Annual Review

I suppose that I should take the word "novice" out of this blog's sub-title now that year three on the plot is well under way but I still feel that I have got so much to learn that I will have to leave it in there for the time being.

I started this year with the intention of keeping things simple on the plot. I resolved that I would not attempt to grow so many different types of vegetable as I have done in the past and that I would concentrate mainly on the handful of crops which I have had the most success with in the previous two years. Having now reviewed the contents of numerous seed trays which I have, at various stages of propagation, positioned on windows sills at home and out in the cold-frame and greenhouse, it seems to me that I am failing in my resolution to keep things simple.

I will set out below the first part of my assessment of the crops which I grew last year. I will review the items in the order of a walk-through from the front of the plot to the back but first here's a photo, taken at the end of June 2011 when most things were thriving, which should help me to remember what I was growing and where.

Flower Bed:  8 out of 10
My 9 year old daughter planted a flower bed in front of the compost boxes with some good results from lupins, dianthus, nasturtiums, rudbeckia and a few others. She eventually lost enthusiasm and the weeds moved in. She will get the flower bed blooming again this year.

Potatoes: 4 out of 10
I had some very tasty new potatoes early on and the volunteers which grew unexpectedly from kitchen waste peelings were also very good but after that my spuds were a disappointment. They were all generally on the small side and if you boiled them for a fraction of a second too long they would disintegrate into mush in the saucepan. Potatoes harvested later on tended to be a bit scabby.

This year I have planted just one variety (Romano). I have planted them at the far end of the plot where the soil seems to retain more moisture. I have planted them in a bed into which I have dug in a few back-breaking barrow loads of well rotted cow manure. I lined the trenches with a mixture of manure, powdered fish blood and bone and home made compost and I sat each seed potato in a trench in a little nest of compost before raking a high mound of soil over them.

I have spread some horse manure with a high straw content into the furrows between each mound. I don't know if anyone has tried this before but my theory is that the layer of strawy manure will suppress weeds and help retain moisture in the soil below whilst at the same time enriching the soil with its pooey goodness.

Leeks: 8 out of 10
I planted leeks in the potato bed once all the potatoes had been harvested. Most of them have done well over the Winter requiring very little care or attention from me. The ones which we had with our Easter Sunday dinner were delicious.

Broccoli (calabrese): 0 out of 10
My broccoli seeds failed to germinate but a local farmer donated some of his surplus seedlings to me and other allotment holders. Unfortunately his seedlings turned out to be cabbages not broccoli. This year I have a few broccoli seedlings already growing and so I hope for better things this year.

Cabbage: 6 out of 10
The cabbages (which should have been broccoli) were perfectly formed with tightly packed hearts but they were very small. In fact my neighbour's cabbages, which came from the same source, were more than twice the size of mine. Unfortunately my children,who would happily devour broccoli by the bucket load, seem to have an aversion to cabbage. I can take it or leave it. The result was that we only ate about half of the cabbages and the rest were added to the compost bin.

Sprouts: 6 out of 10
This is another green crop which the girls avoid. I don't mind that because I mainly grow them with the intention of having some home-grown sprouts to eat with my Christmas dinner. To that extent the sprouts were a success but like the cabbages, which were grown in the same raised bed, they were small but perfectly formed. The raised bed which I will use for sprouts this year has been well manured and the soil is much improved and I hope that this will lead to something more substantial than the little green pellets which accompanied last year's Christmas dinner.

Lettuce/salad: 7 out of 10
The cut and come again salad leaves did well whilst we kept on cutting and coming again but soon went to seed when we didn't cut or come again. Mrs PlotNotes would prefer the convenience of having the salad leaves grown in the garden at home so that is what she will get this year.

Radishes: 7 out of 10
I had intended to plant successive rows of radishes at seven day intervals to guarantee a regular supply for the entire Summer. I found that I didn't have time to do this and so the sowing was a bit sporadic, as was the harvesting. The ones which I picked in time were tasty with a hot kick to them. Others, which I neglected to pick in time, became large and woody and were gnawed at by some unidentified insect or rodent.

Asparagus: 8 out of 10
A few early spindly shoots were followed by some decent spears which were delicious and which were probably as good as I could have expected for second year plants. The asparagus bed is still in the early years of a long term project and so, with some strong-willed self-restraint I was careful not to over harvest the plants. Over the Winter I have dressed the bed with a mix of bonemeal and compost. I now have a couple of small spears pushing up through the layer of compost but they seem to be a good few weeks behind the spears which are shooting up on other plots. I hope I have not damaged my asparagus bed by burying it under a fresh layer of compost. I am a little bit concerned that only two out of fourteen plants are showing any sign of life.

All being well, my next blog update will pick up this review at the strawberry bed.

Pumpkin Surprise!

A few months ago I made an early start in preparing a special bed for pumpkins. I dug a load of horse manure and home made compost into the bed and then I excavated a short trench down the centre of the bed which, over the course of a few weeks, I filled with kitchen waste from home. 

We keep a small plastic bucket with a screw-top lid in the kitchen into which we put various bio-degradable fruit & veg off-cuts, peelings, scrapings etc for composting. Each week I would tip the contents of the bucket into the trench and cover with a layer of soil until I was left with a nice mound of rich rotting waste covered in soil down the middle of the bed. Since then I have left the bed, undisturbed, to rot down whilst I have grown the pumpkin plants from seed in the greenhouse.

I had almost forgotten about the pumpkins until this weekend when I noticed them looking slightly pale and pot-bound fighting for light under a canopy of 5ft high tomato plants. Meanwhile the pumpkin bed had become a mass of weeds which were clearly thriving in the nutrient enriched soil.

A few weeks ago I had noticed that amongst the weeds there were two or three bushy growths which looked very much like potato plants. I assumed that there must have been some potato peelings in the kitchen waste from which potato plants had sprouted. I paid no attention to them; as far as I was concerned they were weeds. In April and May when I tenderly wrapped my first earlies and main crop potatoes in fleece I ignored these pumpkin plot invaders. In May and June when I have given an almost daily drenching of water to my official potato bed the pumpkin bed has been left parched. Any weeds which have dared to raise their heads above neat rows of potatoes in the regulation potato plot have been quickly yanked out and thrown onto the compost heap whereas the weeds in the pumpkin bed have just been left to get on with it.

This weekend I removed all the weeds from the pumpkin bed in readiness for planting out the pumpkins and was surprised to find that I have accidentally grown a lovely crop of new potatoes some of which were consumed with my Fathers' Day Sunday dinner today.

It does make me wonder if all the careful preparation of the main potato plot is really necessary. Why bother with the double digging, marking out, trench digging, spacing out, mounding up, wrapping in fleece, watering and weeding when you can get such delicious results by simply chucking a bucket full of kitchen slops into a hole.

Lucky Tubers

I planted my main-crop potatoes today. I have gone for Maris Piper. My first earlies, Arran Pilot, were planted about two or three weeks ago. These are perhaps dull choices of potato varieties, given that they are widely available in the shops, but after the disappointing potato harvest last year I am playing it safe this time around and hoping for a reliable crop of decent sized spuds and, of course, I now know to ignore the advice of Alan Titchmarsh and I will make sure that all my potatoes get plenty of water.

When digging a trench for the Maris Pipers I unearthed a rusty old horseshoe. I am not superstitious but it has been suggested that this must be a sign of good luck for me and the plot. Now, if the rest of the horse is rotting away under my potato bed that really would have been a stroke of luck and I could expect to produce some truly spectacular potatoes, but I cannot see that unearthing a single horseshoe, which is no longer attached to a horse, will make any difference at all. I'm off to check my lottery ticket now, just in case.



Potatoes, Poo, Pond and Rhubarb

After what seems like a long Winter break from any real work on the allotment I have eased myself back into the routine over the last couple of weekends by doing some preparatory work ready for the fast approaching growing season.

Last weekend I dug up the last few remaining potatoes on the plot. I had intended lifting them in November but didn't get round to it. And then when I found the time the potatoes were locked in the frozen ground. As expected, following December temperatures which had been as low as minus 18C, some of the spuds had turned to a milky mush and others were black and none were salvageable. This was disappointing because they had grown to a reasonable size and would have made good chippers and jackets spuds. If I had harvested them in time they would have been better than any of the others I had grown last year, all of which were on the small side (due, I think, to having followed Titmarsh's cock-eyed advice not to water them).

To add insult to injury, whilst I was breaking my back digging up these inedible and uncompostable potatoes and thinking of all the wasted effort and futility of having prepared the soil, dug the trenches, raked the mounds, weeded the beds and tended the plants all for nothing, one of my neighbours came over to show me his magnificent specimens which he had just dug up. He had planted them very deep in  a double depth raised bed, given them plenty of water all Summer and then covered the bed with polythene in the Autumn. This had protected them against the Arctic conditions which we have experienced this Winter and he had a full bag of very large white beauties of which he was justifiably very proud.

Having removed my useless rotting potatoes I then relieved my frustrations by attacking the plot with my fork and spade. I really got stuck in to it and to my surprise managed to dig over the whole of last years potato patch, an area of about 5.5m x 7m, in what seemed like no time at all. I found this digging to be quite theraputic and by the time I had finished my thoughts had turned from futility to optimism for the coming season.

Fired up with enthusiasm for my coming second year on the plot I cleared out all the rubbish and remains of last years plants from the greenhouse along with the soil and gro-bag contents from the greenhouse beds. I then turned over the contents of compost box number one and was very pleased to see how well all the weeds and kitchen waste have broken down into lovely brown crumbly compost which will be ready to use this year.

I have also made a trip to Wilkinson and to the local garden centre, Silica Lodge (which offers a 10% discount to our allotment assosiation), this week and I have bought some veg seeds, seed potatoes (Arran Pilot and Maris Piper), onion sets (red and yellow) and some bags of multi-purpose compost.

Today I have stocked up on horse manure courtesy of my farmer friend Richard from the neighbouring village, or more accurately courtesy of his daughters' ponies Joey and Poppy. It took 3 trips to the farm and 3 full dust-bins and 18 assorted buckets and tubs to fill compost box number 3. As you can see from the photo below It doesn't look much but my back will tell you it is plenty.



So, everything is starting to take shape ready for year two on the plot and soon I'll be thinking of sowing my first seeds of the year, probably starting with chillis and tomatoes, but I also need to report my first set-back of the year. Today I discovered that my water butt, which has been full of ice for much of the last 8 weeks, was empty. On inspection I found two small hairline cracks in the base of the butt through which 220 litres of water must have escaped when the thaw came. This probably explains the pond behind the greenhouse which I referred to in my previous blog post. I will see if I can repair the cracks by melting a plastic patch onto them. If this fails the water butt will be recycled to become compost box number 4 or perhaps a cover for forcing rhubarb.

Speaking of rhubarb, I have seen the first pink shoots emerging today. Is this a sign that this harshest of Winters is coming to an end? I think not, it is still only January after all.



Pruned

I have spent most of the last two days eating and boozing. Between feasts I have been nodding-off in an armchair catching up with the sleep I have lost in late night sessions following The Ashes cricket downunder. Today I managed to break the cycle of behaviour which had consisted of an afternoon nap with a glass in one hand and a tin of toffees in the other while the kids played on the wii or a film played to itself on the telly. It took considerable effort but I managed to get off my backside and make the short journey to the allotment site.

The ground is still frozen hard and a thin layer of snow lingers on. More snow is forecast for tonight. The ground has been frozen solid since the end of November. There is no possibility of doing any digging unless you have a pneumatic drill. The ground was well and truly frozen when I paid a short visit to the plot on Christmas Eve to pick sprouts for Christmas dinner, which were delicious by the way. There were some other plot-holders struggling with pick-axes and metal spikes to break up the ground so that they could extract their parsnips from the tundra. I hope they were worth the effort.

In theory, I still have some potatoes in the ground. In reality, I don't know if there will be anything still there. I should have harvested them weeks ago but didn't get round to it and when I have had chance to get onto the plot the ground has been so hard that my garden-fork has rung like a tuning-fork when I have tried to prise the ground open with it. I must wait for the thaw before I will find what has become of the remaining spuds. I suspect they will be mush.

The purpose of my visit today was to prune the vines. By the end of the Summer most of the vines had reached the top support wire, about 6 feet high. I have now cut them all back to about 2 feet to where the stems are about as thick as a pencil. All the advice I have received is to do this task when the vines are dormant. In view of some of the temperatures we have suffered over the past few weeks I have no doubt that that the vines are dormant; my concern is that they may be permanently dormant. After pruning I spread a mulch layer of well rotted horse-manure around the vines. I still don't expect much of a crop of grapes next year but hopefully by this time in 2012 I'll have a few demi-johns of home-grown home-brew bubbling away in the spare bedroom.

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.

He's not the Messiah...he's a very horti boy.

As a first year allotmenteer with very little previous gardening experience I am still on a very steep learning curve.  In my quest for allotment knowledge I seem to have acquired a wide selection of gardening books which I tend to dip in and out of on a regular basis. In fact, if it wasn't for the porcelain chair with the wooden seat and the sink in the corner of the room, my downstairs "reading room" could very easily be mistaken for the reference library at Kew.

I have found "The Kitchen Gardener" by gardening guru Alan Titchmarsh (BBC Books) to be particularly helpful. It is well set out and crammed with useful information and it includes a working calendar and an extensive directory of vegetables and fruit. Through this book I have been guided by the wisdom of the mighty omnipotent Titchmarsh at every step I have taken so far on the long leafy green path towards allotment enlightenment. This book has been my allotment bible. When unsure as to what to do for the best I find that, like some born-again evangelical gardener, my mantra is "What would A.T. do?".

But now, at the risk of being struck by a bolt of lightning, I find myself questioning the sacred text of Saint Alan. When describing routine care for potatoes His lesson is, "Except in a long dry Summer, you shouldn't need to water potatoes". Amen.

I planted my first early potatoes at the end of March and later varieties over the subsequent few weeks and, there being no drought, I blindly followed Alan's teachings and did not water them. By the beginning of June I noticed that my potatoes were quite puny compared to those on neighbouring plots. Some plot-holders were even harvesting some pretty impressive crops of potatoes by that stage and mine were no where near being ready. I had followed the Word of Alan to the letter; where was I going wrong?

At about that time I received an email newsletter from an allotment forum website to which I subscribe. The jobs for June listed in the newsletter included the task of giving "copious amounts" of water to potatoes. I sneered at such idiotic advice. Was the author of the newsletter some heathen soil druid who had not heard of the teachings of Alan? I mentioned this to one of the experienced gardeners who has a plot opposite mine. To my surprise he agreed with the newsletter and said "You can never give enough water to potatoes; they are greedy for it".

On my next visit to my "reading room" I did some research and found that every book, apart from The Gospel According to Titchmarsh, advised that potatoes be given plenty of water. The word "copious" was used over and over again.

Since then I have been watering my spuds. The first earlies still look quite pathetic but the others seem to be catching up. Last week I was curious to see if my first earlies had produced anything. If not, I would dig them up to make space for some leeks which need planting out. I found a couple of handfuls of small potatoes which I am pleased to report were delicious.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else agrees with Alan's advice on watering potatoes.

Gone with the wind

This is the greenhouse frame which I erected on Sunday afternoon:-

This is what I found when I came home from work tonight:-

It looks like we have had a bit of a storm blow through today. The allotment is like a swamp and, as you can see my, pride and joy, greenhouse frame is now a tangled mess of aluminium sections. I did notice as I put it up on Sunday that there was one cross member missing from the back of the frame and a couple of the nuts could not be tightened up as they just spun around on the bolts when I tried to tighten them up. I had planned to fit a cross member this weekend and replace the faulty nuts and bolts and then fix it to a base frame. The greenhouse seemed quite secure when I left it but I can only assume that the structural integrity was compromised by the missing strut and the loose nuts and the wind today took advantage of that. 

I was a bit pressed for time before it went dark tonight so I haven't been able to examine the full extent of the damage but hopefully it will be salvageable.

My 10 Grapevines arrived last night and I need to get them planted this weekend so I went up to the plot after work today to dig holes ready for planting. I put a dollop of manure and a scoop of slow release plant food into each hole and then covered it lightly with soil. I will stand the vines in a bucket of water for 24 hours and then plant them in the holes this weekend. However I am a little bit concerned that the site does not seem to be very well draining. It is like quicksand in some parts. In the picture below it is not easy to distinguish my planting holes from my deep sunken welly prints. I will just have to wait and see if the vines take to it.

Hopefully the swampy conditions and greenhouse damage will prove to be only minor set-backs. Everything seemed to be going so well last weekend. The composting boxes arrived;  I collected a nice pile of well rotted pony poo with assistance from Lucy; I also planted three rows of first early Duke of York potatoes.

The long wait is almost over.

The chairman of the allotment committee has emailed to advise that the contractor will be on site next week "to subsoil to 16” then disc, harrow and rotavate the soil incorporating the extra top soil over the whole site". The contractor has then agreed to allow next weekend for plot-holders to mark out where they want their raised beds and he will then put them in place and fill them with top soil commencing on Monday 15/3/10. The contractor has asked that any obstructions be moved to the far end of each plot so as to allow him unrestricted access with his machinery.

So, the long wait to do something constructive on the plot is almost over and I am raring to go.

I have just been up to the allotments. It is a glorious Spring day; clear blue sky; no breeze; still very cold. There was quite a bit of activity going on with people spreading muck and moving things out of the way of the contractor. When I dug the plot over in December I made a couple of piles of vegetation, weeds, roots, and sticks etc which I had unearthed. I have moved them into one mound at the far end of the plot to make sure that they don't get ploughed back in next week.

Whilst I was changing into my wellies in the carpark, etiquette which would be frowned upon at a golf club but which is perfectly acceptable at the allotments, one of the old farmers from the village came over and had a chat. I have often seen him bow-legedly waddling around the village in his tweed jacket, cords and flat cap. He'll stop and talk to anyone. He has not got an allotment but is keenly following progress on the site.

He told me that this has been the longest Winter he can remember. He must be well into his 80s and says he has lived in the village for 66 years. He says Winter around here usually lasts about 70 days but this year it has lasted for not far off 90 days. I don't know what events he regards as signalling the start and finish of Winter but it is encouraging to hear that he thinks that Winter is over now.

Less encouraging for me was his opinion that carrots will perform excellently on my plot but potatoes will not do so well. Anyone who has read my seed order list might recall that I have not got a single carrot seed but I have gone for potatoes on a big scale. I have got 200 or more seed potatoes ready to plant later this month. I will still go ahead with my spud plans but I'll also see if I can pick up some carrot seeds and find a bit of space on the plot to fit in a couple of rows of carrots.

Sack o' Spuds

There was a sack of seed potatoes from Kings Seeds waiting for me when I got home from work tonight.

I had missed the catalogue deadline for ordering seed potatoes and was forewarned to expect some substitutes in place of my chosen varieties but as it happens they have delivered everything I asked for; 3kg of each of the following:-

First earlies - Duke of York
Second earlies - Estima
Early maincrop - King Edward
Late maincrop - Golden Wonder.

I now need store them in a cool airy frost-free place and read-up on planting times and chitting theories and work out what to do with them for best results.

The only things outstanding from the Kings seed order now are the 12 asparagus crowns and 3 rhubarb crowns which will be coming in March. I did pick up a couple of asparagus crowns and rhubarbs in Morrisons a couple of weeks ago. Couldn't resist at £1 a go. I also got some onion sets at same price; 40 red onions and 40 yellow. Still need to order the grapevines.

I popped into Wilkinson at lunchtime today. They had a few allotment related bargains and I came away with a fleece tunnel, an armful of 8ft canes for the runner beans and french beans and some 10 inch clear plastic bell-shaped cloches with pegs . Saved myself about £20 on what it would have cost at the local garden centre. Would have saved a bit more if I'd waited and bought my propagators from there instead of from the garden centre this weekend.

I will go back to Wilkinson when I have made a list of things I'm likely to need on the plot this year. Things that spring to mind at the moment are a watering can, netting to keep birds, butterflies and slugs off the fruit and veg, gardening gloves and some fertiliser.

Yes we have no strawberries.

A parcel of seeds arrived from Kings this morning. The potatoes, asparagus and rhubarb will be coming later but today I received everything else on the list apart from the strawberry seeds. They say they are unable to supply the Temptation Strawberry seeds and have sent a credit note for £1.25 to use against my next order. Fern will be disappointed. I wasn't going to bother with strawberries but she persuaded me to let her have a small patch on the plot to grow some for herself. I'll take her to the garden centre so that she can choose her own packet.