Harvesting this month - March

Swiss Chard



Swiss chard is something most people think of as a summer vegetable - but if you make a late sowing, in around late July or August, you can overwinter it and the result is a really tasty filler for the hungry gap.

The white-stemmed chard might not be quite as pretty as ruby chard (ruby red stems and purple leaves) or the extraordinary multicoloured 'Bright Lights' (yellow, purple, green, white, pink and orange stems all on the same plant) - but I think it has a charm of its own, and what's more it's said to have by far the best flavour. Now, I can't testify to that first-hand, never having eaten either ruby or multicoloured chard; but I do know that this stuff has given us some really delicious eating.

It's a very forgiving plant and will just keep on growing and growing whatever the weather (and you) throw at it. It'll take a degree of neglect, and it's a cut-and-come-again crop, which means you can pick off the outer leaves several times in one season so long as you don't take the central crown. If there ever was an easy-to-grow vegetable, this is it.

You cook chard in two stages: the stems, and then the leaves. The stems take about 10 minutes to steam, and the leaves between 3 and 5; so if you put the stems in first, and add the leaves a couple of minutes before the end, you can have a combined dish. Or just eat them separately: the leaves behave and taste just like spinach, while the stems can be eaten as a celery substitute, or stir-fried, or just sauteéd in a little butter and served up as a side dish.

Snowed in

Well, that was just about the worst Easter I can remember. There I was, poised with chitted new potatoes ready to go, and the snow started to fall. And kept on falling.

It's bitter cold weather like this that has me grinding my teeth in frustration. I almost always succumb and start sowing seeds far earlier (which means in colder weather) than I should do. I've got a bit wise to this and am now armed with assorted cloches, fleece and bubblewrap to cover the seedlings with, but I expect given this awful weather I shall have some failures again. It always seems as though delays will kibosh all your best-laid plans, and there will never be time to catch up - mostly of course this doesn't happen at all, and you still end up with a full allotment by June, but it's hard to find that thought very convincing right now.

Taking cover

When the weather's at its worst - and let's face it, it has been for the last week or so - this is where I retreat to.

It's my greenhouse, technically speaking not on the allotment but in my back garden. I did experiment with raising seeds in my allotment greenhouse, but I couldn't reliably get up there often enough and lost a lot when the weather turned warm.

So these days I sow dozens of trays of seedlings where I can keep an eye on them - as you can see, it's almost full and the sowing season hasn't really got into top gear yet! I have no idea where I'm going to put the seeds I intend to sow next week. I've already decided to direct-sow more than I usually do this year - leeks, for example, carrots and broad beans have been deemed tough enough to fend for themselves out on the plot. But most veg I raise in modules simply because that way, you can stop most things eating them, keep an eye on watering and growing rates and generally mollycoddle them until they're big enough to look after themselves.

Another somewhat overlooked benefit of greenhouses is that you can retreat in there in rainy weather, so you can carry on allotment gardening even in the worst of downpours. Essential equipment, I'd say - I just need a bigger one!

It's a mucky business

I visited my compost bins for the first time this season today, and to my horror realised the one I'm filling is miles from the top, and I've already used up all the rotted stuff from last year. My third one is empty altogether, and growing a healthy crop of nettles through the bottom.

I'm not sure how I came to neglect my composting to quite this extent, as I'm usually an excessively enthusiastic composter - to the point of obsession. I suppose what with all this rain it hasn't exactly been conducive to barrowing muck around, so the best it's got is flinging the odd vegetable trimming over the side. Not really enough to sustain a composting system at full throttle.

No longer, though. We are lucky enough to be next to a stable at the allotment, but unlucky enough for it to be a stable which uses wood shavings, like most of the ones around here (I used to bed my horse on straw when I was a kid - whatever happened to make everyone change to shavings?) Wood shavings are fine in principle, but I find that when they're applied as a mulch they're far too acid - I've lost the crops through stem rots to prove it. Instead, I make sure it's been in the compost bin for a good six months, mixed in with lots of other things like grass clippings, veggie trimmings and annual weeds, before I use it.

So I went and fetched a big barrow of the stuff today and upended it into the compost bin. I'm about to open up a new bed on the allotment, which means taking off a good chunk of turf, so I'll pitch that onto the compost heap next, followed by another layer of muck. It won't take much of that before I'm back to full strength - but I won't get the benefit until autumn, so in the meantime I've got to think of another solution.

Grafted tomatoes

One of the nicer things about being a garden writer is that you get the occasional freebie. The latest has given me an interesting experiment to do - the nice people at Suttons have sent me one of their grafted tomato plants, along with a non-grafted one, to let me see what the difference is.

I first came across grafted tomatoes at their stand at the Garden Press Event in London earlier this year. I have to confess I am very sceptical: it strikes me as really a very fiddly way to produce tomatoes, which seem to do perfectly well on their own stems most of the time, so why you would want to go to the silliness of cutting the top off one tomato plant and grafting it onto a more vigorous rootstock is beyond me.

Well, they say it produces plants that are twice as vigorous and produce twice as many tomatoes, that's why. Oh, and it makes them a bit more money if they can convince everyone else of that - since by definition, you can only buy grafted tomatoes as ready-made plants.

Time will tell. I have to say I'm a little suspicious that the two plants I was sent were already (as you can see from the pictures) rather different in size: but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief there, as of course plants do catch up with each other quite quickly this time of year. What I have found is that I felt I had to give the grafted plant (on the right in the picture) extra support, in the shape of a little stick up the side, as the stem was long and rather lax, so I feared that it would break at the graft. I may be entirely over-cautious here, though, and it might have managed fine without it.

I'll be reporting back in due course!

Knowing your onions

Don't tell anyone, but I'm not all that good at growing onions. Not yet, anyway. I love them, and we eat loads of them, so I keep trying and I'm getting better at it every year - but the results always seem to be disappointing.

The first year I tried Sturon, which are supposed to be nice and round and store really well. Unfortunately I didn't realise that year that you're supposed to keep onions religiously weeded - they can't stand competition. So I got a tiny crop of very little onions (they were nice and round, anyway....) Tried again, same variety, in the second year, kept them a little better weeded but still they were quite small.

Last year I decided the variety was the problem and tried a whopper, Stuttgarter Giant, which are meant to be show onion sized. They have flat bulbs, which I wasn't too keen on - I find them annoying to chop when you're cooking - but I figured if they were big enough it wouldn't matter.

Well... they looked very nice, golden brown and really not a bad size. But exhibition-worthy they were not. I even kept them beautifully weeded, all summer. It might have been the very wet, sun-free summer we had last year: or it might have been that the soil up at the lottie just isn't quite good enough for them yet.

So, on to this year. I'm steering away from the posh flat onion types and gone back to bog-standard, with a variety called Setton. It's actually closely related to Sturon, so has the same uniformly round bulbs, but apparently the yield is heavier. I shall still keep it well weeded, but will try feeding and mulching this year too and see if that works.

I will crack this one day, if it takes me another ten years in the trying!

Harvesting this month - February

Sprout tops

How's this for a bucketful of brassicas?

I cleared my brussels sprouts bed today, and this is what I came home with. Sprout tops, the cabbagey bits on top of the sprout plants, are delicious dark-green greens which are fabulously good for you. They have a really strong, earthy taste that tastes great with traditional Sunday roasts and also stir-fries very well. You can also cook them by dunking them whole in a pan of water flavoured with a knob of butter and some garlic, salt and pepper - simmer for 6-8 minutes and you have a real chef's delight.

These ones were Trafalgar - the sprouts were a bit disappointing, to be honest, as they didn't have the best of sites. The bed gets a bit too shaded by the shed, and the soil is a bit poor, too. But what we missed on the sprouts, we've more than made up for on the tops. We'll never chuck our old sprout plants on the compost again.

Mousey mayhem

Tragedy... up at the allotment first thing this morning, and a scene of devastation met my eyes. Along with the November-sown broad beans I put in the other week, I had also tried an early sowing of Meteor peas, raised just the same under glass and overwintered, then hardened off and planted out. They were doing just fine - but then the mousies got them.

They've been chewed right down to the ground, beyond all hope of recovery. It's just so heartbreaking when this kind of thing happens - you try your hardest, nurture things lovingly, only for them to meet a grisly end.

Well, there's nothing for it: I shall have to start again. And remember, in future, to apply proper protection against mice even when the peas have already germinated into young plants.

Last year I tried holly prunings, which seemed to work quite well, though then the slugs got a lot of the plants anyway: then there are other little tricks I've heard of, like plastic snakes left among the plants (wouldn't like to risk my baby peas with that one though).

I've tried conventional humane traps: the mice just laughed at them. I reckon they held open the gate with their feet while feasting on the peanut butter inside. I also tried unconventional "humane" traps - plastic long toms (very tall pots) sunk into the ground, some bait in the bottom so that the mice fall in and can't get out. These trapped mice, all right, but they had an alarming tendency to drown if it was raining (which it was, a lot, last year). Not very humane, then.

Last resort is the good old-fashioned mousetrap - I'm trying to avoid it, but it's beginning to seem like there's not much option...

And... we're off!

At last, it's seed-sowing time again. After the long, wet, cold winter, there's hope in my heart and compost in my seed trays, and here's just one of the little babies poking their heads up bravely to see what the world's all about.

I get hopelessly sentimental about sowing seeds. It's the start of a new season; laden with hope, innocent of all the disasters to come. There's a sense of adventure, of stepping out into the unknown: who knows what will happen to this little cabbage seedling, so safe in my greenhouse for the moment - it could end up scoffed by slugs... flooded by spring rains... pecked at by pigeons... or (and of course this is the hope I cherish) burgeoning to beautiful cabbage-y perfection so I can enjoy it on my plate.

This is my early sowing date, so brassicas feature highly. I've sown savoy cabbage and two kinds of brussels sprouts - one early, one late, to extend the cropping season to the max. Parsnips, the first carrot sowing and the first batch of salad leaf are also coming up. And I've been in the habit of sowing my Mediterranean veg at this time of year, too - you need a frost-free greenhouse to do this successfully, but since I had electricity installed last autumn this is getting less risky and more profitable every year. So I also have three big pots of tomato seedlings, five melon seedlings (!) and three cucumber seedlings putting on growth almost as you watch them. The sweet peppers and aubergines are in the propagator, and won't be far behind.

First planting of the year

Remember those broad beans I sowed last year?

Well this morning I got my first chance to pop down to the allotment for weeks - the floodwaters are finally subsiding a little and the rain has slowed to a fine drizzle. So I took the chance to plant out those little broad beans, now 6" high plants and just the perfect size for putting outside. Turns out that a mid-November sowing was just right, even though we have had a relatively mild winter - they haven't flopped like last year's and are looking like two rows of little soldiers waiting to do their stuff.

Can't wait till harvest! Roll on summer, that's what I say.

The waters are rising...

About this time of year, things get distinctly soggy up at the allotment. This is typical: the last trench of the bed I'm double-digging at the moment, about a spade's depth and dry when I left it, but a day later the water table is high enough to fill it from underneath.

I've also got soup-plates attaching to my wellies every time I go in there, and I keep having to take days off because the soil is simply too wet to work. It does it no good in any case - as soon as you tread on soggy soil you squeeze out the air pockets, compacting it so that when it dries out it becomes a hard pan that nothing will grow in (and which is murder to cultivate).

Luckily though my allotment has a split personality: on one side (the lower side - particularly the end that's towards the middle of the site) it gets like this very very quickly in the year - that's where the double-dug bed in the picture is sited. At the other end, on the left-hand side, though, it stays more or less dry-ish until about February, so I've now transferred to that end and am double-digging another bed there. Nice to have a choice in the matter!

PSB disaster

I haven't been up the allotment for a couple of days as it's been raining stair-rods - and when I arrived this morning in brilliant sunshine, I discovered the pigeons have snaffled my prize PSB plant.

I had a fairly Heath Robinson contraption of netting and bamboo canes over the top of a row of plants, of which this one was the biggest at about 4'6" and already showing signs of deep purple sprouts in the leaf joints (why is it always your best plants that get clobbered?!). Anyway, it must have blown off at some point, as it was all tangled around the bamboo and nowhere near the PSB. The pigeons have been having a field day and though they haven't exactly stripped it to a skeleton, it's looking really sad. To add insult to injury, they've even pooped on the netting where they perched on it to enjoy their feast in comfort.

Just goes to show - you really do need sturdy netting cages, not just a bit flung over at the last minute (my other row of less impressive PSB and a line of winter cabbage and sprouts are doing just fine - because I went to the effort of making a proper netting cage for them out of 2x1 timber). Honestly, you turn your back for a minute....

The new season starts here

It's November, so it must be time to sow broad beans and peas to overwinter as early crops for next year.

I've learned my lesson from last year, when I sowed my broad beans much too early (in October) so that by this time they were long, leggy and very susceptible to rotting off. These little babies should be up by the end of the month, with a bit of luck and not too much more frost, and shouldn't be more than a couple of inches of sturdy shoot come late February next year, when I'll plant them out.

As you'll see from the picture, I sow my broad beans into toilet roll inners. These clutter up my house all year as my poor family is forbidden to ever throw them away, but then I get to see the point of it all at this time of year as I need 44 of the things for one sowing of beans - two 11ft rows with one plant every 6". The toilet rolls need standing up in something - I use wooden fruit boxes from the local greengrocer - but after that it's simplicity itself: just fill with multi-purpose compost, sow one bean to each roll and water in. You don't even have to take the loo roll off when you plant - it just rots away into the soil (and provides a bit of organic matter while it's at it). Easy-peasy!

Blackcurrant boogie

I have a couple of blackcurrant bushes in my back garden which have been here since I got here (about 7 years now) but have always been in the wrong place - a bit too shady and too crowded, being in the corner between the fence and the greenhouse. Now at last I've got space (and time) to get them onto a far nicer spot on the allotment.

I'm putting them into 1mx1m raised beds - partly because I can't really be bothered to double-dig anything bigger than they actually need, partly because I got given a Link-a-bord raised bed to trial, so I thought this would be a good way to test it out (it's the green one in the front in the picture). So far the verdict is: really easy to install, but a bit on the flimsy side - I had a job to get it level as it doesn't have enough weight to sit steadily on the ground by itself so it moves around all over the place. and for the same reason I'm also a bit sceptical as to how efficiently it'll stay in place (the pegs used on each corner to anchor it keep rising up).

Anyway - so I've dug the space out to a spade's depth, loosened the bottom with a fork, and then filled in with 2 barrows of stable manure and 2 barrows of the compost from my allotment compost bins. Mixed it up thoroughly, put in the edging for the raised beds (the other one's more straightforwardly made of gravel boards) and then replaced the topsoil. It looks dead smart - next step is to hoick out the blackcurrants and shift them over.

Seedy tales

All my planning led to the inevitable lengthy wishlist of seeds and plants - my favourite kind of shopping!

I've ordered all mine from Thompson & Morgan this year - a departure from my usual habit of getting everything from The Organic Gardening Catalogue, but then I thought I'd try someone different. And besides, all the mainstream suppliers are now offering organically-produced seed so Garden Organic have some competition at last.

New varieties (for me, anyway) which I'm trying out this year include the carrot Red Samurai, a deep red maincrop; Sungold tomato, which I've been told is the best of the cherry varieties; and the purple-podded climbing bean, Blauhilde. I'm going to be having another go at growing sweetcorn - last time the rats got the lot, so I'm hoping to confuse them a bit by growing it in the "three sisters" system, a companion planting technique where you grow beans to climb up the corn stalks and underplant with squash (Harrier - a butternut type). I'm also trying growing two types of Brussel sprout, Trafalgar - early, and Maximus, a late-cropper, so I can get the longest season possible from them. And I'm having a go at kale (Dwarf Green Curled) for next winter, and I've even bought "proper" pumpkin seed ("Jack of All Trades") since we've entirely failed to provide ourselves with a Halloween lamp tonight and have the shame of having to buy one in!

It's all very exciting: the new season has officially begun!

Green gold

The plot is starting to go to sleep now so I'm working my way through my beds to get them ready for overwintering (those I'm not going to use, anyway - I have four still up and running, mostly for winter brassicas but also for chard and Japanese onions).

The main weapon in my arsenal against the winter weather is green manures - I'm a real convert, after trying them last year. They're basically just weeds under a different name, but you harness them to your own ends. So long as you don't let them get out of control (not difficult, since you basically kill them in spring) you've got free fertiliser that looks after your soil all winter, too.

This year I've branched out from grazing rye and am trying red clover, too. This is the bed where my mid-season peas and beans were growing - full of lovely lush green foliage, keeping the soil surface from cracking up, holding goodness in the soil and preventing the rains from washing it all out.

I'm hoping that this (a legume) will be a double boost for fertility: not only will it help inject nitrogen when I dig it in in the spring, but it'll also fix nitrogen from the air, a quality common to most legumes. That's also why I chose it for this particular spot - you should always choose green manures of the same vegetable group as the one it's following. So if the bed was used to grow legumes, like peas and beans, you can use a leguminous green manure; but I wouldn't have used, for example, mustard, as that's a brassica and I'm planning to grow cabbages here next year so if the mustard caught club root, I'd be clobbered.

It sounds complicated but it's actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. Who would have thought there would be so much involved in growing a load of weeds?!

Having a think about next year

Looking after an allotment is a constantly evolving task. About this time of year I get itchy about what's going to happen next season - and I always find there's something I've done this year which I want to change, or just have an idea on how I can do it better, next year.

This year it's summer cabbage and winter brassica. Not one of my Golden Acre summer cabbages has yet been eaten - though they're not a bad size and only slightly nibbled! So from this I conclude that a) it's too much of a faff to make coleslaw and we don't like it enough anyway, and b) nobody wants to eat cabbage in summer.

The exception is red cabbage, which I love braised with apples so I think I'll carry on growing those. Last winter though I had to buy in all my seasonal produce for January & February - which means sprouts, kale, winter cabbage, spring greens and PSB, all of which I and the family enjoy in season. So I'm trying to squeeze in as many of these as possible and dropping the white summer cabbage next year, so hopefully my brassica beds should be more successful at keeping us fed!

The best laid plans...

I've had some interesting conclusions from my experiments with successional planting this year. I tried it with peas and beans - early sowing, then normal March-sown mid-season, then a late planting which went in after the early crop came out.

I'm just picking over the late crop now. The peas have been fantastic - better than the earlier two sowings (partly I think because I tied them up a bit better - but also because the weather is drier). The beans were really promising to begin with: one of the things I hadn't quite appreciated was that blackfly aren't around later in the season, so for the first time ever I've grown a crop of broad beans without having to pinch out the tops. They're entirely unblemished, lovely, healthy plants but.... there's a single, solitary, and very sad pod and that's my entire harvest, out of two 11ft rows.

I have absolutely no explanation for this, except that it's possible the insects which pollinate broad beans simply aren't around later in the season. Or maybe it was the variety? It would be such a shame if it's not possible to grow broad beans this late on, since they grew so well and were far easier than the earlier plantings. Ah well... I'll try it again next year and if it doesn't work for a second time, it's back to the drawing board...

The long wet summer

Well what with school hols haven't been around much lately - or rather, I've been around the allotment more than ever, just haven't had time to write about it!

It's been the longest, wettest summer any of us can remember. Everyone else seems to be complaining about it - is it just me who's having a bumper year?! My tomatoes are coming off the vine by the bucketload (literally - stewed up 2kg yesterday and picked another 1.5kg today). The beans have been beautiful, long, straight and full of flavour, I've had hundreds of courgettes and the longest cucumber in history (well, OK, slight exaggeration - but in my gardening history, at any rate!) And I've even grown calabrese successfully for the first time ever.

The only slight negative has been the blight that hit my crop of second early potatoes. But even that I'm putting down to the particular susceptibility of that variety (Kestrel). My first earlies, Red Duke of York, were fantastic, though you wouldn't expect them to get blight in any case. The Kestrel were about 50% ruined - a horrible, smelly, unpleasant job that meant I was eyeing my maincrop, King Edward, with dismay, convinced they too would have succumbed. Not a bit of it: despite the fact that King Edwards have a reputation for small yields and for being disease-prone, not one plant was blighted and I've got two full bucketloads in store in paper sacks in my understairs cupboard. That's from one bed of 4ft x 11ft (I didn't get the second bed dug over in time for two crops, sadly). You can't complain about that too much: I'll be keeping a close eye on them in storage, as I'm still not entirely sure they won't have blight spores clinging here and there, but I was so pleased with them.

Wet summers? Let's have more of them!

Yummy raspberries

I'm lucky enough to have access to the produce from one of my client's fruit cages, so I've been spending a happy hour or so picking summer raspberries. This is no ordinary fruit cage: it has 10 blackcurrant bushes, 5 whitecurrant bushes, and about the same number of redcurrants and gooseberries too. And all around the edge is a thicket of suckering summer raspberries - to say nothing of the autumn raspberries next door...

The whole thing is horribly neglected, so you have to wade through the cleavers and nettles to get to the raspberry plants - but that doesn't seem to have stopped them pouring their hearts into producing as much fruit as possible. I've frozen a lot from the last couple of pickings, but I'm now turning my thoughts to summer puddings and raspberry jam...

The idea is that I take over maintaining the top fruit from autumn, doing it in my own time as a kind of "second allotment" in exchange for the harvest. I'm not sure at the moment a) if I have quite enough time (there's a small vineyard involved too), and b) if the client is going to actually stay in her house for long enough for me to see my investment bear fruit (sorry, couldn't resist that...). We'll see: for now, I'm just enjoying all that bounty!