Afternoon off

Good grief, the plots are a swarm of happy-go-lucky retirees on a sunny afternoon.  Apparently (and I quote), “when you’re retired, every day is a bank holiday.”  Hmph.  Not that I am jealous or anything.  I’m fortunate enough to be my own boss, which means – when the sun comes out and the telephone quietens – I get to trundle down to the plot.

To work, of course.  In-between sitting around with a bottle of blueberry juice to watch the robin flutter between the runner bean canes.

So here’s what I did, and I expect you to be mighty impressed:

First, I cultivated a new patch for yet another packet of French bean seeds that have been lurking in my seed box.  These were ‘Cobra’, the beans that Joe Swift raved about on Friday’s Gardener’s World.  (I didn’t put grass underneath the bed.  I was too tired and finished by the time I remembered.)  This New Patch of mine happened to be along the side of the rusty old shed that we inherited.  Formerly, this Patch was Official Dumping Ground, covered in rusty old poles, spoons (huh??) and other rubbish.  So the first hour was clearing all that off, spotting a frog trying to escape, and prodding the nearby rubbish to ‘encourage’ the frog to finish escaping.

Then a rest, and a little chat with the lucky retiree on the plot-but-one.  He told me we’d get a half-hundredweight of potatoes, which would be helpful if I knew how to translate into pans or handfuls. He was rewardingly impressed with all we’ve done on the plot – it’s absolutely enormous, and I’m not saying this boastfully, because we are not yet sure we can manage it all – but it’s nice when people can see how much work you’ve put in.

I finished digging the patch after another, like, hour and a HALF!  because the ground was solid as a rock.  I think it’s probably NEVER been dug, or maybe not for twenty years.  Another frog appeared and scarpered.  And I put in the French beans, with poles for support.  I might transplant some squashes to the bed at the bottom, too – that could work, and we have zillions of squash seedlings that have self-sown (thanks to someone who dumps squash seeds in the compost bin).

Finally I planted out some more peas – not grown in guttering, as everyone advises, but in modular trays, which seems to have been a big mistake.  They didn’t come out very happily so I’m not sure they’ll take.  And I’m so looking forward to eating our peas, too.  Anywhere I can squeeze in some more, I will.

The saladini continues to rocket (geddit) skywards no matter how much we eat it – what a great crop.  I’ve sown lots more alongside yellow chard (for leaves), extra rocket, icebergs and radishes.  I’ll try again with spring onions soon, too.  They just didn’t appear at all the first time around.  Beet, carrots and kohl rabi all doing nicely, as are the runners and squashes, and potatoes going crazy.  I’m looking forward to eating new potatoes with peas and broad beans – how brilliant that will be.  I’ll have the camera sorted out by then.

Autumn standstill

So most of the plot is dug. We did a little more on the weekend but really, there’s not much you can do in autumn, is there? Apart from order manure (yuck) and strim the grass, like our neighbouring allotmenteers. Still, the first little green things are appearing in our brand new beds (Garlic Marco and Onion Radar – horrible names) and we sowed Broad Bean Claudia last weekend, too. Those haven’t appeared yet, but assuming they haven’t been eaten by robins, pigeons or mice, or trampled on by our neighbour when he was strimming, they ought to, soonish.

One thing I can do, though, is plan. (deputy gardener doesn’t do much by way of planning. He can, however, parrot growth information about carrots and broad beans, annoyingly.) After measuring, constructing, and checking for the sunlight, we now have a full-blown plot plan. Springtime’s crops have homes – and as soon as I have redrawn the sketch without the crossings-out, I’ll scan and post it.

The next part is choosing seeds from the catalogues. I must admit that I veer towards the ones with pretty names – Broad Bean Claudia and Pea Greensage, Rudolph Radish and Christmas Cabbage – but I need some kind of tactic, otherwise I’d just be overwhelmed by choice. And deputy-gardener says that I can’t order the vegetables that grow to look like rude body parts. Some of the seed companies offer small starter-sets, but these don’t include all the things we want to grow. So where do we start with, for instance, five pages of carrots? How do we choose between dozens of potatoes and thirty types of squash? I also know that whoever writes the descriptions may well be leaving out negative information about each species. So perhaps some types of squash are hungrier than others, and perhaps some of them need far longer to ripen. But – partly because of space and partly because of spin – the copy won’t always mention everything. Anyway, I don’t expect it to. But I would like a bit more guidance on choosing. You know – “you really can’t go wrong, unless you go on holiday for six weeks, with these vegetables”.

So there we are. Back to choosing the prettiest names, I suppose.

Other jobs for autumn:
Digging the Cutting Flower garden
Installing water butts (we bought one at the local dump for £3 yesterday!)
Improving soil and covering for winter
Sowing hardy pea seeds
Building cold frames
Saving up for a greenhouse.

Under attack

 After a weekend’s worth of hard work from our faithful volunteers, this is what the plot looks like!  You can see the frame for the fruit cage there on the right, followed by an 8×6′ space for a greenhouse, and some beds without boundaries further down.  To put it in perspective, I guess we have now structured perhaps half or two-thirds of the plot.  The bottom part, where the ground ends in a pointy triangle, is reserved for cutting flowers – no raised beds there, just some cute picket fencing (because I am a girl).   Across the back (running horizontally below the photographer’s feet) is a 40′ bed for beans (broad and runner), and behind that is a raised bank, into which I will be planting apple and plum trees.   And in the bottom left of the picture you can see the onion and garlic bed (covered with netting), from which my little darlings have started to sprout!  God bless their little green legs. 

All plotted out

Check out all that dirty potential! So here it is.  After months of boring everyone witless, we’re boring ourselves to death with rakes and shovels.  Plenty of raking, digging, manuring, boarding, and bracketing – full weekend, not such a full blog. 

The plot is very slopey, in both directions, which is confusing our plans.  We have been arguing over which direction our trendy raised beds should point.  We finally agreed on the direction for the first three:

 

Holly absolutely loved it – all that space, so much to pull up!  Harvey would have loved it just as much.  Plenty of sunshine all day for lying around after you’re all run-out.

We have been blessed with the most wonderful weekend (weather-, not back-wise).  On Day 1, we arrived at about 11am.  After panicking a bit about where to start, and arranging a nice (too) big place to sit, we managed to dig over and build some beds – a long one along the back for runner beans (and the early broad beans, which will be going in at the end of the month), and two shorter ones (for root veg, I think). 

The allotment holders are very friendly (or nosey), although they appeared mostly to be picking and eating, not weeding like us.  (I suppose it’s the time of year, sigh).  Richard gave us an assortment of seeds, suggested onions if we wanted to get something in the ground, and boasted about his strawberries (just finished fruiting).  Two teenage boys locked themselves in a shed, and didn’t come out for a couple of hours.  Muriel and Stephen told us that after years of intensive savoy production, our plot is all cabbaged out, then boasted about their squash and raspberries (STILL picking).  We looked at our bare mud and wished vegetables were faster. 

By 7pm Holly was licking her lead hopefully – even she felt she’d been out long enough.  We sat on our £4 garden chairs and looked at what we’d done.  Then we walked 100ft to the other end of the plot, and squinted hard to try to see the beds we’d done.  Three red hot air balloons passed overhead, and we waved, and ate dark chocolate.  Then we went home for baths and boil-in-the-bag dinner.

On day 2 we went to the garden centre (again).  We taught the parakeet how to wolf-whistle on command.  We asked the fencing man how much it would cost to gravel over 25sqm.  (£150)  Then we filled the car with planks (again), unloaded at the plot, dug a lot more and built another bed, scattered chicken poo on everything that didn’t move, planted onions and garlic, and stretched some 75p netting over the top.  Pretty good for two people who are making it up as they go along, huh?

the wonder of worms

It’s amazing how much worms can eat (and poo).  We have one of these wormeries outside the back door and, no matter how many potato peelings I tip in, the worms keep the level at the same height.  Apple cores, boiled runners, mouldy garlic, grass clippings – those worms love it all.  We can hardly keep up with the unctuous brown feed that drips out (actually, it’s more like a deluge, when I remember to tip and drain).

 The liquid food is doing great things with my dahlias – which were slow and reluctant at first, and are now on a par with the ones grown by the dahlia wizard who lives up the road.  (I hate the green-fingered.)  I suppose if I were of a scientific bent, I would carry out an experiment, feeding some and not others, but life’s too short, and I like flowers too much.

 In case you’re wondering: still no allotment.  I can hardly believe how unenthusiastic those people are to hand over the keys to our much-anticipated new plot.  We keep knocking and asking, and passing on the off-chance, but to no avail.  We have been vaguely promised takeover this weekend (1st Oct) but I’m not loading up the wheelbarrow yet. 

We discovered that we would be inheriting our plot in June.  After a mad flurry of ordering books and creating vegetable spreadsheets (ahem), our sleepless excitement subdued.  We stopped boring our friends and neighbours and we finally stopped boring one another.  We were silenced into waiting.  Now we’re still waiting.  I wonder if this waiting period has been a good thing.  I have forgotten half the stuff about pruning tomatoes and planting onions, but we will be taking an altogether more relaxed and civilised approach: slowly cultivating the parts we need.  After all, we have a whole winter of nothing-growing to dig, read, and twiddle our thumbs.  But… that said… we’re poised for action.  Tools, wheelbarrow, old planks, and seeds at the ready.  That plot will hardly know what hit it.

And oh do we have things to load it with!  Our garden compost bin is full and ready.  We stopped adding to it a few months ago, added some organic speeder-upper, and now it’s all gunky and brown.  Perfect for mixing with other stuff * and slathering onto that neglected old plot.

My shallots are here too, confusingly (I checked: they don’t get planted until spring, which is making me panic: how will I keep them alive until then?).  Rhubarb, blackcurrants, and gooseberries are all on order – and boy, we’d better have a plot by the time they arrive.

*I am so down with the allotment jargon.

How to get an allotment

Some are being sold to housing developers – some are being created from imported soil – some are overgrown, and some are extremely well hidden.  How exactly do you get an allotment?

A plot of land on which to grow vegetables is a British entitlement.  Ever since the war, people were allocated strips of unwanted mud for growing their own.  And now we’re entering a new phase of thrift-for-pleasure (not requirement), suddenly demand has peaked.  Unfortunately, we are also in a phase of housebuilding-for-profit, which is not such good news.  This means that, not only are modern gardens shrinking, but house-developers are slowly eating into our existing garden land.  Allotments are more attractive than ever.

So we knew, as soon as the moving van trucked our extensive collection of garden pots (square ones for parsnips, round ones for runners, shallow ones for strawberries and mint) down to this little village, that an allotment must be the next addition to our land-portfolio.  t took us two years to reach the top of our waiting list.  But don’t let that put you off – at £20 a year, it’s an investment worth paying for.  More than that – it’s your right!

Did you know that, in the UK, local councils are obliged (by law) to provide allotments?  See, I knew we paid council tax for a good reason (lovely green recycling lorries aside).  If yours does not have any, you should round up a group of neighbours and petition them until they agree to build you a lovely new allotment ground.  In Devizes, Wiltshire, existing allotment land has actually been extended by the lovely council, complete with topsoil shipped in from Bournemouth (I don’t know, either), and little boxy sheds (made from ticky-tacky).  (Not really – I have been watching Weeds, which is about a completely different growing culture.)

Well, I’ve said my piece, and I am going to get some coffee now.  Here’s the definitive link for wannabe allotmenteers:
http://www.nsalg.org.uk/#

Welcome to the weedland

This is our new blog.  I will mainly be updating it, with regular interceptions from the junior gardener and the destructive canine.

I thought I should explain the story so far.  We don’t get our hands on the allotment until September, but we are counting down.  We have already made some covert trips to the plot, tried to measure it by paces, and scribbled copious plans (which are currently lying all over the house). 

A little about the plot we’re due to inherit.  It is happily situated in the corner of an allotment field in a village in Devon, where we live.  We are very fortunate to be inheriting this plot (despite the weeds) since it comes complete with its own corner gate, and a splendid car-port (ahem), even if this is presently inhabited by a rusty trailer and other junk.

The plot is on a south-facing slope.  It is also subjected to a LOT of wind, and I’m not talking about the other plot-holders.  It commands fantastic views (especially in winter) across the valley.  There’s no water or electricity, but there is a chestnut-coloured horse living in the field behind our plot.  I have no idea how these factors might contribute to or hinder our success, but they will definitely be blamed for all our failures.