's not that I can't cook or won't cook it is just that Mrs PlotNotes has always arrived home from work before me and it makes sense for her to get cracking with the evening meal before I get home. When I do get creative in the kitchen, for example when making my patented chilli dumplings, it infuriates Mrs PlotNotes because I invariably use every utensil in the kitchen and it takes me twice as long to prepare any given dish than she would spend on it.

For the beetroot chutney I didn't follow a set recipe but pretty much made it up as I went along using ingredients which I had to hand. I boiled up 18 good sized beetroots. Whilst they were simmering I prepared an assortment of mis-shapen and misfit vegetables which had been lingering on the plot for far too long. These included three very large fat carrots which were too big to have as part of a meal but which were ideal for grating. I also finely chopped five large onions. In a blender I chopped up ten chilli peppers along with a load of tomatoes at various stages of ripeness ranging from green to red and slightly mushy. They were, I thought at the time, the last tomatoes of the year. In fact, there is now another crop of tomatoes ready for picking. I also chopped up a full garlic bulb.

I then peeled and diced the beetroots and put them into a very large deep cooking pot. By this stage the kitchen was starting to resemble a blood spattered murder scene. I then added the carrots, onions, garlic, chillis and tomatoes. Next I added about a pound and a half of granulated sugar to the mix and poured a pint and a half of Sarsons spiced pickling vinegar over the whole lot and brought it up to the boil whilst stirring. I also added a bit of salt, and the odd spoonful or sprinkling of various herbs and spices which I could find in the kitchen cupboards including, black pepper, cumin, turmeric, curry powder, and paprika. I then let the whole lot boil and boil and boil into the early hours of the morning. I think I had added too much vinegar and it took me hours of boiling until the mix reduced into something which had a nice looking chutney consistency to it.

In the meantime I had cleaned and sterilised my glass jars and warmed them up in the oven. I then scooped the chutney, whilst still hot, into the jars and sealed the lids tightly straight away. I stored the jars in a cupboard for almost a week before opening the first one for tasting. I am very pleased with the result. To me it tastes delicious but I think the best indication of quality comes from the fact that Mrs PlotNotes has been devouring it by the heaped spoonful putting large dollops of it on the side of her plate with virtually every meal.

Beetroot will definitely be on my seed order and menu for next year.

It's Showtime

Today I entered some of my allotment produce into the local agricultural society show. I wasn't going to bother. I have been away on holiday and have also been very busy at work. On top of that, on a trip to Hampton Court Palace, a rampaging Saga-lout lost control of her car, smashed into my parked car and caused £4012.24 worth of damage to my car (not to mention the damage to the 2 year old Audi parked next to me and the 400 year old wall in front, which she shunted my car into). Consequently, apart from essential watering and a bit of weeding the plot has been largely neglected for the last two or three weeks (it's a while since I updated the blog too. Sorry!).

Until last year I had never displayed anything at a show. Since we moved to this area about eight years ago we have always gone, as a family, to have a look at the August Bank Holiday Show and we have always had a good day out.  The kids and grandparents alike all enjoy it. There is something there for everyone and I usually manage to slip away for a couple of pints in the beer tent with my father-in-law which is a fine way to spend a bank-holiday afternoon.

These shows only happen if there are people willing to participate and it would be a shame to see this kind of event disappear from the local calendar for the lack of willing participants. The Epworth and District Agricultural Show seems to be flourishing. Today there were over 800 entries to the various show competition categories. Last year I entered a bottle of home-made wine, made from home-grown grapes, into the competition and won a second prize. Encouraged by this I decided to enter produce into a few more categories if I had anything half decent on the allotment this year.

I dug up a row of potatoes yesterday. I love digging up potatoes. I never quite know what to expect and can't quite believe that there will be anything there. When you raise the earth with a fork they seem to tumble out of the ground looking like gold nuggets against the dark soil. From that moment onwards they never seem to look quite so good to me.

I have got hundreds of potatoes stored in sacks in the garage. I dipped into the sacks and pulled a few out but couldn't find any that I thought would be worth taking to the show. I can't quite see the beauty in a spud and I didn't know what the show judges would be looking for so I decided not to "show" any potatoes. Maybe next year I'll have a go now that I've seen the entries from this year and I have a bit more confidence in my own efforts.

The show rules for onions stipulated that they be "dressed". I didn't know what that meant. I considered borrowing one of Barbie's outfits from my daughter but then thought better of it and decided not to show my onions. Anyway, now I've seen a dressed onion I know what is required for next year.

I have been taking some absolutely magnificent cucumbers from my greenhouse for several weeks now (even if I say so myself). There have been loads of them. My wife has been giving them away to friends, family and neighbours. Very few visitors leave our house without a complimentary cucumber tucked under their arm. I have had my eye on three large ones hanging perfectly straight in the greenhouse. I had left them growing on the vine to keep them fresh for the show but last week noticed that they were turning yellow. I thought this must either be because they were getting too much sunlight or, perhaps, not enough, or maybe they had not had enough water what with the disruptions of recent weeks. I did a bit of research and found that cucumbers turn yellow when they are over-ripe. They also start to taste bitter when they reach the yellow stage. So, three large yellow cucumbers found themselves on the compost heap this morning and a slightly bent slightly scarred but nicely green specimen found itself called off the 2nd reserves subs-bench to make an appearance at the Epworth Show.

I have also neglected my french beans and runner beans over recent weeks. The runners are now quite large, probably too large, and long straight ones are few and far between. The French beans are beyond their best and many of them now seem to be podding.

My pumpkins are doing well. One needed cutting off so that growth can be concentrated on the others. That meant that I would have at least one decent item to take to the show.

In the end I managed to scrape together show entries for the following catagories:-

1. Three carrots (leaves cut to 3 inches)
2. Three peppers (any variety)
3. One Cucumber
4. Six runner beans
5. Three tomatoes (cherry type)
6. Selection of up to six varieties of veg or fruit - judged on quality. My six varieties were Pumpkin, Courgette, French Beans, Chillies, Spring Onions and Carrots.

I also entered the wine competition with a bottle of rose wine made from home-grown grapes and a bottle of white wine made from plums taken from my father-in-law's garden.

The results? I got second prize for my home-grown grape wine (again) and third prize for the selection of six veg varieties.

Progress Update

The amount of produce I am taking from the plot has exceeded all my expectations. It is hard to believe that only three or four months ago the whole allotment site was a bare brown field with not even a blade of grass growing on it. Now, it is bursting with greenery and almost every meal I eat contains something grown on the allotment.

Here are a few photographs taken on the plot today.

Harvested This Morning

This is what makes it all worthwhile, not to mention the tomatoes, strawberries, onions, red chilli peppers and purple sprouting broccoli already harvested and the expectation of radishes, carrots, sprouts, pumpkins, french beans and runner beans still to come this year and the asparagus in year two and the grapes/wine in year three.

Propagation

Today I have started to propagate my first batch of seeds. I have sown french beans, spring onions, maincrop onions, dianthus and marigolds into a couple of propagators in the spare bedroom. Fern has also sown some strawberry seeds. I have also put a batch of onion seeds in the coldframe outside and will compare their progress with the onions in the propagator.

The dianthus and marigolds are intended to be used as "companion planting". The idea is, I think, that if I plant them in my veg beds they will repel insect pests. Either that or they will attract the pests to their flowers and in doing so keep the pests off my crops. Or are they supposed to attract the good insects? I'm not sure. If the theory doesn't work at least the flowers will add a bit of colour to the plot.