Helpful Hands

Mum and Auntie Jill came over to the allotment last weekend and provided not only cheap labour, but also an amazing fount of knowledge on all things green. I'll try to jot down what they said just so I can remember their sage advice;

"What are you doing with that watering can?!"
 Water properly, don't use the rose to water all the soil around where your plants are - get close and direct the water at the plants.

"Water that poor pear!" 
Mulch trees and shrubs; not only does it keep weeds down, but if you build it up into a little dam around it (think of a volcano crater) then it holds moisture and directs it at the roots.

"Don't water every day, give them a good drenching once a week" 
OK, I knew this one already, but I hadn't appreciated what 'drenching'  really was! The pear wasn't drenched until it had almost two watering cans full. Apparently, watering once a week encourages the roots to go hunting nice and deep for water. This is good, as cant really get up there every day.

"If you get interesting looking weeds, keep them!"
I cant believe we haven't done this before. After a spot of weeding mum found what turned out to be fennel. Brilliant.Sure they're not in the right place for our crop rotation, but who cares! Jill says "stick a pole in so you know where they are and make sure you water them".
I instantly thought that this would maybe make a great companion plant but after a bit of hunting online, found that; "Fennel is an odd plant in that it pretty much is a poor companion for everything."
Haha. But it does say that it repels aphids, so that's good for where it is, right on the peas and beans patch :) 



"What are all these dandelions doing here?!?!"  [needs to be said with outrage as if someone has trampled over your prize blueberry bush] If you cant be bothered to dig them up, just pick off the flower heads. I was lazy, so just grabbed the flowers off, managed to get over 100.. dandelion tea perhaps?

"Your compost is rubbish, but you'll learn!"
To me it looked tons better than it did two weeks ago, but wasn't really going anywhere - no heat and quite broken down. so we decided that should start a new one and put the rest out on the plot. Top tips for compost success are layers of twigs and green and adding "recycled beer" and chicken poo. There was also much loling at the beetroot growing in the compost - if you chop them up, they don't keep growing. Who'd have thought? Also, roots the length of your arm are not a good idea either.

"We've had two loads of rhubarb already this year" 
Force your rhubarb and you'll get a super early crop




Plus they did LOADS of weeding :) cheers guys!


More photos on flickr 

Companion Planting

Saw this pretty infographic this morning showing some common companion planting combinations. I think that some of these are more often employed in annual crop  rotation instead of strictly companion planting (eg Beans & Brasicas), but still good stuff.

Compost

After reading Mark Diacono's excellent book Veg Patch fairly constantly since Christmas, it's become a bit of a crutch for me... rather than just hack away with a shovel, I'll now find myself reading up beforehand, nodding and then hacking away with a shovel. Whenever Harriet and I talk about the allotment, I seem to precede every sentence with: "Mark says..."


Its like I've turned into an adoring three year old. 

Anyway, Mark says that your soil is your most important bit of your plot. More important than the veg even (!). Well we gave ours a bit of a manure last year, but haven't really done anything since. Makes sense tho, if you're taking things out of the soil, you'll need to keep the nutrients all topped up if you want to keep doing it every year.


One way of getting nutrients back into the soil is by composting. We've got a compost bin, so last weekend I had a look at how it was doing.  Definably more like soil than the rotten cabbages and chard that it was made up of, but quite dry and not fully broken down. And not many worms. (Also think i saw a rat in there, but it could have been just been a potato.) 


As we've not been visiting enough to make regular additions of food waste, it looks a bit undernourished. But what was there was promising, and I dont think it will take much to turn it into the powerhouse of free goodness for our plot.


So things to do this year:

 - Fill it up; make sure we use it. All kitchen waste, cardboard and paper, laddered tights, whatever will rot down is going to fill up the bin.
- Get a balance; Ensure that there is both 'Green' (fleshy stuff, clippings & peelings) and 'brown' (twigy things, cardboard, straw) - think this might have been a problem last year - it was mostly just grass and weeds

 - Water it; Our bin is plastic so it isn't going to get any moisture from the rain, which apparently slows down composting.

Also saw that a lot of the perennial weeds (like dandilion) were actually doing just fine and starting to grow in there. Have put them in a plastic bag to decompose before for a few weeks to make sure theyre double dead before they go in with the rest of the stuff.


Anyway, the bin was emptied out, given a nice airing and a good 'watering'. Will have to see how it is in a few months time.

And 'sow' it begins...

Our weedy, untilled allotment has, in the week or so since we last visited, been transformed into a beautifully dug-over, weed-free plot. Not a miracle, just Peter from the allotment society and his rotovator. He did a brilliant job. He had to do it three times apparently. Our new aim for this year: improve the quality of our soil through adding as much organic matter as possible. We need to make another call to Phil the poo man.
So, into this newly rotovated soil, we planted the first of this year's crops. Potatoes. Three rows of Charlottes, and then a row each of Arran Pilot, Lady Christl and Vivaldi (the famous, 'slimming' potato - only half the calories of a normal potato! Amazing). We'll see which ones do best (and whether we get any less fat from eating them). We planted them in the corner of the plot that we never got around to touching last year.
We also planted a few rows of onions and half a row of beetroot. Don't worry, there will be more beetroot to follow. We just wanted to make sure we spread the beetroot love out throughout the summer and didn't end up with a glut. Although a glut of beetroot would be no bad thing, in my opinion.
We also planted some aubergines and leeks in modules. Our aubergines didn't do very well last year, as we left it too late before we planted them. We didn't want to repeat our mistake this year so they're already planted up and sitting in a nice warm spot on top of the washing machine,  ready to be planted out when it gets a bit warmer.
We got our potatoes and onions from the allotment trading hut. 40 or so potatoes and 50ish onions for about £4. It's good for the purse strings as well as the waistline.
We got most of our new seeds for this year from The Real Seed Company but we've also tried saving some seeds from last year's crops. We'll see how they do.
Here was the table on seed sorting day.

One thing we have learnt today: it is very difficult gardening with a hangover. We achieved probably 30% of what we would have on a normal day because we kept on having to have little sit downs.  Happy birthday to Andrew's brother Ben.  

It 'woodwork' better if it had a roof - the fruit cage post

This year we are determined to learn our lessons from last year. One major failing from last year: all our fruit got eaten by birds (or some other unidentified thief)

So yesterday we put Year Two: no-longer-newbies into action.

I got the bus up to the allotment while Andrew cycled to his parents' house to get the car. I felt like a true, die-hard gardener as I got to work in the greenhouse, listening to the radio, while the rain poured down outside. 

Andrew arrived soon after with a roof-rack full of wood, a saw, a spirit level and a hammer. Woodwork time.

We'd planned to build a walk-in fruit cage, but after chatting to Andrew's Uncle Paul at Christmas, we thought maybe a smaller, moveable one would be better. We had a look around at a few other fruit cages on other plots, and then set off for Homebase. The man at the checkout was slightly bemused by our purchases, and it took him a long time to find 'pond and fruit cage netting' on his till. He kept looking at the 'Chains' section until I told him it was a mesh, not a chain. Don't think he'd been working there long.

We came back to the allotment and Andrew got to to work with a saw, hammer and nails, while I did my best with the mesh and a staple gun. 

Then we put it all together to make this wonderful cage for our strawberries. Check out our awesome woodwork skills. We decided we'd make this cage just for the strawbs, and do something else for the raspberries and the gooseberry. I hope it works because last year we had a total of 1 raspberry and 0 gooseberries. Not a brilliant harvest. 

Yes we do realise it doesn't have a roof yet. We ran out of time and energy. Luckily there's no fruit for the birds to eat yet, so we've got a bit of time. 

Back in the growing game!

Last weekend we donned our wellies for the first time since the end of October and ventured back to The Allotment. We were both feeling a little apprehensive on the bus ride there... maybe others would look in disgust at our six month absence... maybe all the windows had been broken on the shed.. maybe our plot had been given away to some other happy newbies...

However all was well. Actually, it looked in a better condition that it was when we left it.  We spent the day clearing old produce that we'd left behind and moving big clods of grass from the area we never got around to using last year. We then took all the clods and used them to build up the path between our plot and Carol's plot next door. 

Here's what it looked like when we got there. Last year's canes and plenty of weeds. 

Here's what it looked like when we'd finished. Yes, we realise there aren't many differences to spot! 
We managed to secure the services of Peter, the Chairman of the Allotment Society, and his rotavator. So hopefully all the hard digging work will be done for us. Definitely worth £30. 
Here's some pictures of our first allotment lunch of the year, in our shed's little veranda. Sandwiches with chutney made from last year's produce. YUM. 

September Update

It was with much trepidation that we finally went back to the allotment today...
During our loooovely two week holiday in Thailand we had cleverly forward planned and arranged for Charl and Jon, expert horticulturists, to pop up in keep an eye on things. We were thrilled to see that they had done their best to plunder as much as possible, and we only had a glut of runner beans to contend with on our return.

However, since getting back we have been slightly less well organised. Our weekends have been spent attending a wonderful wedding in Belgum and massacring an effervescent fig tree in Oxford, and as going up on weekday evenings had not even occurred to us, its been even longer than we'd hoped since we were last there.

But as ever, we were pleasantly surprised to see how hardy our plot has been to our blatant neglect. The beetroot that were only just seeded when we left are now definitely established nicely (we even managed to harvest one that was doing far too well compared to its siblings).

French beans and runners are continuing to be amazingly successful and we harvested about 3 kgs today, despite us already taking about three times that so far this year! Unfortunately, the growing frame has taken a bit of a bashing. Need to do a better job when we re-build it next year.

But the champion of the trip was the monster 'courgette' that we found. Must have been about 50cms long and weighed over 1.1kgs. Totally unexpected compared to the tiny 15cm jobbies that we'd been getting off it so far.  I'm not sure what the difference between a marrow and courgettes are, but this one was definitely upwardly mobile.

Cabbages are still looking like cabbages, but as we both dont really like cabbages, we left them where they were. Note to self: dont plant as many cabbages next year.