Allotment – My Plenty Food Project

Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke

Having only taken over my plot in April I didn’t have much time to research garlic varieties last year & being in a hurry to get something in the ground I just picked up a bag of an unnamed variety in my local garden centre – I did have a crop but nothing to rave about and chose not to save any cloves for replanting. Of course I now realise that I should have had them planted out much earlier and am much better prepared this year.

So back in the autumn I gave it a little more thought although also gave considerations to cost (which I’m not slightly regretting!). Anyway, for a named variety I opted for Lautrec White, a hardneck type, because I’ve never eaten garlic scapes and decided the best way to get some were to grow and harvest my own. Why Lautrec white? Simply because it came across as being one of the best tasting garlics – and taste has to be top of my list of desired features for any crop. I am a little concerned though that it isn’t partial to damp conditions being as my plot was pretty sodden when I took it on – hoping the raised beds I’ve put it will keep it out of the worst of the flooding! My economy purchase was a 500g bag of assorted softneck varieties from Simply Seeds. I thought this way I could sample a number of varieties without being completely overrun – but the downside is I may not be able to identify my favourite post harvest, hence my slight regret. And although not a true garlic I have also planted Elephant garlic – some from Simply Seeds and some other cloves I picked up at the Malvern Autumn show although I omitted to make note of the seller/grower. And finally I have purchased for planting in spring some wilder types of garlic including Crow garlic, allium vineale, from Norfolk Cottage Gardens and Ransoms, allium ursinum, given to me by a friend, Other garlic flavoured plants I already have include garlic chives Allium tuberosum, and society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea.

Elephant garlic

Crow Garlic

Ransoms

Lautrec Wight

Society garlic

I’m looking forward to seeing how they all turn out next year but meanwhile have been reading a little about garlic heritage.

“Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke” – or so said Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller first published in 1594. It seems that garlic has, in the UK, waxed and waned in popularity over the centuries. The fact that the name by which it is widely known originates from the Anglo Saxon word gārlēac, suggests that it was known in Britain from ancient times. (If you are interested in more on the etymology of this and other herbs and spices I can recommend Gernot Katzer’s Spice pages but don’t blame me if you lose yourself in it for a few hours!) Another disliker of garlic was John Evelyn who described it thus in Aceteria: A Discourse of Sallets

Garlick, Allium; Whilſt we abſolutely forbid it entrance into our Salleting, by reaſon of its intolerable Rankneſs, and which made it ſo deteſted of old; that the eating of it was (as we read) part of the Puniſhment for ſuch as had committed the horrid’ſt Crimes. To be ſure, ’tis not for Ladies Palats, nor thoſe who court them, farther than to permit a light touch on the Diſh, with a Clove thereof, much better ſupply’d by the gentler Roccombo

But despite his objection to its use in salads he is apparently credited with being a promoter of ‘enriching salads by rubbing garlic around the dish as the Brahmins did’.

Luckily garlic seems to be undergoing a renaissance, helped by growers in the UK and North America (& elsewhere) who are once again introducing us to the wide range of varieties available to both grow for ourselves or to consume. I’m certainly looking forward to discovering more for myself about the nuances of flavour from those I am trying out in 2019.

PS I came across a great piece of writing about garlic and its cultural and emotional associations in a essay by Stephanie Susnjara published in Creative NonFiction in 2006. It’s available to read on the Jstor website which you can sign up to for free and read a limited number of articles.

Jan/Feb sowings

When it’s cold or wet outside there’s a limit to the amount of time I want to spend on the plot on preparation of beds or other infrastructure projects. And lack of forethought and loss of my polytunnel in the autumn mean that I don’t have a lot to harvest – now limited to cavolo nero, celeriac and parsley! So what other gardening related tasks are there that I can use to distract me from work?

I spent some time cataloguing my seeds (I’m a tad nerdy!) and then decided the best way to store them would be in order of their sowing dates. So I made 12 dividers that would fit into my storage box and dropped in the seed packets in the appropriate month for first sowings. For crops that I want to succession sow as soon as I’ve made a sowing I can just refile the packet in the following month and then it’ll be good to go again.

Last year I didn’t take on my plot until 1st April and had only known for certain a couple of weeks before that I was getting one so my early sowings were both not very early but also a little haphazard and not planned. I was then somewhat thwarted by a very wet April and a badly drained plot so didn’t get the best start. I’m hoping to be more organised this year and ready to go just as soon as I can.

I am a tad nervous about starting seeds in January and February in case they end up too far advanced before the weather is kind enough to plant them out. But hopefully my polytunnel will be finally in place and will provide a temporary home even for those crops destined to be grown outside in my raised beds or borders. But as I’m also nervous at my ability to successfully germinate and grown on young seedlings by starting early it gives me time for second sowings if/when the first ones fail. But one of the main reasons for wanting to start early is simply one of logistics – I don’t (yet!) have any heated propagators so my seedlings live on my kitchen windowsill and my spare bedroom. If I can get some of them ready to move on into the polytunnel or my garden lean-to before the main sowing months of March and April it will ease the pressure on limited space.

So what did I sow in January and have planned for this month?

Seeds for February Sowing

Flowers too

Broad Beans – Karmazyb

Babingon Leek Bulbils

Peppers for sowing in February

Trying out nursery bags instead of plastic pots

January sowings:

Babington’s Leeks
Leeks – Musselburgh, Stocky F1
Aubergine – Rosa Bianca and Black Beauty
Goji Berries
Kale – KX-1
Caucasian Spinach/Hablitzia Taminoides
Peas – Kent Blue, Charmette

February sowings:

Peppers – California Wonder, Unicorn, Grueso de Plaza, Bendigo
Chilli Peppers – Padron, Early Jalapeno, Hungarian Wax
Tomato – Brandywine Black, Purple Ukraine, Chadwick Cherry, Iraqi Heart-shaped, Green Zebra
Hops
Peas – Kent Blue, Roi des Conserves
Broad Bean – Karmazyn
Red Orach
Broccoli Raab
Celeriac – Monarch, Giant Prague
Shoo Fly Plant
Tiger Nuts
Parsnip – student (trying these in loo roll inners)
Welsh Onion
Crow Garlic
Beef & Onion Plant (Toona Sinensis)
Asparagus
Flowers – Aquilegia, Hollyhock, Echinacea, Cosmos, Zinnia

Most of the above are destined to be grown to fruition (hopefully!) on my allotment plot but some will go into pots in my garden. My front garden is very neglected and is mainly covered with small slates so not much growing. I’d like to get some more pots of flowers and maybe even some edibles out there too.

When it comes to sowing seeds I am still unsure as to how many to sow. I am still (overly?) enthusiastic about trying out lots of different varieties and hopefully giving myself an all-year harvest. So I may only want to grow small numbers of each type of plant but it seems hard to only sow 3 or 4 seeds of each type. So I’m not going mad with vast numbers of seeds but am probably growing more than I need if they do all germinate and grow on to suitable plants for planting out. But my intention would be to pass on to fellow allotmenteers & other growers. I may even get some swaps – and then have to try and squeeze them. But all that’s looking ahead. For now I’m just feeling content starting to see my windowledges filling up and the first few shoots from my January sowings.

Aubergine Rosa Bianca

Garlic chives

A growing addiction?

Laid up with a bad back recently (an unfortunate cycling-related injury – something went twang as I stood up after locking it up!) I decided to have a go at sorting out my seeds. Before I knew it I had opened up Access and was putting together my very own seed inventory and database – how nerdy is that? I was somewhat horrified to discover that I had over 120 types of seeds – is this usual?

I did only take on an allotment in April last year so I seem to have accumulated these packets in a fairly short space of time. And they don’t include the empty packets from varieties that I grew and used up all the seed this year. So where did they all come from? And what am I going to do with them all? Surely I can’t find space to grow that many varieties – and if every seed was viable I would have enough for a large market garden.

In my defence I didn’t buy all of them. My neighbour gave me quite a number of packets surplus to her requirements – many of them ‘free gifts’ with various gardening magazines. They were either varieties she didn’t like or types of vegetables that she had no interest in growing. I’ve had a few given me as presents – including a couple from my son after visits to a Cornish garden and Kew gardens. And they do include some seeds I saved myself last year – including two types of tomato I grew in the garden, pepper seeds from a green pepper my neighbour gave me to taste, french, runner and field beans I harvested on the allotment and several types of squash from fruit I’ve purchased from my local farmers’ market. But the majority I have bought myself either online from a variety of seed companies including small independents such as Real Seeds, Incredible Vegetables, Tamar Organics and Norfolk Cottage Gardens; or from garden centres and some bargains from the Malvern Autumn Show. Plus my six choices and a surprise freebie from my first selection from the Heritage Seed Library.

As I’ve added each type of seed to the database I have also been allocating space to the crop on my garden-planner. And adding the particular variety and any notes about it to the plant list. I intend to use the growing chart the planner produces as I probably couldn’t produce anything as good, let alone better, from my own database.

I’m reconfiguring some of the layout of my plot to allow for the hopeful restoration and resiting of the polytunnel and in the hope that I will finally get my shed erected. And I am trying to use the data about planting and harvesting dates to make some sensible decision about succession planting to make the most of the space and number of beds I have available. But trying to find suitable spaces for the sheer numer of varieties I really want to try is proving challenging! And I do have a nagging question at the back of my brain about how many vegetables I can actually eat! And fairly soon I will have to face the very vexed question of just where am I going to find space to get these seeds started – they’re not all going to fit on my kitchen window sill 😉

Is this normal – or am I becoming a secret hoarder of seeds? Am I making a newbie error behaving like a kid in a sweetie shop? Will I regret the error of my ways when I start looking closely at the sow-by dates? Answers on a postcard please….. 😉

Giving peas a chance…

For someone that doesn’t normally eat a lot of peas I seem to suddenly have a lot in my seed stash for planting in 2019. I do have childhood memories of eating peas straight out of the pods on my Mum’s allotments and enjoying them this way much more than eating them cooked and served with my Sunday lunch a couple of hours later. In later life shelling them seemed to be a bit of a faff and why bother when you could either have mange tout or sugar snaps – or frozen peas. And I do like a tub of mushy peas with my fish ‘n’ chips 😉

I didn’t have much success this year – possibly due to the hot weather – with the varieties I grew: Charmette (dwarf petit pois), Rosakrone (tall) and Golden Sweet (Mange tout), all from Real Seeds. The latter was particularly attractive though and did crop for a long time even though I indulged my inner child and very few pods made it home 😉 I still have seeds of all these varieties left over and will give them all another try.

Parsley Pea

Charmette

Roi des Conserves

Kent Blue

Doug Bray of Grimsby

Rosakrone

To these I have added Roi des Conserves from D T Brown. This is a tall variety and as the name suggests is for canning or for saving as dried peas. I was also taken by a couple of varieties on offer through the Heritage Seed Library: Kent Blue, which can be eaten as a mange-tout or allowed to mature; and Parsley pea, which produces a mass of tendrils and so I will be growing primarily for pea-shoots. And then to add to my collection the ‘freebie’ surprise packet of seeds from the HSL was yet another pea! Doug Bray of Grimsby is another tall variety producing regular peas.

So a variety of types which should give me a continuous harvest for several months – and will also provide some beautiful flowers to rival some of my neighbours sweet peas with the bonus of an edible crop too 🙂

STOP PRESS:

My first order from Hodmedod came this week and I must have had peas on the brain because amongst the items I ordered are a selection of pea related lovelies: Tinned and dried Carlin peas, Kabuki marrowfat peas, roasted peas (horseradish flavoured!) and yellow pea flour. I shall probably have a go at sprouting (& possibly growing on ) the marrowfat and Carlin peas just to see what happens. Watch this space!

An unproductive November

A combination of poor weather, a cold, a trip to London (on the best weekend of the month!) and a bad back have all contributed to a less than productive month on my plot. I have barely been there to do anything but have made a couple of quick raids to see if there was anything worth harvesting. And have been rewarded by still harvesting assorted lettuce leaves, oriental greens, kale, a couple of small cabbages, a romanesco cauliflower and finally last week the oca. I was disappointed by both the size of the oca harvest and the individual tubers. Not sure if it was the dry summer or maybe the hastily built raised bed and poor compost they were planted in. Will try again next year as I do think they are a tasty crop – my daughter got hold of these and turned them into a surprisingly good vegan curry.

Oca Harvest – Nov 2018
White Romanesco

With help from fellow allotmenteers plus my daughter and her boyfriend I finally managed to move the shed I had purchased in the allotment auction way back in June on to my plot. But I still have some issues to resolve before I feel confident about erecting it. There’s a vacant half-plot next to mine covered in brambles and I was asked to leave space at the top of my plot to allow access for the council to get across with machinery to remove them and rotavate the plot (personally I think this is a recipe for disaster!) and the route across would be just where I want to site the shed. I’ve also learnt that a new drain is to be put in across the top of my plot. And none of this work is scheduled to take place until February at the earliest so somewhat thwarted at the moment.

Shed moving
Shed stacked up

The Polytunnel Saga – a salutary lesson

When I first took on my plot the only structures I’d envisaged were a shed, raised beds, a compost bin and a wigwam for my beans. But surveying the neighbouring plots I soon discovered that almost everyone had numerous other structures – hoop tunnels in all shapes and sizes, greenhouses and polytunnels. And very soon my shopping list started getting longer. Which was a bit of a problem as my earnings – and hence my budget – seemed to be shrinking rapidly.

But as luck would have it our allotment association was organising an auction of unwanted items from plots that had, or were being, vacated as part of the downsizing programme. And I had my eye on one of several sheds – and then my heart skipped a little beat when I discovered that there was also a polytunnel up for grabs! I was actually out of the country during the auction but my neighbour had offered to bid for me on anything on my wishlist. And when I got back I discovered she’d managed to get everything on my list (shed, polytunnel, water butts and canes – and I had money back too!

Polytunnel

Shed

I then had many sleepless nights trying to work out how to move the shed and polytunnel several hundred metres across the site to my plot. The shed has actually yet to be moved although I have had help to dismantle it and if we can get the allotment trailer mobile this task should be accomplished next weekend. But a few weeks ago I was able to get the critical mass of people together to shift the tunnel without having to dismantle it.

So a mix of family and new allotment friends all grabbed a bit of tunnel and with my brother-in-law directing us we set off around the site like some giant green caterpillar. You can see what I mean by watching the video – and, as I find it far too upsetting to write about (boo hoo!) do watch to the end to see what happened in high winds, just a few weeks after the triumphant installation of my new pride and joy 😉 The joy was definitely short-lived although I am still hoping to be able to salvage something from the wreckage.

And the lesson to be learned? Take note of your neighbouring plotholders who warn you how strong the winds can blow across the exposed site – and always dig in your polytunnel covers before there’s a storm warning!

Planning a perennial garden

Tackling the brambles - this will be site of my mini-food-forest

I’m inherently quite lazy so much as I am enjoying gardening I want to be able to work towards making my allotment plot as self- as possible. And I, hopefully not too naively, think that my approach can fit with ways of growing that make best use of natural resources, are organic and work with, rather than against nature. So yes I believe that no-dig gardening methods as espoused by Charles Dowding will be just as productive, if not more so, than traditional methods of digging and double-digging. And at the same time I don’t have to exert myself too much other than mulching and compost-making. It will also be kinder to my back.

By the same token, it seems to make sense to grow a wide range of perennials, or self-seeding annuals, and reduce the amount of time (& space) on sowing, pricking out, growing on and planting out. There are rules on my allotment about the number of trees etc that can be planted so whilst I don’t think I’d get away with turning my whole plot over to forest gardening I am planning on using some permaculture ideas on at least a small corner of my plot – once I’ve tackled the brambles which are currently encroaching from the vacant pot next door. More of a shrubbery or hedgerow garden than a fullscale forest garden but we all have to start somewhere! So I’m currently keeping my eye out for bargain perennials and working on my design which I hope to be able to implement over the next year or so – as finances and time allow.

Asparagus Connover’s Collossal

Currants – white & red plus Rasberry canes

Prostrate rosemary

Daubenton Kale – plain & variegated

Poire Melon & Blood red Sorrel

Traditionally a food forest has seven layers starting at the top with the canopy layer of large fruit and nut trees down through a low tree level, shrub level, herbaceous layer, ground cover, rhizosome/root layer and vertical climbers or vines. I think I’ll have to dispense with large trees but am planning on trying for 6 layers. So something along these lines at the moment forming both an edible hedgerow along two sides plus filling in an area close to my shed and surrounding a planned wildlife pond (which may also contain some edibles).

Low tree layer – dwarf or cordon apple & plum trees, szechuan pepper
Shrub layer – Black and red currants, gooseberries, chokeberries (aronia), sea buckthorn (nitrogen fixing)
Herbaceous layer – liquorice, perennial kale, rhubarb, Egyptian walking onions, comfrey, borage, sorrels, herbs eg feverfew, lemon balm, asparagus?
Ground cover – strawberries, ramsons
Root layer – Skirrett? Groundnuts? Jerusalem artichoke?
Vines – hops

So how far have I got? A rough plan I’m playing with on my garden planner, a couple of plants in pots, a few plants on my plot which may need to be relocated, some sown seeds and others waiting for sowing/planting in spring – and a growing wishlist!

Lasagna Gardening

Since I took the decision right from the start to concentrate on no-dig raised beds I have struggled to find (affordable for me!) sources of growing medium. Each of my pallet-collar raised beds is 1.2m x 1m and to get a depth of even 20 cm (8″) requires 240 litres. So even using the cheapest bagged compost I’ve found – Care Compost made from Birmingham’s Green waste by Jack Moody of Wolverhampton and bought from the wonderful Martineau Gardens at £2 per 40 litre bag – it costs £12 per bed. And that doesn’t include the cost of car hire for me to fetch it – or the bus fare to go and collect the car!

I’ve also had half a load of manure from a local horse stables – it was in May and had to share with my neighbour as it was the last they had before the autumn. £35 per load delivered (c. 3 tonnes) so pretty good value for money – but I need more! And I found someone with manure from their horses in a field a few miles away. I had to dig into the mound and bag it up myself but it was free! However the digging and lugging of about 10 bags put my back out and I was incapacitated for a week. And although well-rotted it turned out to be full of grass seed just lurking and awaiting to sprout a couple of weeks after I planted out my leeks in it.

I have been making my own compost with slightly mixed results so far. My first compost bin was not up to scratch and the slats kept breaking so I’ve now dismantled it – and I’ve yet to rebuild one from the pallets I’ve scrounged. Instead I’ve been throwing everything into a large dumpy bag and trying to mix it as best I can. I haven’t achieved the temperatures I would have liked for initial ‘cooking’ of the compost but its got loads of worms in which are doing their stuff. I’ve used some compost from here to top up my early beds after their first harvest before replanting.

Worrying that I wasn’t going to be able to get hold of much more manure from the usual allotment supplier this autumn – and other sources costing much more – and still having lots more beds to get filled before next spring I decided I needed a different approach. On a day out I’d driven past some bagged up (fresh) horse manure by the side of the road at £1 per bag and managed to squeeze 6 in the back of the hire car. So instead of piling it up to leave it to mature or even adding it to my compost bin I’ve split it across 3 of my beds as a layer in what will become lasagna (or lasagne) beds. Starting with a base layer of cardboard or newspaper to suppress perennial weeds I’m now layering up with alternating green and brown layers to strive to get a good carbon:nitrogen mix. So pretty similar to compost-making but doing it right in the bed rather than the compost heap – making lasagna beds is also known as sheet-composting.

There’s a lot of confusion about C:N ratios and greens:browns and what materials are brown and green. I’m not slavishly following any ‘recipe’ but using what I have to hand or can get my hands on and now seems like a good time of year to be doing it. Brown materials include woodchip and autumn leaves whilst fresh manure is considered to be green. Other greens I’ve used so far include my cleared bean and tomato plants – plus a load of nasturtiums and windfall apples I found on the communal compost heap (normally reserved for those things that no-ones to compost in their own heaps!). A few barrow loads of wood chips have so far formed the brown layers – burrowing into the communal pile to find the previous load that was dropped there which was from deciduous trees and included leaves whilst the top layers are from chopped conifers and may be a bit resinous/acidic. I’m using those for my paths.

Greens from bean & tomato plants

Browns and greens

So I’m layering it up and watering each layer well and to the beds above I’ve since added a layer of semi-composted material from my compost bin. I’ve covered them over with black polythene to see if it will ‘cook’ the mix and bump-start the breakdown whilst there’s still some warmth in the air. Although I’m slightly concerned about cooking the many worms I introduced from the compost! I assume they’ll have the sense to move to cooler parts of the bed if it warms up too much 😉

As I get hold of more material I’ll keep layering up more beds and letting nature and the winter weather do its stuff. When it gets to spring my plan is to top off with a layer of brought in compost for seed sowing or adding to planting holes for plants. Now my main task is to go on the hunt for as much organic material as I can source for free – I’ve already got friends and neighbours giving me their last lawn mowings and saving me their swept up leaves. And the money I save on buying in tonnes of compost I can spend on more seeds and plants…..:-)

Oh dear – it’s been a while……

So much for my good intentions to write regular blog posts about my allotment adventures over the summer! It’s not that I haven’t written anything but its been in my personal journal and not for public consumption – apart from the occasional tweet. So for the record and to catch up I’ll try and summarise what’s happened over my first 6 months on my plot.

April –

New compost bin

Bokashi bin

Seeds

1st pallet collar raised beds

Germination

Mulching weeds

Windowsill seedlings

Frustrating first month as waited for ground to dry out, weather to warm up, seedlings to germinate and to find a source of ‘cheap’ manure/compost. But the seeds did germinate and I had them all over the house on window ledges and in my shed. Assiduously labelled everything and enjoyed watching them grow. But quite a few got bit too leggy and spindly before conditions were good enough and I had some beds set up to plant them out. Constantly on search for more cardboard as mulch as I gradually used up all of my stores from the house move. Failed to stick to my plan – carefully drawn up in my garden planner.

Positives – found good source of pallet collars for raised beds. Also tracked down Care Compost for £2 per bag and eventually got hold of the manure man. And most seeds did OK.

Negatives – V disappointed with cheap(!) compost bin I had bought – thought it wouldn’t last (I was right!)

May –

Loading manure into bed

Field beans

1st rustic bean frame

Chitting oca

Tractor delivery

Scorzonera?

Lovely stuff!

1st bed planted – gooseberries, strawberries with wool fleece protection

Mad rush to get everything planted out and established before my trip to Canada at end of month. Financially strapped so couldn’t afford to splash out on enough compost etc so got fewer beds planted up than planned but manure man had eventually put in an appearance – delivery by tractor! Made a start with adding woodchip to paths between beds – with son’s help. First bed planted with free strawberry plants and gooseberry bushes from a Handsworth allotment by way of Gumtree. Constructed some bean wigwams for runners and french beans. Field beans planted out too.

Positives – definite signs of progress and v pleased to actually see some plants in the ground.

Negatives – shortage of compost/money! Huge storms at end of month put paid to some plans before holiday.

June =

First half I was in Seattle/Vancouver whilst kids looked after my plot! Did do a bit of horticultural tourism – a visit to University of British Columbia Farm for the Farmer’s Market and tour of their sustainable farm which was great. Worthy of a whole blog itself but a few pics will have to suffice.

UBC Farmers Market

UBC Farm Tour

Came home mid-month into a heatwave which was to continue for next couple of months or more. Son had done watering and most seedlings had survived but there were a few casualties – notably courgettes and squash which had disappeared completely. A & R had also gone ahead and used pallets I’d left to build a compost bin – not quite the design – or the position – I’d anticipated but I appreciated the gesture 🙂 Its proved useful since for several things but not yet making compost!

I’d missed the allotment auction but my neighbour T had bid on my behalf and I discovered I was now the proud owner of an 8×8 shed and a 20ft long polytunnel:-)

Shed

Polytunnel

Field Beans

Positives – great holiday! Excited by shed & polytunnel

Negatives – loss of courgettes & squash etc. Weeds! Sleepless nights trying to work out how to move shed and polytunnel.

July –

Field Beans

Beetroot

Carrots

Velvet Queen – a stunner

More beans

1sr French beans – Cosse violette

Leeks

Onions – Red Baron

Potatoes in woodchip

Manure with worms

Well this is when I really started to see results! Real actual harvests! From tiny seeds germinating on my windowsill back in the cold of spring to harvesting radish, onions, potatoes, carrots and beans in the heat of summer. This felt like success. But was still struggling to get my replanted courgettes & squash going and was on to my third unsuccessful sowing of lettuce. And there were some other casualties too – achocha, brassicas looking very peaky and most of my raspberry canes had all succumbed to heat or insects.

Positives – harvests and my beautiful Velvet Queen sunflowers

Negatives – hours of watering, crop losses and still those sleepless nights working out the logistics of moving shed & polytunnel!

August –

Aidan & me

Propping upthe beans – again!

Tree spinach

Bergamot

Digging trench for the polytunnel

Bee friendly sunflower

Tackling the brambles – this will be site of my mini-food-forest

A little helping hand with clearing brambles

Fermenting purple french beans

Chinese Gooseberry in the garden

Summer gloriousness of Velvet Queen

Chinese gooseberry

The heatwave continued unabated and lots of time still spent on watering. Some things still looked peaky – brassicas very motheaten (probably literally!) but decided not to uproot in the hope they’d perk up and I hadn’t got any plants to replace them with anyway! Still very little progress with the courgettes/squash and sweetcorn very slow. But lots of purple french beans (Cosse Violette) so had a go at fermenting some with OK results even if they lost their colour.

Having acquired blackcurrants from my neighbour’s plot in July this month I found plums & damsons on trees at the margin of our site – and apples in the communal ‘orchard’ – they found their way into crumbles and gin. And sheltering from a sudden deluge in one of my neighbours many structures I made good use of my time and helped myself to a couple of bags of her blackberries (with permission of course!) Good size but flavour not so good as wild brambles.

Had a helping hand from son and we made an impact on tackling a lot of weeds and brambles at top of plot and covered over to prevent further growth. Plan to put shed and move compost bin up here. After some rain we also managed to dig out the polytunnel I’d bought and my sister then helped dig out a couple of trenches around the space where it was going to go on my plot.

Positives: Clearing weeds, harvesting, and general progress

Negatives: Clearing weeds and sleepless nights thinking about the polytunnel!

September –

Month started very well with the moving of the polytunnel:

And then there was even some planting in the polytunnel:

But then we had the first of the named UK storms – Storm Ali – and this was the result:

Oh dear! I hadn’t completed the job of digging in the polythene cover – but it seemed sturdy enough and had been weighted down either side so I couldn’t imagine it moving very far. But the day I went to tackle the digging in ahead of impending storm Bronagh I walked down the path and suddenly realised I couldn’t see it behind my neighbours’ runner beans as I approached. It simply wasn’t there – and at first glance it wasn’t anywhere in sight at all. It was only after I’d walked up to the top of my plot that I spotted in in the distance having come to rest against someone’s compost bin right up against the boundary trees. I managed to get the cover off – surprisingly appearing to be in one piece with only a couple of small tears in the ventilation mesh – and stashed away. The frame appeared pretty mangled on first view but at the time of writing I have a plan to salvage it if possible with the help of Dave on my neighbouring plot. So all may not be lost just yet!

September wasn’t completely a failure – I discovered that where allotment growing is concerned patience really is a virtue! I finally harvested my first courgettes, lettuce, broccoli and kale. But can’t claim the tromboncino – that was from Kings Norton Farmers’ Market.

Yellow courgettes

Tree spinach next to oca

Morton’s Secret Lettuce Mix

Pink tresses on sweetcorn

Mizuna seedlings

First courgette 🙂

Tromboncino – from farmer’s market

Mange tout with flowers

And the month – and my first six months of being allotmenteer ended with a real treat. No! – not my Allotment Association AGM at which my election as treasurer at an earlier EGM was confirmed 😉 But a trip with my sister to the Malvern Autumn Show – an absolute delight.