Small Plot? No Problem!

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OK, so it's not the end of the calendar year, but it's the end of the 2009 growing season and thus a good time to summarise the year's progress.

On the plus side, our allotment was more productive than previous years, but on the downside, we neglected it for longer than before and ended up losing our tenancy (see previous post). So, in some respects the year has been a bit of a disaster, but one can only chalk it up to experience and move on...

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I'm sad to report that earlier this month we received written notice to quit our allotment. As you may guess from the neglected state of this blog, we have both been very busy with our day-jobs this summer, and the weeds on our allotment enjoyed the manure we dumped on the beds even more than the vegetables did. The result was that we were unable to keep our plot up to the standards required by the committee, so that's that!

It's a real shame given all the hard work we put in this spring (and that can be clearly seen the photos on this blog) - but the demand for allotments is really high these days so there's a lot of pressure. Fortunately we were able to get up there one last time to harvest what had survived our neglect: one "Uchiki Kuri" squash, some half-dried borlotti beans, a few small celeriac, a surprising haul of onions and carrots (over a kilo of each), plus five of the biggest sunflower heads I've ever seen! We also dug up the strawberry plants, because frankly they weren't cheap, and we have a strawberry planter at home, sitting empty and neglected...

Once I'd got over the shock I realised what a weight of guilt I'd been carrying, because my indifference to gardening magically disappeared. Suddenly I was reading gardening magazines and seed catalogues and excitedly planning what I could squeeze into my tiny back garden! The poor thing has been as sorely neglected as the lottie - because the allotment was a higher priority, so of course neither got done - but luckily I've had two weeks off work and enough fine weather to take advantage of the free time.

Hence, one raised bed is now half planted up with overwintering onions (with the other half covered, ready to sow early spinach next spring); the other bed has some late attempts at winter-hardy salads, and broad beans will go in soon. The lessons I've learnt over the past three years should stand me in good stead and help me to produce a decent crop, even from the tiny space I have left.

I was so upset at first that I deleted this blog. Fortunately I had a backup of most of the site, so I've only had to reconstruct the last couple of entries, though it looks like the categories and tagging have gone AWOL...

We've been working hard on the plot this month, trying to get it all in shape for the coming season, and so far it's looking pretty good!

Richard has also been building a compost bin from the pallets we inherited with our plot. I added some slot-in front panels, and the whole thing looks pretty fine, if a bit lopsided - but that's all in the allotment tradition :)

This year we decided to try growing potatoes in planters, since we had had so much trouble with blight on the allotment. We bought a set of three potato "sacks" and some veg-growing compost at the garden centre, and back in January we bought a dozen seed potatoes at the Potato Day at Ryton Gardens.

I followed the instructions in a video posted on the Grow Your Own website, with great results so far! Here are the "International Kidney" (better known as Jerseys, though since we don't live in Jersey they can't be called that officially), barely three weeks after planting:

And here are the maincrops - the "Mayan Gold" (on the right) is racing away!

Our third planter, containing first earlies, is progressing about the same as the Jerseys. Looking forward to some nice new potatoes this summer!

Today I decided to sow some parsnips; Madeline decided to supervise, though obviously I was not doing it right, judging by her haughty expression!

First I collected twenty of the loo-roll tubes I had saved over winter, and I decided to microwave them (to sterilise them) as per a suggestion I had seen online. Unfortunately no timings were suggested, so I set the microwave to 2 minutes. Bad move! Within the first minute, evil-smelling smoke started pouring out of the microwave! Luckily none of them caught fire, but I won't be doing that again!

I found that I could fit the twenty tubes into a seed tray with room to spare, so I added another eight untreated ones, filled them all with compost and - thinking that parsnips, being related to parsley, might respond similarly - watered them with boiling water. Now I just have to wait...

As you can probably imagine from the length of my veg-growing list, my seed box is getting pretty crowded! I was very excited, therefore, when I saw this new seed packet organiser on the Harrod Horticultural website. It's a smart metal container in the same faux-Victorian style as their bulb tin but in a not-too-girly raspberry colour, and since it is slightly bigger than my current box (a hessian-covered Laura Ashley CD storage box from WHSmith), it seemed ideal.

However when it arrived, I was gravely disappointed with the design. For starters, the lid simply fits loosely on top of the tin. If you were careless enough to drop it, all your carefully organised seed packets would end up on the floor in chaos. Not only that, but it means the tin is not airtight and therefore not suited to long-term storage of seeds.

An even bigger disappointment lay inside, however. What appears in the photo to be a set of sturdy cardboard dividers, similar to the ones sold for use with index card boxes, turned out to be flimsy paper - the only reason they are standing upright is that the interior is divided into several compartments by fixed metal walls. This has a number of disadvantages. Firstly, the metal dividers reduce the amount of internal storage space, so despite being a good deal larger than my CD box, I doubt I could get many more seeds in. Secondly you are stuck with four equal sections for your seeds, and we all know that some months require a lot more sowing than others. Thirdly, the month-by-month dividers are so flimsy, they are unlikely to last even a single year of fat packets of peas and beans being squeezed into the sections and pulled out again.

Unsurprisingly, I have decided to send the organiser back for a refund. If you want an attractive gift for a dilettante gardener who is mainly growing flowers and herbs, this might fit the bill. But at £16.95, frankly there are a lot better uses for your money. Me, I've added an old (airtight) biscuit tin to my storage armoury...

(BTW, if you fancy the printed seed envelopes, a small sample of which are provided with the tin, they are a dreadful rip-off as well - £3.95 for 20!!! I got a packet of 50 plain manila envelopes of very similar size in WHSmith for £1.75.)

A couple of people have commented on my growing list for 2009 that I seem to have an awful lot of seed for such a small plot! My answer to that is two-fold:

1. In many cases I don't have a full packet of seed of that variety - and even when I do, I'm usually not going to sow it all this year. Seed-saving and seed-swapping are wonderful things!

2. I'm aiming to have as much of my plot in production all year round as possible, and that does require a wider range of veg.

It's a cliché of veg growing in general, and allotmenteering in particular, that in summer you end up a glut of courgettes/runner beans/beetroot/etc and have to give it away by the carrier-bag full. That's fine if you have a big plot - but I don't. Instead I grow small amounts of everything, and I use the appropriate variety for the season so that I get at least some veg all year round. It takes more planning and a bit more investment to get started, but I think it's worth it!

At the weekend, after all the work on the allotment I relaxed by watching the BBC programme "A Farm of the Future" (part of the Natural World series). It was a real eye-opener, I have to say. On the one hand, I've known since the 1980s that oil was going to start running out some time around 2020-30, but nothing I'd read back then had spelt out how that was going to affect agriculture and food production. In terms of impact on the next two generations, it knocks climate change into a cocked hat!

Well, of course I felt motivated to do something, so I Googled around and found out about the Transition movement. Cambridge is already a Transition Town, with an active group since summer last year. Some of their activities are a bit hippyish for my tastes (cringes at thought of singalong evening!), but they've done some more practical things like lobbying the council into looking more seriously into the allotment situation. It probably helps that Cambridge is already quite progressive in this area, but that's no excuse to rest on our laurels!

So, I've volunteered to help with compiling the monthly email bulletin. It's an area where I have expertise, and hopefully I can get away without wearing any rainbow-striped ethnic knitwear ;)

Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)

Since it's the last week of the moon cycle and there was no planting to do, today seemed the ideal time to get on with general maintenance - and luckily we were blessed with lovely weather for it!

First off was a trip to the recycling depot at Chittering, where the company that collects our green bins makes compost available for free to anyone who can be bothered to bring sacks and shovel it up for themselves! Obviously it's not fantastic quality and probably not suitable for raising young plants, but it's great for soil improvement on the allotment. It was a bit weird to be shovelling up steaming hot compost, but I guess it was still warm from the "in-vessel" composting process!

After lunch we went back to the allotment and I forked over Bed 4, where the onions and carrots had been last year. There was a layer of soft grass and weeds, and a few invasive couch grass roots, so I tried to clear it without too much disruption to the soil - just turning over the top 5-10cm to remove the weeds. Then I dug a shallow bean trench on either side of one half of the bed, lined the trenches with cardboard and newspapers, drenched them in water and added the leaves and chopped stems from the frost-damaged romanesco that needed clearing up, and covered it with soil. Finally I sprinkled some general-purpose organic fertilizer along the trenches and on the other half of the bed, and we dumped five bags of compost on the whole lot. So, that's one bed cleared and rejuvenated - only seven more to go!!