Small Plot? No Problem!

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

Thanks to a wet June and some serious neglect, the young plants that I was raising for the allotment have mostly died, much as they did last year. However there's an easy solution if you're prepared to spend a bit of money - plug plants!

I've found a supplier on ebay who is substantially cheaper than the big-name seed merchants, so I'm going to give him a try. He's got leeks and a range of brassicas, which should fill the main gaps in my winter plan - if his plants are good, I'll post a link.

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

We rather let the plot go unattended in June and early July, thanks to a combination of wet weekends and other time commitments, so some of our summer crops are past their best. However all was not lost...

The broad beans were getting a bit big for our liking but were still plump and juicy, so after blanching and peeling (the latter took a lot longer than I anticipated!), they went into making a chicken, new potato and broad bean salad with pesto dressing - scrummy!

The peas, on the other hand, were definitely on the turn. I collected them all, though: the still-edible ones went into a risotto (along with some leftover pancetta), whilst the dried-out pods produced a good crop of saveable seed. I'm not sure I want to grow lots of this variety (Waverex) next year, but I can hopefully sell/swap a load of them for something more interesting :)

The garlic was looking yellow and starting to flower, which some books say is the right time to harvest it, though the Garlic Farm guide recommends doing it earlier in the cool UK climate - which rather assumes the summer has been good enough for them to have put on some decent growth. Anyway I dug up all the garlic, both early and late varieties, and hung them in my conservatory to dry.

Note on moon: this week just happens to be the best one for harvesting for storage (rather than immediate use) - serendipitous or what?

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

I went to the allotment after work to do a bit of weeding and watering, and took some photos of what's growing - before it all gets nibbled by pests!

Here's a young red cabbage (Red Drumhead, a traditional Victorian variety) that was sown in April and planted out in June under a netting tunnel. It's looking remarkably healthy, so I'm just hoping that it survives the caterpillars and develops a good head. The row of autumn brassicas (red cabbage and "Ottobrino" romanesco) are protected from the pigeons by a chicken-wire fence, and they have collars to keep the cabbage root fly at bay, but I have yet to defend against the inevitable slugs and butterflies...

The other thing that's growing really well is the Burgess Buttercup winter squash. It has set one nice fruit already and has quite a lot of flowers - when it has set two or three more, I will remove the excess flowers to focus the plant's energies on a few good fruit.

Today I decided to create a new blog, dedicated to gardening, chicken-keeping and other domestic pleasures - so here it is!

So far I have imported all the relevant entries from my old blog covering my first year of allotmenteering, and added some new (back-dated) ones to accompany photos I took at the time.

I've been inspired to do this by VegMonkey and the Mrs, whose excellent blog about raised-bed gardening has me green with envy!

BTW, the title of this blog comes from "No Plot? No Problem!", the official guide to National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. My main website, www.annelyle.com is about my writing and used to include random gardening bits on my blog, but I decided that it would be better to split them up. After all, most writers won't be interested in my vegetable photos, and most gardeners couldn't care less about my attempts to finish a novel!

So, now I have a proper gardening blog, I suppose I'd better be a bit more organised about my postings! First off, here's a brief history of my veg-growing efforts.

I started growing a few salad vegetables in my back garden in 2005 - just tomatoes, garlic and a bit of lettuce. However I'm on a typical modern housing estate, i.e. mostly rubble and compacted subsoil, with no more than a few inches of topsoil in most places. I considered getting an allotment, but the waiting lists here in Cambridge are generally very long.

In the spring of 2006 I started keeping a detailed gardening diary. By July I decided I really needed an allotment, so I chatted up the elderly secretary of the local society and got one within a few days! It's only small (about 8 x 8.5m of usable growing space), but enough for us given that we both work full-time. I also bought an eglu and a couple of chickens, having decided that, since the chances of moving somewhere more rural were slim, I might as well live the Good Life here in suburbia :)

In spring 2007 I realised that I would have a lot more success raising my salads in the garden (the allotment being too far away to keep a close eye on delicate plants) if I used raised beds, so I bought a couple of Link-a-Bord 2m x 1m beds and filled them with compost. Back on the allotment, we had a lot of wet weather and also underestimated the amount of time and effort needed to maintain the plot - but I refuse to give up, and we've hung onto it by the skin of our teeth!

This year we've been trying to get up to the allotment more often, and the plot is gradually taking shape. Yields are still modest, but given the minimal time and effort we put in, they're not too bad - and the raised beds in the garden have been a big success (when I can keep the chickens out!). I've improved our rotation plan in order to keep as much of the ground in production for as much of the year as possible, and I'm looking forward to eventually being able to grow enough veg for all our needs. Well, apart from maincrop potatoes, which require too much space, and peppers, which are difficult to grow in the quantities we like to eat!

I have two Link-a-Bord raised beds in my back garden, each 1m x 2m x 15cm, plus a narrow brick-edged border built against the conservatory. These have been a great improvement over growing my salad vegetables directly in the ground, since the soil in my garden is shallow and rather poor quality. The main problem is keeping my bantams out - even with bird netting strung all the way around the beds, they are quick to attack any plant whose leaves grow close enough to peck at through the fence!

So far this year I have grown:

• Flat-leaved parsley and coriander - self-seeded from last year, and very prolific, but bolted in late spring :(


• Carrots "Early Nantes" - sown under Coke-bottle cloches in early February, these have been cropping steadily through late spring and into summer


• Spinach "Matador" - sown in March, and provided several meals' worth of leaves in April and May


• Courgette "Albarello di Sarzana" - not too prolific, but we get a steady supply of good-sized pale green fruit


• Lettuce "Parris* Island" - a nice crisp cos that hasn't bolted yet (fingers crossed!)


• Tomatoes "Ferline" and "Sub Arctic Plenty" - just starting to set fruit, not helped by a wet June


• Garlic "Purple Heritage Moldovan" and "Chesnok Wight" - now drying in my conservatory. I grew these around the tomatoes, and they seem to have kept the pests at bay very successfully. The bulbs are modest in size, but there are over two dozen of them, so should keep us going for a while


• Ruby chard - very attractive, with an earthy taste similar to beetroot leaves (the chickens love it too!)

There's more planned for the autumn, including more carrots ("Rothild" this time), bulb fennel, pak choi, spring onions, and of course lots of salad leaves!

* No, that's not a typo. Apparently the lettuce is named after Parris Island, off the coast of North Carolina, not the capital of France

Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)

Yesterday I took down the bundles of garlic that had been hanging in my conservatory to dry. They had been there almost a week, having been harvested just after the full moon (best time for lifting roots for storage) so I thought it was time to progress to stage two: stripping and further drying.

The first part turned out to be quite messy, so I'm glad I did it outdoors. Basically you have to rub off the driest outer layers without exposing the individual cloves - easier said than done with some of them! However the reward is that you end up with lovely clean bulbs, just like the ones in the shops.

The bulbs now need another two weeks' drying in a cool dry airy place (not easy in this weather!). Unfortunately we don't have a garage or cool shed, so I will have to put them in the utility room and hope for the best!

I've been reading other people's veg-growing blogs lately, and I wish I'd started sooner. It's very gratifying to know that I'm not the only one struggling with the dreadful, unreliable British weather, erratic seed germination, etc!

Particular favourites at the moment are Vegmonkey, for showing how much can be done in a small space, and Soilman for his self-deprecating humour :)

Look who I found trundling around my back garden at 8pm this evening:

It's not a great photo, but I didn't want to frighten the little chap too much and the light was already getting dim enough to need flash. I don't think it's the same one I saw at seven o'clock the other morning, marching determinedly across the lawn with a big bundle of grass in its mouth (presumably a female building a nest?), as it was huge and this fellow was only about average-sized.

Anyway, thanks to the bantam ladies for alerting me to his presence - they don't like unfamiliar creatures in their territory, but at least hedgehogs are safe from attack (unlike mice)!

I was chatting on the phone to Richard last night (he's in Scotland on business), and he suggested we try potatoes in barrels next year, to avoid the possible blight problems at the allotments. I'm game, since it gives me more allotment space for other crops, but it means totally rethinking my rotation plan - again!

I'll just have to make sure he knows that watering them is his job, since it was his idea ;)

July is a transitional time: on the one hand you're starting to harvest a lot of the spring sowings, and on the other, it's time to get sowing again to ensure that you have veg into the winter and following spring.

Looking back at the year so far, here are my successes and failures (items marked with an asterisk are my first attempt at growing this kind of plant):

Successes:

• Broad beans - OK, but need more work on keeping blackfly at bay. I really want to try overwintering them this coming year, as they do well on our allotment site


• Cabbage and cauli - OK so far (fingers crossed!)


• Carrots - grew really well in the raised bed, though they could have done with being just a bit more thinned


• Coriander - self-seeded last year, and this spring I had so much of it, I was giving away big bunches to the neighbours


• Courgettes - OK. They never over-produce for me; maybe I don't feed or water them enough?


• Garlic - fantastic! Decent crop despite the wet weather, and my biggest bulbs yet!


• Onions - planted a bit late, but coming along nicely


• Parsley - survived right through the winter without protection, and after cutting right back to a stump, it's flowering, so should self-seed


• Peas - OK. Not sure I like the variety I grew all that much (tiny petit pois, hard to catch at the perfect moment), so maybe try something different next year


• Squash* - a half-success, really. Only one fruit, though it looks very healthy. Maybe it needed more feeding and/or water?


• Tomatoes, outdoor - doing very well compared to last year (when they all died of blight), though I should have staked them earlier

Failures:

• Asparagus* - the bed I planted in spring 2007 hasn't thrived, probably a combination of very wet weather last year and insufficient weeding. Perversely, the row that I dumped some waste soil on has done better than the rest - still rubbish, but at least it hasn't died altogether!


• Celeriac* - hasn't done well on this first attempt. I suspect it needs a lot more watering, so in my new rotation system I'm going to put it in with runner beans, which also like damper conditions


• Chillies - went really well, then I needed the cage (used to protect young plants from my cats) to break one of my bantams out of her broody spell, so I put the chilli plant outside and it got battered by a rainstorm :(


• Cucumbers* - started well, but then the chickens scratched up the plants :(


• French beans - no luck so far. Need to take more precautions against slugs! (Summer sowings in pots are coming along nicely, however)


• Leeks* - were doing well, but I wasn't able to put them in on time because the garlic was slow to mature, and they faded. Replacing with plug plants this year, and will refrain from sowing leeks quite so early next year!


• Peppers - see cucumbers


• Potatoes - possible blight and a poor crop. Next year I'm going to try them in a barrel on the patio, where I can put a raincover over to reduce the chance of blight


• Runner beans - started well, but died back in the hot spell at the end of May. One plant made a good come-back, but the crop is of course limited. Think I will try digging a trench under the wigwam next year and filling with organic material.


• Sweetcorn* - disaster! My cat ate the first batch of young plants, and of the direct-sown ones, only one survived the slugs :(


• Tomatoes, indoor* - grown as insurance against another wet summer, but keeping them watered has not been easy (my conservatory gets very hot), and they haven't flourished