Small Plot? No Problem!

As it's just too hot to write at the moment, I've been tending my garden and thinking about what to plant next. I'd really like an allotment, as our garden is too small to fit in many bulky, slow-growing crops such as raspberries or even cabbages. So I phoned the secretary of the local allotment society on the off-chance, and it turns out that they have one or two abandoned plots that might suit - I'm going round there tomorrow to have a look round :)

It would be great if we could get one - my gardening research has also got me interested in keeping chickens, but Richard isn't keen on ceding garden space unless we have an allotment to grow our veg on.

I just got a call from the allotment secretary to say that the 3-pole plot I looked at (approx 10m x 10m) is ours! I'm going round to collect the gate key this afternoon, so we can make a start on clearing it asap. It's overgrown with grass and poppies, but nothing too drastic - and it has raspberry canes already! (No fruit on them, though, so they might be old or were just cut back at the wrong time of year.)

Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)

Here in Cambridgeshire, at any rate! The weather is fine and sunny, and the allotment calls. On Monday I did a huge batch of digging (carefully, so as not to injure my back, which is recovering well) - well, huge for someone who's 5' 2" and not exactly athletic! OK, only half a veg bed, each of which is about 1.5m x 3m (yes, I know, I freely mix metric and Imperial measurements!). Today I did the other half, albeit taking it more slowly, and planted it up with garlic and shallots, leaving space for leeks and onions to be sown later.

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

Not much writing this weekend - it's the Easter break, the weather's been lovely, and there was loads to do on the allotment. We've finished digging another bed, so tomorrow I'll sow some carrots and some more spring onions (this being the first half of the waning phase, which is good for roots). Roll on summer!

Moon phase: Week 2 (waxing)

Cleared the Roots bed today, and found a surprisingly good batch of carrots! I had been a bit worried that the soil on the allotment was too heavy for root vegetables, but on the other hand that side of the plot was well dug in the spring.

So, here they are, and yes, they are supposed to be yellow, not orange! The variety is "Jaune Obtuse de Doubs", from The Real Seed Catalogue. They're not quite as sweet and tasty as I'd hoped, but that might be down to the horribly wet summer. Still, I'm as pleased as punch to have grown my first carrots!

Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)

Finally got around to going up to the allotment today for the first time this year *blush*. Unsurprisingly, there was not much left of my neglected brassicas, though a couple of them had turned out to be the "Ottobrino" romanesco that I sowed in the summer. Is it a broccoli? Is it a cauliflower? Nobody seems to be entirely sure - but anyway I picked one decent head and we had it with dinner - yum!

Today was mild and sunny, so I got the year's outdoor sowings off to an early start with some "Early Nantes 2" carrots. I've sown them in small patches and covered them with home-made mini-cloches made from 2l coke bottles with the bottoms cut off. Not very elegant, but they will warm the soil during the day and protect the new seedlings from frost at night. Then I sat in the sun, watching the chickens :)

Moon phase: Week 2 (waxing)

I took the day off work today, since the weather forecast was for sun all day, and there's still lots to be done on the allotment. In fact I ended up spending the whole day up there! I've been revising my rotation plan, and so some of the beds need relocating slightly, as well as clearing some previously unused ground.

Most of the day was spent digging Bed 6, which took a lot longer than I had hoped. Although the weather stayed dry, there was a cold easterly wind and the sun lurked behind the clouds until mid-afternoon. I also edged Bed 6 and the near side of Bed 5, after relocating the broad bean plants, which were where the path needed to go.

After that I planted the young peas in Bed 6 and sowed a second row in situ, and constructed a support/bird protection out of canes and chicken wire. These are a fairly dwarf petit pois called "Waverex", so they won't need anything elaborate by way of support. Finally I sowed my remaining broad bean seeds in the leftover space, and a short row of "Munchen Bier" radish in Bed 5 alongside the runner beans. As I'm growing these for the seed pods rather than the roots, it seemed sensible to sow them in a "fruit" week.

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

I went up to the allotment early, as it was going to be a sunny day, though it was already pretty hot by 8.30!

An unexpected bonus was the delivery to the site of a large pile of woodchippings, thanks to one of the plotholder's whose neighbours were having some leylandii ripped out. With the help of Jim from the next plot, I was able to lay paths between beds 3 & 4, 5 & 6 and 6 & 7, and fill my barrow with enough to do another one (probably between 7 & 8). Suddenly the whole plot is looking remarkably neat and tidy!

Although this is a "Leaf" week, I'm a bit behind so I've been planting anything that needs going in. That includes a load of red onion sets ("Red Baron") I ordered late and which took a long time to arrive. Between the three blocks of onions (planted in rows across the bed) I planted out a dozen or so of the beetroot that I've been growing in modules, and a few celeriac.

I also hoed the potatoes and earthed them up a bit, and weeded the garlic, peas and beans. All in all, a good morning's work!

This evening I thinned the spinach in raised bed 2, and we ate the thinnings in a pasta sauce - our first proper crop of the year :)

Moon phase: Week 2 (waxing)

The potatoes on our allotment are looking extremely unhappy, with leaves turning yellow and brown - it could just be the weather, but I'm very concerned that, given how warm and rainy it's been, it could be an early attack of blight. It seems unlikely this early in the year, especially since the variety I chose, "Orla", is supposed to be quite blight-resistant, and none of the other plots that I've looked at seems to be affected, but then again a lot of the older plotholders probably aren't using organic methods, so their spuds could have been sprayed. However I can't see what else would make the plants look so ill so, just to be on the safe side, I've cut away all the ill-looking foliage, and we'll be throwing it in the black bin so as to keep any infection out of the compost. I've left the healthy lower leaves, so the plants have a chance of feeding the tubers a bit longer - fingers crossed!

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

Last week's remedial action seems to have stopped the rot, as it were - the remaining potato foliage is looking healthy :)

Just to be on the safe side, though, we dug up two of the three rows of new potatoes. The yield is predictably low, but they should give us a few spud dinners!

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.

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!

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

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

It's a Leaves and Shoots week this week (no Lynne Truss jokes, please!), so I've been sowing my autumn and winter salads in the raised beds. Rocket, broccoli raab, chicory Rosso di Treviso and spring onions have gone in so far; next up is the pak choi, when I've cleared out the remains of the lettuce. Hopefully my plug-plant brassicas and leeks for the allotment will turn up this week as well - perfect timing!

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

I went up to the allotment on Tuesday morning, not having been for a few days, and discovered that the pests had been very busy in my absence. Worst hit were the "München Bier" radishes, which I was growing for the seed pods (right). So, no trendy stirfries for me! I pulled all the plants out and squished the offenders underfoot before throwing them in the compost bin.

Luckily the radishes were the first to attract the cabbage white butterflies' attention, so the caterpillars on my cabbages and romanesco weren't so big and voracious. On the other hand the autumn brassicas also had whitefly and a few aphids. I removed what I could, then after work Richard and I went round to our local garden centre and picked up some pyrethrum spray and a big micromesh tunnel, and took them to the allotment to escalate the War on Terror. I try to only use sprays as a last resort, and really I should have netted the plants better to prevent this happening - but it's easy to be wise after the fact.

The other major pest on the allotment is slugs. Not just little keel slugs, but honking great Arion ater, those three-inch-long black fellows. I had to eject one from the heart of one of my red cabbages - the chances of us getting any brassicas this autumn are looking increasingly slim :(

Not to be daunted, however, I have deployed a Slug-X trap baited with diluted dregs of raspberry vodka (no beer in the house, and you can't buy alcohol before 8am, even for slug-killing purposes). I put it a good foot or two from the netted cabbages, so that it lures them away rather than to them. I've also put a ring of fine woodshavings around each plant as a slug barrier - a recent trial in "Grow Your Own" found that bran worked very well, but I couldn't find any in my local Tesco and I didn't want to wait for a trip into town. So, I'm trying out their "Value Small Animal Bedding" as an alternative. Fingers crossed!

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

Leaves and Shoots week is drawing to a close, and the weather forecast for the weekend is looking grim, so I worked from home today so that I could fit in a session at the allotment.

At lunchtime I sowed some pots of herbs indoors: lots of coriander; sweet, Greek and Thai basil; plus mint, dill, marjoram, chives and lemon balm. The cats are now shut out of the conservatory until I can work out how to stop them jumping up onto the shelves!

The big job, though, was planting out the plug-plants that arrived yesterday. Two beds had to be forked over and raked flat again, which took longer than I had anticipated. Although the summer's hoeing has kept the annual weeds down, the perennials keep creeping back (the little sods!), so there was a fair bit of bindweed and couch grass roots to get out. It's like painting the Forth Bridge...

Eventually, though, I got to the fun part - planting! One bed now has two rows of 20 Musselburgh leeks; the other has a row of seven PSB and another of eight "Nero di Toscana" kale. Now more careful than ever about pests, I have the brassicas under my two standard net tunnels, and the leeks are surrounded by chickenwire to keep the pigeons off.

The plot's starting to look halfway decent - if we can get the old raspberry canes out this autumn and the perennial bed (asparagus and soft fruit) sorted out, it might finally start looking like a real working allotment instead of a half-abandoned one!

N.B. Today's title is from the old music-hall song made famous by Marie Lloyd, for those of you too young to get the reference :)

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

This weekend had a Gallic flavour: harvesting red onions on Saturday and preparing the garlic for storage on Sunday.

The onions are a bit small, but then they did go in late, and red onions in the shops are seldom large. It was also a bit early in the moon cycle for harvesting roots, but with rain forecast for the rest of the week, I didn't really have a choice :( Now they are drying on the slatted shelves in my conservatory, since outdoors is obviously not an option.

On Sunday I decided I was fed up of having a box of garlic "decorating" the living room, so I set about making it into plaits and grappes. However the hardnecks were a bit too stiff for making grappes; either I left them to dry too long, or I'm doing something else wrong! Plaiting the softnecks was fiddly but rather satisfying - just a pity that the softnecks all turned out rather small, so my plaits are miniature ones :)

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

I haven't blogged about my allotment for a while, mainly because there hasn't been much happening - I've been weeding and cutting the grass, and picking the snails and caterpillar eggs off the brassicas, but all is pretty quiet on the harvesting front. However yesterday I couldn't resist digging up these beauties, since it was the right time of the month.

They are "Chantenay", from the Organic Catalogue, and reputed to be very tasty, so I'm looking forward to trying them. Sadly they represent the whole of my carrot crop for the allotment - most seem to have been mown down by slugs before they got going (my crop of Early Nantes in the garden was much better, though the individual carrots were a lot smaller). The biggest of these is 16cm which, given their girth, makes for a pretty hefty carrot!

Moon phase: Week 2 (waxing)

Today I've been sowing onions, spring onions and broad beans indoors, and it's been sunny enough to tempt me outside! I cleared the spent plants from one of my raised beds, and dug up the baby carrots that had been sitting there over the winter.

We also went to the allotment to pick a few kale leaves to have with our sausages tonight, so I took some pictures with my camera phone. Here's the leek bed (plants bought in from ebay):

and here's the day's harvest:

Not bad for a relative beginner!

Click on the link below for more photos...

Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)

Checked on my seedlings today, and they are mostly coming along nicely.

The onion trial trays are germinating at a good rate, with the first seedlings showing at around 14 days and many modules having 80-100% germination after 21 days. The one-week-old tray is obviously not showing anything yet!

All the germinated onions have gone into the cage so that the cats don't nibble them, and I'm going to start hardening the oldest tray off next weekend when the New Moon comes round again.

The spring onions have been more variable: "Crimson Forest" has done very well, but the "Ramrod" not so much, perhaps because the packet was a bit old.

Elsewhere, a couple of broad beans are poking above the compost. No show yet from the celeriac, and only one "chitted" parsnip seed has a root. A couple have gone mouldy (too warm? too damp?), so I think a re-sowing straight into compost may be required after the next Full Moon.

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!!

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!

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 :)

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...