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!

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.

Getting into a routine

I thought it might be useful to write down the routine I've established this year - everything changes so much over winter and spring that I forget from one year to the next what I was doing this time last year.

So... I'm trying out the half-hour allotment idea at the moment, from Lia Leendertz's book of the same name. I don't have the book myself, but have leafed through someone else's copy: I'm intrigued by the idea of giving the allotment regular but relatively short bouts of time, but disagree with her on a few points - she says, for example, that you shouldn't try to feed your family on this small amount of time, yet at the same time advocates not going up to the allotment at the weekend. So I've kind of adapted it: my mission is indeed to feed my family, and I do go up at the weekends (actually that's my longest chunk of time each week).

Monday-Friday: half-an-hour in the mornings between the end of the school run and starting work. This covers general planting out, earthing up, tending, troubleshooting, clearing beds, mulching, sowing new seeds.. whatever needs doing really. Except...

Wednesday: this is harvest day, when I go through and pick anything that needs picking. If we don't need to eat it, I freeze it that same day. This makes sure nothing goes to waste. I do pick things other times in the week - strawberries, for example, need picking over at least every other day when they're at full steam - but having a definite day makes it easier to keep on top of it.

Weekend session (usually 2-3 hours): watering, every week that we haven't had much rain; and either weeding or mowing. I do each every other week, so one week I'll weed through, the next I'll mow & strim the grass down. Other weekly tasks are picking over the crops again (as for Wednesdays), trimming off strawberry runners and pinching out tomato sideshoots. And I give the tomatoes an extra water with liquid feed added.

In addition to this, I fill the water-butt Wednesday and at the weekend to operate my wonderful automatic watering system, which is keeping the toms going beautifully!

So far it's working really well, on what I think is a minimal amount of time (good thing too given I'm juggling small kids, work, and my garden at home). It'll probably all have to change next summer, but hopefully I can build on this rather than starting all over like I usually do!

Letting everyone in

The allotment site opened to the public yesterday as part of the village Open Day - there were about 16 gardens and two allotment sites in the scheme and it was a huge success.

I was up there most of the day - it was great chatting to people. Most people wanted to pass the time of day rather than talking veg; several told me they'd lived in our area for years but hadn't ever known there was an allotment site there. It is quite tucked away - that's part of its charm, of course. We also had quite a few people signing up for plots - we now have an official Waiting List (like so many allotment sites). What a change from when I first came, three years ago, and just walked onto my plot. Then, I was about halfway down on the left-hand side, there was nothing oppposite me, and I was the last on the row and had a virgin patch of grazing field to deal with. Now there are allotments all around me, and another four or five down the hill from me. It's such a testament to how much it's all caught on. Long may it continue, I say!

I did my stint on the front desk (not that it was any hardship - mainly drinking tea and gossiping!) and then we all pulled up our chairs, brought our families and had a barbecue. There was a "best scarecrow" competition and much fresh salad and potatoes straight from people's plots. It was allotment holding at its best - a great community spirit, with people of all ages from very young to very old mucking in together. Fantastic.

What happens when you don't pay attention...

I made one of those really silly mistakes today. I've been desperate to get the last tray of Calabrese out onto the allotment - they were getting pot-bound and a bit miserable, but I was waiting for my Build-a-Balls to arrive to make sure I could net them as soon as they were in.

So there I was merrily popping in a tray of Calabrese Chevalier (a late-maturing variety I hope will follow on from the Pacifica).... and then happened to notice there were two labels in the tray. One half was indeed calabrese... but the other half was the purple-sprouting broccoli I had planned to pot on so they could follow my summer cabbage (or maybe the early calabrese, depending on which came out first).

Now if you've ever tried to tell the difference between calabrese seedlings and PSB seedlings - forget it. I would have thought the PSB would be gratifyingly purple, and one or two were, but not enough to be sure. It's infuriating and almost certainly means the massive PSB plants will overshadow my poor beleaguered calabrese later in the season.

Moral of the tale: never, ever sow more than one brassica in the same tray. They all look the same. And it's bound to end in tears.

Strawberries and pheasants

Get a load of this! My first proper strawberry harvest last week - and it's a whopper!

I had been expecting a bit of a poor showing this year - not because the plants weren't producing, but because I failed to net the crop early enough and when I got back from holiday there was a hen pheasant nesting in the middle of the strawberry patch. Being a hopeless softy, I couldn't possibly have shooed her off, so she sat there for weeks, taking a peck out of whatever strawberry was more-or-less ripe and within reach. I also assumed that her little babies would gobble up whatever she left over for them.

As it turned out, though, she left last week, leaving only a single cracked eggshell behind her: I'm not sure if her babies were caught by something horrible, like the rats, or if she managed to hatch a few. Certainly there's been no sign of her or babies since.

The good news, though, is that now she's gone I've got the strawbs all to myself - and as you can see they're cropping fit to bust! All the above are Cambridge Favourite, which are now in their second season and definitely in their prime: it's so noticeable how much better they're doing than last year. They must have produced a pound or so every couple of days for a fortnight now.

The Honeoye in the next-door bed have hardly produced anything - but then, they're in their first year. Having seen the difference a year makes in the Cambridge Favourites, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt - but will expect big things next year.

Now, where's that strawberry jam recipe....!

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!

Salad days

One little innovation this year has actually been in my back garden, and not on the allotment at all.

I've got two little awkward squares, in between some fencing panels, which I had been trying to make a herb garden from (they're about 5ft x 2ft and you couldn't do much else with them). Unfortunately they've turned out a bit too shady for the herbs - I managed to get some nice low rosemary hedges going as edging, but that's about it.

So I've converted them into salad gardens, since lettuce and salad leaves tend to like it shady, and it's conveniently close to the kitchen so you get your salad stuff as fresh as it's possible to have it. This niftily solves the other problem I had with growing lettuce - that by the time you'd picked it on the allotment, finished whatever else you were doing and brought it home, it had started to go limp. And by the time suppertime came round, it was really pretty sad!

So now I've evicted the remaining herbs (though I've kept the rosemary hedges) and have some fairly tight-packed rows of lettuces growing happily. Varieties so far have been Lollo Rosso and Salad Bowl for cut-and-come-again, and the compact variety Tom Thumb for whole lettuces. We've been tucking in - and it's been a great success, really delicious lettuce and as much as we can eat. The idea is that once we eat through one row, I'll replace it with other varieties - next to go in is a salad mixture from Thompson & Morgan. Not sure quite what's in it but it'll be interesting to find out!

Salad is one of the few crops I should be able to keep going all year round, so I'm expecting big things of this little patch. Cue yet more planning and seed-buying as we move through the summer into autumn...!

The greenhouse is go!!

At last... I've sorted out the watering system for the greenhouse, and now have a dripper hose connected to the water butt up at the allotment. I'll be very interested to see how it keeps everything going.

So it's all systems go for transferring my poor overgrown tomato plants from the home greenhouse, where they've been getting increasingly drought-stricken and pot-bound, to the luxurious quarters of the allotment greenhouse. Because I've got a whole greenhouse devoted to toms this year, I've been able to go to town on the varieties: I'm growing good old Gardeners' Delight for general use, then San Marzano, the "only" cooking tomato according to some - it's a plum variety and very reliable; and then Brandywine for massive beefsteak tomatoes for salads.

Brandywine can be quite tricky as you need to get the watering just right to avoid blossom end rot and all sorts of other difficulties: last year I only got a couple of edible ones, and the rest split and went to waste. But this year I've got my watering system, and anything is possible...!!

Off we went to mow...

Been away for a couple of weeks and came back to knee-high grass. It took me a whole hour to strim the edges alone - and I still haven't got around to mowing the main drag!

Our allotment site is going to open to the public in a few weeks' time, as part of a scheme run by the local parish council. Everyone's getting very excited about it: there are notices galore and we've all got to clear up our plots a bit. That's no mean feat when you realise that shed which blew down a month or three ago is still in a heap in a corner, and you have about 10 compost bags full of rubbish to take off to the tip. My days of comfortable messiness are soon to come to an end, I fear...!

Strawbs on the way

At last I got around to weeding the strawberries today: they were sprouting thistles by the time I got to them, so they've been a bit neglected, but fortunately I've shoved so much manure and compost into the beds that the soil is about the best on the allotment and the weeds just jumped out.

The Honeoye I planted last year have been a bit disappointing - small plants still and only a handful of strawbs. They aren't much further along than the Cambridge Favourites next door, either - but perhaps it's just that it's their first season.

The Cambridge Favourites, on the other hand, are in their second year and quite amazing. I don't think I've ever seen so many strawberries per plant - must be a good dozen to 20 each. They're still tiny but should produce a fantastic crop - that is, if I can beat the slugs and mice to them...

Planting, planting, planting...

This time of year I abandon everything else in the rush to get my baby plants into the ground. That means my poor allotment is looking increasingly shaggy - grass up to my knees and weeds in the strawberries. But the coldframe is full of hardened-off veggies which demand to be taken to their new home.

Today it was the turn of my calabrese - Pacifica is a good mid-season hybrid which I'm hoping will take the place of my poor failed Tiara (early) sowing. Just two seeds germinated - I still don't know quite what I did wrong - and then I turned up this morning and found that one of the seedlings had been eaten by slugs.

Since one early calabrese plant is too sad for words, I've filled up that row and the one next to it with the Pacifica. I try to sow three "sittings" of calabrese - otherwise you get a glut which can't be frozen easily. Last year the whole thing was a failure as the drought got the lot; this year the Tiara have, as I said, turned up their toes, and I was away on holiday when the Pacifica germinated so though I got lots of lovely seedlings they were very leggy. Time will tell how they survive their bad beginnings.

The third late sowing is currently two seed-leaves in my greenhouse, but looking lovely and healthy so if I can keep the slugs off (beer traps have been set!) I might yet get some sort of crop...!

Juggling glass

I have two greenhouses. Yes - I know, it's a bit much. The worst of it is, I have a secret yen for a third one, too.

One greenhouse is at home - that's currently stuffed to the gunwhales with bedding and cutting flowers for the garden, but also raises all my veg seeds (I prefer to have them where I can keep an eye on them). Outside it are also two rather ramshackle coldframes, soon I hope to become one very large and less ramshackle one, where I eventually evict all the baby plants when the pressure to use the borders inside the greenhouse becomes too great. The process has already started - today I took out one of the benches and planted my cucumbers out. They're "Cum Laude" - an F1 female-only variety which cost a small fortune but I hope will be worth it. They've formed some great little plants, at least.

The next bench will come out once I've evicted my tomato plants. They're currently growing into small monsters in 3-litre pots, waiting for the automatic watering system to get itself sorted out up at the allotment greenhouse. I've just bought a dripper system from Two Wests - great online greenhouse/watering/gardening site - which connects up to a water butt. So far, so good. The plan is to feed the hose through a hole in some marine ply which I've replaced one of the glass panes with. However - if you've ever taken a close look at water butt taps, you'll know they're not exactly standard. So I've had to order a new connector - one of the ones with a screw thread to fit any size tap - and an in-line filter as they don't supply them with the dripper kit (to their shame - there's nothing more infuriating than realising you've got to search out another bit of kit to make the first bit work).

Once they've arrived and I've got it going, off go the tomato plants and I can free up another border for the aubergines and peppers. I did also want to grow melons this year - but the slugs have taken a good munch at the growing tips so I'm not sure the plants will make it through.

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.