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...

Hi-ho, hi-ho.

I brought this little bundle home from the plot yesterday. I can't wait to see what Mrs. Plotnotes cooks-up with it. I'm hoping for something special after my tea tonight at round about crumble o'clock.

A gift, a flower and a pea-leaf tea-leaf.

I sowed a row of peas two or three weeks ago. I made them pigeon-proof by first covering the seeds with a layer of fleece and then putting a row of prickly pea-sticks on each side of the row. Next, I hung some shiny dangly metal things from a string suspended above the sticks.

Today I lifted the fleece to see whether or not any shoots had emerged. I'm pleased to say that I have had a pretty good germination rate and I now have a row of pea shoots which looks very promising. I took a close-up photo of one of them. I didn't notice at the time but now that I've downloaded the photo I can see that a cheeky uninvited visitor, probably a mouse, has breached my anti-pigeon defences and has taken a bite out of the leaf. So now it looks like the pigeons are not the only pests to contend with.

Other news from the plot today is that one of the rhubarb plants has produced a flower. Guided by the consensus of opinion from an array of gardening books I have removed the flower so that, in theory, growth will now be concentrated on the stalks and not on the flower. The smell from the fresh cut rhubarb, as I removed the flower, was deliciously mouth-watering. It was so good that I could not resist taking a bite out of the flower stalk. To say it was bitter is something of an understatement. It caused a reflex reaction in my mouth which stretched and tightened my lips and forced my tongue to curl and arch and stick out while I ran to the nearest tap for a mouthful of water to sloosh away the bitterness.

Also today I happened to be in the right place at the right time when a local farmer called at the allotment site. He farms a few thousand acres of organic vegetables and he had a very large seed tray containing a couple of hundred broccoli plugs which were surplus to his requirements and free to a good home. I helped myself to two dozen of the little plants and I am now looking forward to harvesting supermarket grade organic broccoli in the coming months. This was quite fortuitous because the calabrese seeds which I have sown at home have failed to germinate.

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.

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.



Rhubarb rhubarb!

Last week I noticed some tasty looking rhubarb stalks appearing on a few allotment plots which reminded me that the three crowns of Timperley Early Rhubarb which I had ordered from Kings in January, for delivery in March, had not arrived and so were now Timperley Late.

I 'phoned Kings. They apologised for overlooking my rhubarb order and promised to dispatch it straight away. At the weekend a parcel of funny looking rhubarb arrived from Kings. I am not a botanist but I examined the evidence and concluded that the specimens they had sent to me were in fact 12 strawberry plants (Cambridge Favourite Variety) and not rhubarb.  I reached this conclusion after reading the leaflet which arrived with the parcel which gave instructions for planting and care of strawberries. The plants were also held together with a tag which was labelled "Cambridge Favourite Strawberry".

After the Bank Holiday weekend I 'phoned Kings again. They apologised for the cock-up and told me to keep the strawberry plants. They will arrange for their wholesaler to send some rhubarb out to me as soon as possible. I have rushed home from work each night this week eager to see if the rhubarb has arrived. Unfortunately the only rhubarb which has been delivered to me has been in the form of letters, leaflets and news-letters from the local parliamentary general election candidates.

I did a bit of work on the plot over the Easter weekend. The vines were planted on Good Friday. I will post some photos when I get a minute. I have also built three small raised beds, one of which now accommodates 12 strawberry plants. The other two small beds will be for rhubarb and asparagus (or possibly pumpkins). I am still waiting for the contractor to construct the three large raised beds which were promised weeks ago and I have not yet set about seeing what can be salvaged from the tangled mess which was previously my greenhouse frame.

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.