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.

Shaping up for year two.

I would have liked to have dug the plot over in February ready for sowing and planting over the next few months. I did try but really it was too wet. I prepared a bean bed which consisted of a couple of trenches lined with horse manure and then back filled with soil and home-made compost. I also created a small bed on part of last years potato patch into which I have put onion sets. Then it rained and in no time the bean bed had become a bean swamp and a moat had formed around the onion bed.

The area behind the greenhouse has been under water for a couple of months and is unusable for anything other than as a muddy allurement to my youngest daughter and her friends. My long term plan is to put a shed behind the greenhouse. This will need to go on a raised platform. A South-East Asian style shed on stilts might be more appropriate.  February was really a bit of a wash out. For much of the time digging was counter productive. I couldn't walk on the soil without sinking into it and compacting it. Wherever I walked I left a trail of muddy puddles rather than footprints.

March, however, has been much better. The bottom end of the plot is still quite soggy but over the last two weekends the plot has been transformed. It has been weeded and dug-over and the beds for this years crops have been marked out. At times this has meant cordoning-off the beds and then, so as to avoid walking on them and compacting the soil, working on hands and knees from outside the beds, reaching in to the beds to extract weeds and dig over the soil with a trowel before scattering a layer of well rotted horse manure on to the surface.

I have also tidied-up, weeded and manured the strawberry and asparagus beds, weeded the rhubarb bed and I have dug-over the pumpkin bed and buried a layer of rotting kitchen waste under it. I have sown a row of carrot seeds in a raised bed and put onion sets and garlic in one of the other raised beds. I think the whole plot is starting to take on a "ready for Spring" look rather than a "tired of Winter" appearance.

At the end of last year I asked my daughters if there was anything that I had not grown which they would like me to have a go at this year. Unanimously they suggested peas. I think they like the idea of being able to pick them and eat them straight from the pods when they visit the plot. So, new for this year, I have put in a row of Kelvedon Wonder peas and I will sow some more over the coming weeks. I have protected them from frost with a layer of fleece and I have used prunings from garden shrubs, which did not survive the winter frosts, as pea-sticks which will hopefully deter the local fat feral pigeon population from feasting on the peas before my daughters can get to them.

The rhubarb continues to push through and is starting to provide some welcome colour on the plot. All of last years crowns have survived the winter and I'm looking forward to my first rhubarb crumble of the year. I have not forced the rhubarb this year. I think the crowns are probably still too young to be forced but next year I will see if I can force an early crop.

My leeks, which have never looked anything other than pale, thin and pathetic, now suddenly seem to be greening up and thickening up. A few times I have been close to pulling them up and chucking them onto the compost heap but now they are more likely to end up on the dinner table in the next few weeks.

Out of 24 purple sprouting brocolli plants which were looking big strong and healthy in November only two of them have survived the arctic winter conditions and the daily banqueting of the pigeons. One of them has a few florets which I think will soon be ready for picking. I have transplanted the two survivors into a raised bed. I hope that after all they've been through this doesn't kill them off but I needed to move them so that I could prepare my potato bed ready for planting in early April.

I have found that one way to get the plot dug over without ruining the structure of the soil with my size 12 wellies is to make use of an eager light-weight volunteer.

I even managed to sit in the greenhouse, put my feet up and have a nice cuppa whilst my young apprentice got on with the digging. It was very relaxing....until she spotted me.