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 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!

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...

Bombing at the local show

I had a go at showing a few of my veg at the local Horticultural Society's summer show at the weekend. I have, to put it politely, a long way to go before I pose any kind of threat to the regulars.

I tried potatoes and broad beans, since they're my best crops at the moment, and since my pea crop isn't much this year I didn't have much of an option. Off I trotted on Saturday morning to pick the best of my Green Windsor - the second planting, which is just hitting maturity now as the Aquadulce Claudia have finished. The timing of this successional planting couldn't have been better this year - definitely one to repeat again.

Anyway; then I dug up some lovely egg-sized Red Duke of Yorks and lovingly wiped the mud off them to bring up that ruby sheen. It all looked pretty good until I got to the hall and started "staging" (putting it on plates to show it off to best advantage).

The summer show - unlike the spring and autumn shows - is fiercely competitive, a fact I only appreciated once I was elbowing plates of perfect beans to one side in order to squeeze in my little offering. And oh dear - those broad bean pods which looked so perfect on the allotment; how tragic they looked next to those platefuls of perfectly straight, perfectly uniform, perfectly enormous models of What a Broad Bean Should Be. Mine suddenly turned out to be wonky, not the same length at all, and all stubbornly twisting in different directions.

It wasn't much better with the potatoes: I thought they were all roughly the same size, but roughly isn't good enough. Everyone else's were exactly the same size, to the millimetre, and mine stuck out like a sore thumb with three chicken's egg-sized and one big turkey's egg-sized in the corner like an uninvited guest.

All very hopeless, and I had to suffer the ignominy of being one of those who didn't even get a "highly commended". Instead of doing the sensible thing, though, and retreating with my tail between my legs never to darken the doors of the village hall again, it's actually got my blood up. You just wait till the Autumn Show. They won't know what's hit 'em.

The allotment in June

Here's what's happening on the allotment this month!

The broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia) I had so much trouble with back in March are doing amazingly well and have caught up brilliantly. Pods are swelling and soon to be harvested. The only trouble I'm having is that they aren't supporting each other as well as usual - so are sprawling all over the peas next door. I'll be bracing up this variety next year.

Another crop that's just about to start harvesting (well, I've dug up one or two plants already in fact) - Red Duke of York first early potatoes. So far, so good: lovely coloured tubers, some large, though some really tiny (could be I'm harvesting a bit too early yet though). My only little niggle is they're really tricky to spot in the soil!

Another surprise success after a bad start: this is one of my calabrese plants. Not the Tiara - yes, there is just one plant remaining - but the Pacifica, which have bounced back from being allowed to get too leggy as seedlings and are making great growth under their netting cloche.

And this is the biggest success story of all this season - the Cambridge First strawberries, now in their prime second year and fruiting fit to bust. More on these at a later date as they're fantastic enough to deserve their own entry - but they get my medal for Best Crop So Far!

You'll notice I haven't taken any wide views so you won't have to see the knee-high grass (now mown, thank goodness) and the piles of rubbish :D - maybe I'll include those next time!

From deluge... to drought

Talk about extremes of weather.

Having spent most of the winter under water, I'm now having to get out the watering can again - we've had nearly four weeks without any rain and with 20+ degree temperatures. It's lovely if you like sunbathing, not so nice if you have young plants to nurture.

As a result my carrot sowings have almost entirely failed - I'm having a go at sowing them direct, which is not something I usually do but on the other hand it's the normal way of growing carrots so I thought I'd try it. Of course I haven't been able to keep the rows watered, so that's about the only reason they've keeled over (or rather, haven't germinated in the first place).

Never mind - I'll keep going when - or rather if - the rains come again, and hope for more success then. On the plus side, my baby plants are shooting up: I now have tomato plants a couple of feet high and very, very healthy waiting to go in my greenhouse border in mid-May; the peas are starting to form pods already (well, they are Feltham First); and the broad beans are looking lovely, strong and healthy. I've got quite a few brassicas in modular trays hardening off in the coldframe ready to go out in a week or two - my brussels sprouts sowing failed, mainly I think because the seed had been kept a bit too long, so I had to buy in 12 from my garden centre which is another first so we'll see how they do.

Busy, busy, busy! I do love this time of year.

All is not lost!

Popped up to the lottie this morning and more in hope than expectation had a peek under the fleece that's covering the broad bean seeds.

So far there had been no sign of them but an awful lot of mice in my traps, so I'd assumed the mice weren't in the slightest bit put off by the holly snippets and had scoffed the lot. How wrong can you be - I lifted the fleece to find a lovely long straight row of inch-high bean shoots! So it looks as if we will be having an early broad bean crop this year after all.

It's so nice when things go right for a change. And I'll try the holly trick next year - it really does seem to have worked.

It's spring!

I'm in heaven. The allotment has dried out, the soil is warming up, and I've been sowing seeds all day. Spring is officially here.

I've had very mixed results from sowing directly in the ground - too often I've had absolutely no germination at all, for a variety of reasons including slugs, mice, tricky weather or all three. So in recent years I've taken to sowing all my seed into modules of one sort or another - usually the cell trays, 24 to a tray, which is happily one row in my raised bed with plants every 6", or two rows of larger plants with a 1ft spacing, plus a couple left over for luck. I also sow broad beans in loo rolls (they need a good root run and you also avoid disturbing the roots as you plant them with loo roll intact), and peas go into 4" pots, three to a pot, and get planted out almost as soon as they've germinated one pot per foot. It worked beautifully last year - hope it does this year too.

So far I've been struggling badly with my early broad bean crop, and in fact can probably write it off as a failure. First I was too impatient and sowed the autumn seeds (Aquadulce Claudia, so no problem with the variety) far too early - October, when temperatures were still quite mild. Fatal - by November they were already flopping over, and they had a bad winter when they really needed to go out onto the plot but it was too wet to even try. By the time I got to planting them out in February, they'd rotted away and I had to chuck the lot.

Then I tried planting broad beans straight in the ground: that was about 2 weeks ago, and I haven't had a snifter of a plant at all. I think they've all been harvested by the mice - I've trapped four now, but that probably means there have been a dozen or more running over the seed bed, taking no notice at all of my holly branches. Maybe I should have put a few more down. So anyway - I'll have to cut my losses, I think, and just plant mid-season beans instead.

The good news - my pea plants have picked up, and apart from a few losses (which I think were due to slug attack - I was late protecting them) they're now growing heartily. My next door neighbour, who's a coppicer, is due to deliver a batch of hazel peasticks any time soon, and then I'll dare to take off the fleece cloche and let them do their stuff. Won't be long now!

Pesky pests

This time of year, whatever you put in the ground is a magnet for pests of every possible kind. My poor little pea plants which I planted out last month are struggling to get away - what with the deluge of rain that's been going on for a month now, they haven't been able to make much headway, and in the meantime they've been snack fodder for my three major betes noirs - rats, mice and slugs.

I planted some broad bean seeds today, Aquadulce Claudia again, direct in the ground for the first time, since the autumn-sown plants keeled over (a combination of my mistake - sowing them too early - and an accident - the gale-force winds a few weeks ago blew the fleece off and there was a vicious frost which clobbered the top growth). I spent more time protecting the seeds than actually planting them. First I put down slug pellets - before you throw up your hands in horror, I use the Growing Success iron sulphate ones which don't harm wildlife (but do harm slugs).

Then I cut some short sprigs of holly from the next-door woodland and laid them over the top to put the mice off. And finally I sank some plastic lily toms someone gave me into the ground as mouse traps. They're about 18" deep and no mouse could escape once inside: I've baited them with peanut butter and will be checking them regularly, as there's no point setting humane traps unless you're going to be humane about not letting them starve to death in there in the process.

Then I'm in discussions with the local hardware shop as to the best way to deal with the rat problem. Poison is really tricky, as I take my dog up to the allotment. But I've yet to hear of anyone being very successful with traps, though the bloke over the road at the allotment site trapped 36 rats last year with a squirrel trap, so perhaps that's the way to go. Either way, it's quite an investment as the traps are £17.99 each - so I want to make sure I'm getting something that works!

RIP shed...

So that's it then. No more shed.

Last week we had near-hurricane force winds which demolished half-a-dozen trees in our area, killed 7 people across the country, and caused no end of damage. One of the casualties was my rickety old shed, which I found in several pieces scattered all over the allotment - the roof, which I'd battled with once or twice before, had been blown right into the next-door-neighbour's allotment (and this is the roof that requires at least two people to lift it).

I shifted all the vulnerable stuff like the lawnmower over into my greenhouse, which is also sporting a plywood sticking-plaster after one pane of glass was blown loose and cracked its corner and the corner of the one below it. At least it's still standing, and relatively dry inside! Then I stacked all the bits of shed in a big heap and gazed disconsolately at the sorry-looking and very damp floor which is all I now have left. Luckily I also have a very handy and generous husband who's offered to build me another one - discussions are continuing as to exactly how!

Meanwhile my baby peas and broad beans are now up at the allotment under fleece waiting for me to find the time (between shed-related crises) to plant them out. The beans haven't overwintered well - I planted them in October which these days is far too early - but the peas are looking great. The garlic is already in, so once those two are planted that'll be my early crops in place - just in time for spring!

Another raised bed completed

I spent this afternoon battling with the soup again - marginally more diggable since it hasn't rained for all of about 3 days, but it still left me with mud soup-plates attached to the bottom of my wellies.

Never mind: object achieved. I finished constructing the next raised bed: having double-dug the area over the last couple of weeks, I finally up-ended the last wheelbarrow load of compost and then put in the scaffold boards.

The worst of constructing raised beds, I find, is getting it all level. When you've got a site like mine - sloping not just from side to side, but also from front to back - it's the devil's own job to get four sides of a rectangle on a level. With this bed, as with others, I had one end almost proud of the ground level while the other end was sunk almost level with it. At the end of the day, it doesn't affect the result, which is a defined, contained area of really well-cultivated soil which produces seriously good crops. Well worth the work - and the frustration.

The strawberries are now in - four rows of Honeoye which I hope (mice permitting) will provide me with lots of really early strawberries this year. I'm planning to plant out the garlic soon, too, and the early crop of peas and broad beans which have been pre-germinating in my coldframe at home. It's amazing how much there is to do at this time of year!