Our allotment's blog

Some photos

2007-06-06T18:46:00.001+01:00

Having now got back into the allotmenteering (and, perhaps, Blogging) spirit, I've been spending quite a lot of time down there over the last couple of weekends getting everything back into shape. It wasn't too bad, but it had been a little neglected earlier in the year.
As well as digging and general muck clearing, I've been diligent about protecting our bumper crop of raspberries from the birds. I've never really bothered with this before, and we've always had a few raspberries to try. However, this is the first year for which it appears that we're going to get lots, and the Allotment Uber Gaffer has warned us that the pigeons (grr - pigeons) are broadening their appetites and becoming ever more voracious. I've also been very careful to build a firm tent, rather than draping the net directly over the bushes; this after the AuG also warned us of finding bits of dead blackbird chick in the net if we did the latter. Apparently they get tangled up thinking they can still get at the fruit, then the pigeons (grr - pigeons) swoop in and mangle them.

While I was in a netting mood, kale and sprouts went in. That's spuds in the background, that is. While we're on the subject, the Pink Fir Apples are coming along nicely. A bit munched by lugs, but all-in-all not too bad.
And, finally, the usual plot overview. It all looks a bit bare, but the plants are a-coming...

Shed porn

2007-05-29T07:43:00.000+01:00

Blogs always look better with a photo at the top, so here's an entirely opportunistic photo of the shed I've been building at the bottom of the garden. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Yes, this does have tenuous links to the allotment.

People in the office have been asking why it's taken such a long time - I started last August. Now they can see the answer. It's not because the shed is particularly complicated or flashy. It's because I'm a tedious detail-monkey. Yes, those are fully working sash windows. Yes, I did make them myself. Yes, all the shiplap is screwed in place, not nailed.

Anyway, now it's all done apart from the paint job (to be painted in Holkham linseed oil paint, colour 'parchment') and some barge boards to go round the roof. I've been scouring the neighbourhood for designs in the vernacular. If I can work out how, I'll take some photos and host a poll here for what gets built.

Return of the Native

2007-05-28T18:35:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been four months since my last update, and everything has changed. In just four months I've been plunged into blogging obscurity. My Google pagerank has plummeted from four to zero, my Blogger login has been rendered obsolete (luckily I have a Google login) and the text editor looks a little - just a little - different to it used to. On the plus side, my last post got seven comments - thanks to all those who left something.

So, why have I been away? Well, unfortunately there's no great life changing experience by which to justify my absence. I didn't write for a long time simply because I couldn't think of anything to write. It's as easy as that. As you can probably tell, by the fact that I'm rambling, I can't think of much to write now either.

This year's allotmenteering efforts got off to a slow start. Some digging happened in March, but April saw the site come to a halt. The early period of dry, hot weather baked the soil to concrete, making digging impossible and sowing futile. April, therefore, was a month in which to complete my super luxury shed (mentioned in an earlier post) in the garden. And, no, mentioning my shed doesn't mean I've come over all lifestyle in the last four months. This was, and remains, an allotment blog. The shed is linked because, as I wrote before, the lame B&Q too-short-to-stand-in, too-flimsy-to-trust and too-rubbish-to-mention effort, with its cracked plastic glass and ill fitting door, that came with the house is now off to the plot as a combined tool store and weak-tea-on-a-rainy-day emporium.

May has seen a return to form. April's hiatus meant that the first part of the month was focused on clearing weeds. Luckily the situation hadn't got out of hand. Doubly luckily, I'd invested in a chillington hoe, the bully most likely to steal the pocket money of all the other, lamer, tools in the shed.

With the land clear, we've been planting in earnest. We have three types of potato in; a standard second early and maincrop variety, and Pink Fir Apples. Other allotment bloggers seem to rave about the latter, so I thought I'd give them a go and stuck ten tubers in. They seem popular with the slugs which probably bodes well for flavour but poorly for use-ability.

Edwin Tucker let us down with onions, with their red onions failing and the bag of white onions they sent us being half rotten but arriving too late to do anything about it. Therefore, we have shallots and garlic but a pretty paltry array of white onions.

We did have some Pak Choi and some Cos lettuce coming on, but the got eaten by the slugs. No matter, May is the demoralising month with the slugs on the rampage every night. Chin up, plant more seeds, start again. There's a good row of carrots (Nantes) and a few scorzonera too.

There is a good crop of grain amaranths and quinoa coming on, both sets of seeds from The Real Seed Company (link to the right). For both the plants are about 6 inches high and growing well. We've also got a job lot of last year's specialities oca, ulloco (yes, I know I said I wasn't going to grow them again but the Real Seed Company tempted me) and yacon.

The garden is full of brassica seedlings, sweet potatoes and squash plants waiting to go out. The plot is clear and ready for them; it's now just a matter of getting around to it, and judging the optimum balance between the weather being too wet and slug friendly and it being too dry and requiring watering every night. If I have my way that balance will be considered struck next weekend, and the lot of them'll be out. "They've got two choices", as my dad always says.

Today has been a day of planting seeds. I am trying more than in previous years to get salad crops going. The beds have been diligently cleared (no hiding places for slugs) and the soil raked to a fine tilth. The following are all in:

Swiss Chard (started off in pots at home in previous years)
Red Para Cress
Chicory (Palla Rossa)
Florence Fennel (Zefa Fino)
Beetroot (Detroit 2 Bolivar)
Spinach (Matador)
Flat leaf Parsley
French Bean (Slenderette)
Lettuce (Paris Island Cos)
Onion (White Lisbon)
Pea (Green Shaft)

There aren't any photos to accompany this post because the plot was really busy this afternoon and, frankly, I was too shy to take them. However, if you're lucky there might be some in the near future...

Egg mysteries

2007-01-11T21:35:00.000Z

There was a brief spell of good weather on the weekend, if good can be defined as "not raining", so I decided to go down to the plot to do some general tidying up. Sow thistles are sprouting up everywhere, and they're ugly little blighters that are best nipped in the bud.

After having cleared the worst of them, I turned my attentions to a little digging. That's when I found the buried egg.

Avid readers (humour me and pretend they exist) will know that I love a good allotment mystery. 2006 saw the Case of the Disappearing Brassicas (solved), the Case of the Cat Poo (solved) and the Case of the Southmead Egg Leaver (unsolved). I thought this was the first case of 2007, with the similarities to the Case of the Southmead Egg Leaver not going unnoticed.

After a few fanciful moments spent wondering if this was a dinosaur's egg (take it home, incubate a T-Rex?) a quick chat to the Allotment Uber Gaffer solved the mystery. It's a goose egg that accidentally got imported with the horse manure. People have been finding quite a few of them, the foxes having been caught moving them around and burying them.

I'll end with a plot overview photo, as there hasn't been one for a while.

Allotment awareness

2007-01-11T07:48:00.000Z

Jane has post an interesting comment in response to my earlier post about Bristol's allotment strategy. One point that particularly struck me was about the advertising of allotments.

I've never seen any! In my experience it's up to the individual to initiate the whole thing - the potential plot holder has to decide they want an allotment, then has to have the information seeking skills to delve into the depths of the city council to work out the application process.

In that case, there must be a strong element of word-of-mouth in the uptake of allotments. So, no wonder there are disparities between communities! It makes me wonder how many neighbourhoods are seething about the piece of derelict scrub land in their midst, completely unaware that it's theirs for the taking?

(Actually, a person-in-the-know has told me that not even city council knows where all the allotments are, but that's another story.)

Anyway, Jane's comment has made me notice that advertising and promotion are conspicuous by their absence in the whole strategy. I've already sent one tranche of feedback to the city council (to be published later) - I now feel another one coming on!

The allotment annexe

2007-01-07T21:44:00.000Z

Well, what with the political thread about Bristol's allotment strategy and the fact that it stopped raining for long enough today for me to visit the plot, I now have a bit of a backlog of vaguely post-worthy material (if you set the bar of expectation low enough). However, the first thing that comes to mind is that the allotment annexe - the extra couple of beds the Uber Gaffer gave us during our short fall in the summer - has been under represented on this site.

At the moment it looks like the photo above; full of spring cauliflowers and leeks, and in need of a going over with a hoe.

We've never had much success growing cauliflowers. We got curds when we first tried about a decade ago on our first plot when we lived in Oxford. However, as soon as we cut the curds open they were full of cabbage white caterpillars.

We've never managed to get cauliflowers to work in Bristol. This year's crop is the most promising yet - actually, that's true of all brassicas. As they're a spring variety, we're keeping our fingers crossed that if we do get curds they might even turn out to be bug free.

We have a lot of leeks - I think we ended planting a couple of hundred - but they're all teeny-weeny. I suspect the very dry summer and the fact we were pretty late planting them out didn't help. Nonetheless, they taste good.

Bristol's allotment strategy

2007-01-06T18:11:00.000Z

I've been reading a post on Jane Perrone's blog about the loss of allotment sites in Manchester. I haven't delved into the details behind the story, but the topic started me thinking about Bristol's allotment strategy. The latest version, to cover the period 2007-2012, is currently in consultation. Superficially, Bristol's approach seems to have some similarities to Manchester's story.

The current strategy (2001-2006) and the new proposals both appear to share the core theme of divesting poorly used or derelict sites, ploughing some of the proceeds into improvements for popular sites. The council's record on this is pretty good. During the period 1999-2005 the council sold off 7 sites (or parts thereof), netting a little under £6.5M, 38% of which was returned to investment in allotments. The improvements are plain to see. For example, the site our plot is on (Ashley Down) has new, high security, palisade fencing, new haulingways and there's talk of a complete overhaul of the water supply.

This investment seems to have paid off. Looking at the 2003 to 2005 period, there appear to be just over 800 new long term (i.e. persevering for the two years measured) tenants. Combining the increased number of tenancies with the reduced number of plots, occupancy rates are now up twenty percentage points to 73%, when compared to 2000. Again, anecdotally, the Ashley Down site has been transformed over three year period we've been there from being half filled with brambles to fully cultivated with a waiting list.

The picture above concentrates on the allotment strategy from a "return on investment" perspective. I'm very sympathetic to this. We live, after all, in a society driven by financial targets. Recent news stories have made it clear that the NHS is expected to make difficult decisions to manage its budget; allotments are small fry in comparison. Selling off unused sites makes a lot of sense.

However, there are two sides to this story. The entry referred to on Jane Perrone's blog takes a more personal approach. She discusses, for example, the fate of plot holders on little used sites who are moved when the site is sold off. As well as the new locations offered not always being suitable, simply offering an equivalent sized piece of land ignores the investment the tenant has made in their existing plot. Years of cultivation, soil improvement and the like can't be moved. Then, of course, once it's gone it's gone. It's very easy to go from allotment site to housing estate, but that's not true of the other way. Irreversible decisions to reduce capacity shouldn't be taken lightly; that's something the railway industry seems to be learning.

Looking at the lists Bristol's strategy documents it appears that under utilised sites tend to be in the poorer areas of the city, although that's certainly not universally true. Yes, having an allotment is somehow trendy again. Yes, there are plenty of stories about waiting lists stretching out for years. But, again anecdotally, my feeling is that it's a bit of a middle class phenomenon.

Does this indicate that the under utilised plots are simply in the wrong place? If they are, the strategy of selling them off makes a lot of sense. They are of no benefit to solving the much publicised long waiting lists, and their dereliction suggests that the local communities could better use the money and space for something else.

Or, does it indicate a lack of foresight by the authorities in promoting allotments to all? I don't want to go too far down the path of crass generalisations about demographics and the role allotments could play in improving access to - and knowledge of the importance of - fruit and vegetables in poorer neighbourhoods, but I can't help my thoughts heading loosely in that direction.

I want to avoid going off on a social comment tangent. My basic point is: Which comes first - the chicken or the egg? Should the council work to drum up demand where there's currently very little, or accept that some locations are a lost cause (for want of a better phrase), get rid of them and reinvest where allotments are winning?

I'm somewhat ambivalent. I can see the case for both points of view.

There's more to write on this, and I may have to revisit this post when I've got my thoughts better formed.

Christmas cheer

2006-12-25T12:39:00.000Z

Ok, I know it's a bit sad writing a blog entry on Christmas day, but the facts are that the Allotmentboss's Boss is downstairs preparing food (and implicitly inviting me not to hover in the kitchen) and I'm upstairs testing out a USB mug warmer I got as a present [1]. So, while I have free hands I might as well.

Anyway, on with the allotment related news. This is, after all, an allotment blog.

First, there's the Brussels Sprouts. Most years we grow the variety Groninger, but this year we tried Wellington. I'm not impressed. You see, I'm the sort that likes bullet hard, tightly packed ball bearings of sprout. Wellington are anything but this. They're like little loose flower heads. I'm not sure whether its the variety or the warm weather we've been having - although we have had the frosts that sprouts are always better after - but either way its back to Groninger next year.
Next, there's the horseradish. As I've written here before, I'm partial to Jerusalem artichoke and horseradish soup. So, I dug both up yesterday to make this year's first batch.

Last year I tried grating the horseradish by hand. I'm still surprised that I came out of the experience alive, even if I have got a bit of squint now and still get flashbacks. So, this year I thought I'd try using a blender to grate the stuff. Big mistake. You see, you get nothing while the thing's whizzing away, but as soon as you take the lid off it's obvious the pain has just been stored up. The ABB found me cowering in the corner, half grated horseradish dashed across the work surface and down the floor, whimpering "make it stop".

All of this makes me wonder what was going through the minds of the first humans to try horseradish. I mean, there must have been some stage of experimentation when people didn't know what plants were edible. Surely, when trying out new plants to eat, you wouldn't persevere with horseradish? What went through that Australopithecene entrepreneur's mind - surely, in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, the sheer pain of preparing horseradish would make it a "nah, I don't reckon we could eat that"?

Still, it makes nice sauce.

Anyway, that's enough of that. I've got a day of drinking and swearing at the Queen to get on with.

[1] I used to be a bit of a freelance scientist when I was young enough to have a full head of hair. So, armed with the knowledge that (pure) water has a specific heat capacity of 4.2 kJmol^-1, there's 100ml of water in the cup and the stated power of the warmer is 2.5W, I ought to be able to work out its efficiency using my home-brew thermometer. Life's not all sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, you know - although at times it would be nice if just some of it was.

What we did on our holidays

2006-11-27T17:27:00.000Z

Quite specifically, what we did on our holidays was wait until it started to rain heavily, then ran outside and shovelled shit.

It all started yesterday. We were down on the allotment collecting a rather fantabulous looking January King cabbage (ok, two months early, but who's counting?) and some kale when we spied the Allotment Uber Gaffer up the path. I made the sign of "could you get me a load of horse manure?" He made the sign of "I've already got you a load over there", which was odd seeing as we hadn't yet asked him for one. This either meant the AuG had had some sort of prophetic vision calling him to get us some poo in advance of our asking, or he'd got a general load in and we were the first people to ask. We decided to plump for the latter as the most likely explanation. This meant the manure had to be moved quickly; it wouldn't be without precedent for the same poo to end up being given to half a dozen different people.

Luckily, the Allotmentboss's boss and I had taken today off, for no constructive reason other than we both had holiday to squander before the end of the year. We set off with our wheelbarrow (freshly pumped up tyre) and shovel just after midday. About one hundred yards from the house it started to rain. It was light drizzle; I wasn't going back. About two hundred yards from the house it started to rain heavily. It was just a passing shower; I wasn't going back. About three hundred yards from the house it was still raining heavily. I was already soaked; there was no point going back.

The ABB quickly found shelter as soon as we got to the allotment site, delegating all non-managerial input to the poo moving exercise to me. In pouring rain I started loading up the first wheelbarrow full, squelching and slipping as bubbles of water-manure slurry gurgled out from under my shoes.

By about the fourth wheelbarrow full I'd got into some sort of rhythm. I was forewarned about the little ha-ha ledge in the path that would tip half the dung out as the wheelbarrow bounced over it. I knew of the slippery mud slopes of death, waiting to send the unwary directly on to their arses, that went down the side of our plot to the lower beds.

With a rhythm in place, I had some time to think. My mind flashed back to my thirteenth birthday, being called outside by my father to help him empty the semi-rotten contents of the compost heap into a tractor trailer. It was pretty clear that once you were a teenager birthdays just weren't special any more. As a thirty-something, that lack of distinction now extends to holidays.

An hour and half and fourteen wheelbarrows' worth later, the job was done. Most beds have now got a pile of manure on, ready to be spread at a rate of about one heavily loaded big wheelbarrow per two square metres. I don't know if that will be enough, but by that stage even I could smell that I smelt bad. And, hanging around for too long with trousers sticking to one's skin, soaked to the knees with horse poo, has limited merits.

Brrr - chilly

2006-11-05T17:41:00.000Z

I was enjoying a quick cup of tea before work on Thursday morning when my eye happened to catch the tomatoes out on the patio. Given the season, they hadn't been doing well recently. However, something much more dramatic had clearly happened overnight: The tomatoes had thrown in the towel, called it a year and died. I opened the patio door - brrr - and peered out. Yes, I could see my breath. Yes, there was ice over the tray of water on the patio. Yes, the lawn was white.

Yes, it had frosted overnight.

No, I hadn't harvested all of the tender vegetables yet.

I couldn't do anything about it on a work day, so the veg. had to endure another two nights of frost. Yesterday morning I was up good and early, equipment in hand to mount a rescue mission.

The allotment was an apocalyptic vision of vegetable carnage. Those that were supposed to have lived - the kale, the sprouts - had lived. Those of a nervous disposition had died. The sweet potato vines were mush, the yacon a few blackened stalks and the Jerusalem artichokes stripped woody stems.

Luckily, things weren't as bad as they first appeared. Digging into the ground, the frosts hadn't gone that deep. The tender root crops had survived.

If, by some miracle of poor judgement, this blog has a regular reader, they'll know that I've been trying out some unusual vegetables from Simon Hickmott's book of the same name. They all came out of it, thus:

Sweet potato - Beauregard "improved" (Thompson and Morgan)
A bit of a cheat this one. It's in the book, so I can count it, even though this is the third year I've grown sweet potatoes. Once again, they were a success. Interestingly, the tubers grew much closer to the stem than normal, making them much easier to harvest. This might be something to do with the weather this year, but I suspect the fact that I had them growing in a bucketful of home made compost in otherwise awful thick orange clay had something to do with it. I can imagine the roots venturing to the edge of the compost and saying "oh no! not for me" in a comedy mincing voice, before retreating to safety.

Of the two varieties of sweet potato that are on offer here in the UK, Beauregard tastes the best, seems to be the most pest resistant, seems to be joint first for yield, stores the best and produces the most consistent and usable sized tubers. To be honest, I can't think of any benefits of the alternative, T56.

Sweet potato - T56 (T&M, OGC)
The poor relation of Beauregard, but the only way I could get my hands on the latter this year, given my home slipping attempts had failed, was to buy ten of these and get five Beauregard free.

T56 is better than nothing, but the taste isn't spectacular and you do end up with a hotch-potch of finger sized tubers and rugby balls. On the plus side, I gave a few slips away to some friends - sweet potato growing virgins - earlier in the year and they both succeeded in growing a crop. Maybe they'll get into the habit. (Actually, that makes me sound like some sort of sweet potato slip dealer.)
I've made good and sure that I get my own Beauregard plants next year by taking some very early cuttings from this year's plants.
Oca (Edulis and Unusual Herbs and Edibles)
The oca started well, but got knocked back by the dry July. They were in a bed with ulloco (more of which below) and leek seedlings, so there was no real ground cover. The soil yawned wide gaps as the month got drier, and the oca wilted. Nonetheless, they bounced back with aplomb in August. The Allotmentboss's boss made a comment about the yield per unit area when compared to potatoes. I made an ill formed and ill informed reply about promoting diversity rather than monoculture. The yield isn't great, but it's not bad either.

Overall, I'd say oca is a bit of a winner. The leaves are like a pleasantly sharp version of sorrel and can be eaten in abundance. The tubers are crispy, but with a lot of moisture. They smell and taste a little of rhubarb crumble, again with the oxalic acid taste of sorrel. Oca is also a pretty plant, with its small hairy leaves and pink stems.Ulloco (Graines Baumaux)
These plants never really got going. I think I ordered them too late to give them any real chance of growing in the short English season, and the drought in July knocked them so hard they never recovered. As a consequence the yield was, well, ... one that placed a considerable demand on the zoom function of my camera.
I'm not sure how much I like them. I seem to remember Simon Hickmott describing them as having a mucilaginous texture (too lazy to go downstairs to check). If he means that they have no real taste but leave your mouth feeling slimy and clammy, I agree.

American ground nut (Edulis)
I've decided not to harvest these this year. They grew pretty well, but I think my chances of getting a decent crop will be improved if I leave them to spread about a bit.

Chinese Yam (Edulis)
Likewise, these are supposed to take three or four years to reach a decent size.

Yacon (Edulis)
The yacon had a poor start. I'm not sure I was the best parent to it. Four out of the five tubers I was sent rotted. The remaining one grew very slowly. In fact, it only really got going in mid June.

Once it did get going it was great, but it was a little too late to be spectacular. The book talks about a giant amongst vegetables. My yacon grew to about three feet high. It was very stately, though, with large arching leaves. Moreover, it produced a modest crop of tubers.

The tubers taste pretty good, sort of nutty and sweet. If you think in terms of a dessert version of a Jerusalem artichoke, you're along the right lines.

I'll be growing yacon again; it tastes good and the plant is attractive. I've taken nine root tubers for next year.

Can anyone identify this fungus?

2006-10-15T21:20:00.000+01:00

The photos aren't the greatest quality, but a few clutches of this fungus have appeared on our allotment. I'm a pretty diligent spotter of the plain old field mushroom; pink gills, peels, smells like a mushroom and has no real ring round the stem. These aren't field mushrooms; their gills are pure white. So, characteristics (differences from field mushroom as I know it in bold):

Smells of ordinary field mushroom.
White gills.
About 5-10 cm across.
The cap can be peeled easily.
Very noticeable ring round the stem.
I didn't see a basal bulb.
Growing on freshly cultivated heavy clay soil - nearest trees are elm saplings 10-15 metres away.

I've been looking around online and I think it's probably some sort of edible Agricarus, but I'm not going to take the risk.

Soya disappointing

2006-09-21T18:11:00.000+01:00

We harvested most of the soya beans today, as the pods looked thoroughly dried out. This is the yield from three plants. Hmm, I may have been overly optimistic when I picked out that size container!

On the plus side, we did have an unusually good crop of onions this year. These bulbous beauties, harvested back in July, should keep us going until April/May, and the shallots even longer. There's definitely something comforting about storing food away for the winter.

Some foodstuff has to be eaten straight away, though, not so much because it's perishable, but because it might not survive the onslaught of the goats at St Werburgh's City Farm! We ambled down there this morning on the way back from the allotment, and received an unexpectedly rapturous welcome from the said goats. Before we knew it, they'd pinched a couple of Swiss Chard leaves from out of our bags and would have had more given the chance. We probably should have known better as they played the same trick with leeks last year.

A bit of a pickle, a bit of a jam

2006-09-19T18:50:00.000+01:00

During September we've been getting jiggy with the art of home preserving. We don't actually have any fruit trees on our allotment, but we are lucky enough to have a few on the communal land immediately above us.

The plum trees have produced a glut this year - like everywhere it seems - so I've made a few litres of plum chutney (some of which is boiling away in the pan above). The nice thing is this has turned into a communal effort. My colleague who sits next to me at work has an apple tree in the garden. His apples have made a few kilos of apple chutney. He's given me some apple wine (not the best) in exchange for some of the chutney. Downstairs sits another man who has a bottle of his home made cider with my name on it.

The AllotmentBoss's Boss has got in on the act, too. She's been taking (after asking) elderberries from trees in the neighbourhood and using them to make jam and cordial. All good, scrumptious, seasonal stuff.

Egg man (Or egg woman, or egg child, or egg monster?)

2006-09-04T20:29:00.000+01:00

The spring cabbage did get planted this evening. For my own future reference:

Pixie has been planted in the normal tray.
Myer's Offenham has been planted in modules.
(Unrelated) Gloucestershire County Cricket Club is doing its annual floodlit match tonight. I must remember to consider going next year. I'm no great fan of cricket, but it does look and sound like an interesting night out.

Anyway, on to the egg man. The other day I was talking to a colleague of mine at work about his allotment. He owns a plot on a site in Southmead, an area of Bristol not far from here. My friend went to his plot the other weekend and part of a row of potatoes had been dug up and snaffled. There, in the middle of the broken earth, was a hen's egg by way of payment. Apparently, this isn't uncommon on his site. There are lots of stories about an egg-person who causes random low-level damage to plots there but leaves an egg in apology.

If the egg bandit is reading I have mixed emotions. Firstly, boo-hiss for monkeying about with other people's plots. On the other hand, congratulations on coming up with something so bizarre.

Long time, no write

2006-09-03T20:11:00.000+01:00

Indeed, nothing happened at all on this blog during August. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the weather has been rubbish, so we've not be down to the plot as often as we'd like. Then, I've been busy at work, having been made redundant then getting a promotion in the same company (figure that one out). However, finally - and most importantly - I've been devoting my time to building a shed in the garden. This effort has vague allotment connotations, because when the glorious new ab-initio Allotmentboss self-build gets completed, the crappy B&Q flimsy effort we currently have gets moved to the plot. With it there not only can I continue to bang my head on the doorframe every time I go in to get a spade, I also get a spot to drink lukewarm tea from a plastic thermos and listen to BBC Radio Bristol on a crackly, tinny transistor radio every drizzly Sunday morning.

While all of this has been going on the Alotmentboss's Boss has been wandering around the neighbourhood denuding elderberry trees of their fruit (well, actually, I've been doing most of the picking, but enough said). We have jars of elderberry and allotment-communal-apple-tree jam and elderberry and clove cordial - all yum.

So, August has been mostly about harvesting things, as the photo at the top of this entry shows. Try as we might, the courgettes have been turning into marrows. We now have a fridge full of green things we haven't been able to eat yet, so much so that we've been passing produce to one of my friends at work. I'm notoriously stingy about giving stuff away, so we must have had a glut.

All of the early potatoes are now up, as are about half of the main crop. Both have done very well this year, with good high yields - the Charlotte earlies netted 24kg of spuds from 3kg planted - and relatively little damage from slugs.

The sweet potatoes are growing on well. They are possibly being a little slower than they have been in previous years, but I don't whether that's down to the poorer soil they're in, the cold drizzly weather, or just my perception. What is interesting is that they're all rambling up the hill of the allotment, despite the fact that the slope faces into the sun, which rises from the bottom left of the plot and sweeps over to set in the top right. While the creepers have ventured, in some cases, over a metre up the plot, nothing more than a leaf has ventured south of where the plants were put in. I'd be interested to hear any guesses as to why...

The squash really enjoyed the incredibly hot patch we had in July, and put on lots of fruit. Here we have an Uchiki Kuri and some maturing butternuts. The slightly dumpy Allotmentboss digits provide a sense of scale.

The cabbages are doing well under their protective nets. I can't remember exactly what variety this one is, but it's something like January King. We have thus far forgotten to plant any spring cabbage seeds, and it's getting a little too late now. If I remember I might stick some in a tray tomorrow evening and let them take their chances.

Finally, as I failed to do one at the beginning of August, here's a general site overview taken on or around the 20th. The first signs of mildew on the squash plants is evident; when we went down there last night the plants looked close to the end.

A little extra bite

2006-07-26T21:56:00.000+01:00

We've been getting close to the animals recently. Just around the corner from our allotment site is St Werburgh's City Farm. This is a great place to go for a bit of light relaxation, not least because the aptly named Farm pub around the corner on Hopetoun Road has a fantastic beer garden. So, the route goes a little like this: To the allotment to dig, weed and harvest. Then, go to the pub for beer and finally on to the farm to stare at the pigs or bleat at the goats. (Ignore the sheep - they're not exactly the most interactive of animals.)

I mentioned chickens in a previous post. Goats would be a serious upgrade on chickens. Feed in any old green stuff in the front, get cheese out of the back. Great. There are three kids and three adults at the farm at the moment. If only they knew that just around the corner from their grass paddock lay 110 plots of fine, fresh leeks, brassicas and other vegetable delights...
There are, of course, also piglets. Pigs entertain me because they're always so grumpy. If it's not "squeal squeal squeal how could you treat me so cruelly?" it's "grunt grunt grunt leave me alone I'm miserable".
Anyway, it's not only the farmyard animals I've been sharing quality time with recently. Yesterday morning I woke up like a shot at 5:30, probably because the air is so still and hot at the moment that we left the curtains to our broadly south facing window open overnight to improve the breeze. Unable to get back to sleep, I jumped out of bed, pulled on some shorts and a t-shirt and made for the allotment. I was hell-bent on getting that last bit of the annexe dug, ready for leek transpalnting this weekend.

Unfortunately, the allotment was absolutely marauding with Blandford Fly, many of which decided quite specifically to maraud around my bare unprotected legs. My shins are now a patchwork of large watery swellings and extremely itchy red bites.

Our site is pretty well known for Blandford fly. The Allotment uber Gaffer tells stories of people needing to go to hospital after getting bad reactions to the bites. I went to A&E last year after I got bitten on the lower arm while digging potatoes; by the end of the next day my lower arm had doubled in size and my lymph nodes were like bright red tracks running up through to my neck.

The only thing I don't understand is where they come from. A quick search on the web shows that they like to be around rivers (the Stour in Blandford, for example). We don't have a river nearby, but we do have some slightly stagnant water butts? They're also apparently most active in the middle of the day, whereas I've only ever been bitten around dawn and dusk. Maybe what we've got isn't true Blandford Fly but a Bristol variant. I don't know. All I know is it bites anything below about half a metre from the ground, it draws blood and at the moment it itches like crazy.

Courgette recipe #462

2006-07-23T21:02:00.000+01:00

It was the Allotment uber Gaffer that set fire to the grass on our new allotment annexe. Unfortunately (actually, irritatingly) the fire has burnt a hole in our nice new - and expensive - pigeon netting. We only draped it over the plants last week. I'm a bit miffed, but he did pull out all of the stops to find us the extra space, so I'll let him off. More impressively, I've found out that he keeps chickens on his plot. This makes him some kind of minor deity in my book, and therefore beyond any form of mortal reproach.

I got talking to our allotment neighbour today. Well, I say neighbour, but she's kind of our neighbour squared, being on the plot sandwiched between our two bits. She's been on there since last year, but we've never really got to know her (although we did give her vegetable spaghetti plants earlier in the year). We're rarely around at the same time and when we are we're both intent on getting on with work. Anyway, she's interested in chickens too, so some sort of communal chicken madness scheme is hatching in my brain. Unfortunately Fluffius Muppetus has already taken the best possible chicken names. "Hen Solo" and "Princess Layer" makes me chuckle every time.

Anyway, enough of that. I'm about to enjoy a bowl of courgette and courgette flower risotto. Last night we had courgette pasta. Tomorrow I'm looking forward to courgette bake, with the promise of courgette ice-cream for pudding. A few weeks from now we'll be able to wash it all down with courgette wine sipped from glasses made from hollowed out courgettes, before freshening up with courgette toothpaste and a quick once over with courgette facial scrub.

In case I'm not being clear, we have a lot of courgettes. A lot. We have a lot of French beans too, but that's another story. On a more practical note, we're most of the way through harvesting the onions, and it appears that we've got a lot of them as well.

They're home

2006-07-20T22:07:00.000+01:00

We got about a third of our new allotment annexe cleared last weekend and planted it up the calabrese and cauliflowers. The remainder had the grass hacked off and left. We both went down this morning (to collect courgettes, natch) and the grass strimmings had all been burnt. Now, the question is was this a bush fire (maybe sparked by a bit of glass making a lens onto the tinder-dry grass) or did the Allotment uber Gaffer decide to make the clearance a bit easier for us?

They're not funny, but they are amusing me

2006-07-18T08:18:00.000+01:00

I was stood down on the plot last night, hands on hips, having a hearty, if slightly irrational, chuckle at the squash plants.

I think I'm finding them funny because they're growing like plants possessed at the moment - I suspect due to a combination of the very hot weather and the bucket full of the Allotmentboss's home made compost each is sitting in. Either way, each time I go down there another half dozen six foot long tendrils have made a bid for freedom, crawling over the neighbouring beds or neighbouring allotments.

I also find the fact that they like to hold hands so very tightly amusing. One of the beds above the squash contains potatoes, and the squash have got their tendrils wound well and truly round them. Every time I dig up a potato plant I can almost hear the attached squash whine; "Nooooo. Don't take him away. He's my fwiend..."

The brassicas have a home in waiting

2006-07-15T15:06:00.000+01:00

I went down to the plot on Thursday night to see if there were any more courgettes to collect (there weren't). On my way back up to the main gate our Allotment uber Gaffer flagged me down, waving his arms proudly.
"Ahhh, just the man! You'll see that a young couple have taken over the bottom half of that plot next but one to yours. You can have the top half."

I did the maths in my head quite quickly. The site on offer is a field of dense couch grass, and that's what I wanted the least. Milk thistles, sow thistles, even isolated and controlled knotweed are just fine, but digging out a mat of couch grass rhizomes for ever more is certainly not my idea of fun. On the other hand, it is next but one to my current plot, and it is next to one of the all-too-sparse water butts. There's also a thing about gift horses and mouths and the inverse relationship between begging and choosing to consider.
"Ahh, thank you Allotment uber Gaffer, I'll take it."

I went down there early this morning to survey the scene in a bit more detail.

Yes, it does look like a fairly dense field of grass, and one that's set seed too. In the middle of everything there's a bed of broad beans that are chocolate brown and well past their best.

As Roots Manuva says, "chin high, puff chest and get right to it". So, I've spent the rest of the morning with my sickle (it's surprising how many glances a six foot four man with a shaved head gets when walking through the centre of Bristol with a sickle) and fork trying to bestow some sort of order. Despite the fairly promising looking patch at the bottom of the area (foreground) I decided to start at the top, where the grass was at its worst; something to do with woolly thinking about saving the best 'til last.

I'm really glad I started at the top.

First of all, it hasn't been grassy for that long, which means that the grass is easier to get out than I'd anticipated.

Secondly, the last incumbent clearly put a lot of effort into caring for the soil up there. As I wrote above, it's only two plots along from mine but the soil is much darker, more crumbly and obviously in better heart. I'd say lots of good stuff has been added to it over previous years.

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, as I was tidying up to go home the couple who have taken the lower half of the plot turned up. After exchanging pleasantries we talked boudaries, and it appears the Allotment uber Gaffer has promised them the bottom half to include that clear looking bit I thought we were inheriting. I'll need to catch up with the AuG on this - he's never that decisive with his adminstrative bureaucracy. (Indeed, I'm not even clear whether we've been given this extra patch only to solve an immediate brassica crisis, or whether we can have it in perpetuity.)

However, as things stand I leave with the sense of having avoided needlessly doing someone else's work for them, coupled with a slight sense of guilt that I'd spent the entire morning offloading our weed roots and other rubbish onto what turned out to be their allotment... doo de doo de doo...

Got them!

2006-07-09T19:18:00.000+01:00

The rain abated so we got to the allotment in time to harvest this year's first courgettes before they turned into this year's first marrows. In true courgette plant style, we'll need to go again on Tuesday to harvest the next batch.

Last weekend I took lots of photos of things growing that I didn't get around to including in a blog entry, so I've put them all together below in a sort of medley format. From the top, and left-to-right, we have: Soya beans, french beans, squash and sweetcorn, celeriac, fennel, white onions and brussels sprouts.

Ahhh, rain

2006-07-05T22:57:00.000+01:00

Rain, and lashings of it, which means I won't have to get up stupidly early in the morning to water everything before work. However, will it stop raining in time to allow me to get the first courgette of the season (photographed on Sunday) before it turns into a marrow?

A correction (perhaps)

2006-07-03T21:58:00.000+01:00

On reflection, I don't think my post from yesterday makes much sense. I wrote about our potato plants suffering from blight, but it not having been too serious in previous years. Well, blight is serious, and there's no reason to believe that our plants have some sort of special dispensation to contract it but only in a mild form.

So, the suggestion is that what our potato plants have is not blight, but something else. Something that leads to black spots and general yellowing of the leaves, would strike early in the season and yet still allow production of a good quality (and large) crop by the time the plants are lifted later in the year.

A quick skim through Hessayon suggests that what we have is a magnesium deficiency. Photo 161 on the following website is a pretty good example of what our plants look like.

Whatever we've got, it's probably not blight. Either way I'm happy. The potatoes we harvested yesterday tasted nice, and past precedent also suggests that our crop will store well. What else can you want?

It's the start of the month!

2006-07-02T12:16:00.000+01:00

Which means it's time for the now customary pictures of how the plot looks. What follows is a lot of photos with very little commentary.

General site overview
While it may look like there's some spare space in the left foreground, there isn't. It's just that the plants that are there are too small to be picked out by my camera. (Notice also the rare glimpse of the Allotmentboss's Boss.)

Unusual vegetables
I don't really have a good definition of unusual. I suppose in this context it means "things we haven't grown before".

The one and only yacon is growing quite strongly but slowly. Despite the dry weather it's being a bit of a martyr to slugs. The Chinese yams are doing well. Simon Hickmott, in Growing Unusual Vegetables, writes that they're unlikely to make much progress in their first year, so that they're about 18 inches tall seems pretty good.
The American ground nut (Apios Americana) is similarly climbing strongly, but it's hardly a mass of dense foliage. I'm not too worried; both plants appear to be happy enough.
The ulloco have put on a good spurt of growth over the last few weeks. That may be due to the hot weather, or it may be due to the lashings of home grown compost I've given them.
Finally, the oca are definitely the early winners of the unusual vegetable competition. They're fairly big plants now, and the leaves taste wonderful. While I'd like there to be tubers at the end of the year, oca is definitely worth growing just as a salad vegetable.
(In the foreground is a line of Swiss Giant Zermat leeks.)

Usual vegetables
(Or, "things we have grown before".)
Firstly, it looks like our first early potato plants are just beginning to get some black spots on their leaves, indicating the first signs of potato blight. It's not too bad so far, but the maincrop plants will need to be watched carefully to ensure they're lifted before it gets too much of a grip. In each of the three years we've grown potatoes we've always ended up with blight, but we've never had a problem lifting and storing a good supply of perfectly healthy tubers. Blight always comes, but it nevers seems to get a killer grip on our plants.

Anyway, given that the blight is coming, that we'd like some new potatoes for our dinner, that we need the space for brassicas and that it's always nice to harvest things, we dug a few up (hence the empty patch down by my feet). Four kilogrammes of near flawless tasty looking salad potatoes (Charlotte) - great!
The space was immediately replanted with kale (Pentland Brig). Over the coming week I'll probably lift all of the Charlotte plants, and replace the whole bed with brassicas, thus partially overcoming our little space crisis.

Slightly above the potatoes are the sweet potatoes; Beauregard in the front row, T56 behind. This is not the best bit of real estate on the plot. It's laced with large clumps of heavy yellow clay, and it's noticeable that there aren't even many weeds growing up here. Comfrey and grass survive, but not much else is tempted. Still, it was the only space we had. In typical Allotmentboss style I threw in two large bags of home made compost, and so far so good.

Our other allotment's blog

2006-06-30T18:41:00.000+01:00

The brassicas continue to get bigger, and we continue not to have anywhere to plant them. All of our plants were pricked out about a month ago, and they were all approximately the same size. The following picture is of various plants - kale, calabrese and cabbages - that were planted out in 100% home made kitchen waste compost.

This tray, on the other hand, was planted out in chipped bark compost:
That's a fairly substantial difference; an abundance of rich growth against stunted yellowing plants. Either way, both sets now definitely need planting out - before one dies of starvation and the other gives up from overcrowding.

We're still completely out of room on our plot. We have space for a few plants, and we could get creative - planting between onions that will be coming up soon, for example - but essentially there is no obvious place for everything to go. So, it's time to think radically. It's time to get an overflow allotment.

We're on Bristol's Ashley Down allotments. The site representative has got a plot he can let us have, but it needs a notice to quit served on the tenants. They've let it become overgrown with milk thistles and other weeds, but it is mercifully free from couch grass. Unfortunately a notice to quit takes a long time. Even worse, half of the plot is full of Japanese knot weed. In itself, that's not too much of a worry. We don't need the whole plot, so we could just give it a wide berth and leave it to its own devices. The worry is that Bristol City Council are currently on a bit of a mission to eradicate knotweed from all sites, which means they're spraying it with some pretty unpleasant chemicals. What's bad for knotweed is certainly bad for cabbages, and I doubt it's great for an Allotmentboss either.

So, it's time to look at other sites. We have plenty to choose from locally. My cycle home from work takes me past a cluster of sites that are about half a mile from home - roughly the same as our current plot. Tonight I made a recce, as follows (includes blurb from the Council's allotment website):

Dovercourt Road
Number of plots: 30
This level and vehicle accessible site has seen a decline in recent years but has great potential. The site has a water supply and a new parking area.
I couldn't actually get in, because the site is well protected by a fence and barbed wire. There were clear signs of life on this site, with lots of plots in cultivation. However, the unused plots seemed to be mostly covered in metre high grass - far too much of a challenge at this time year, and a sure sign of chafer grubs/leatherjackets ready to saw off anything planted there. There's also a high voltage power line running along the back of the site, and it's the furthest away of the sites I looked at.

Downend Road
Number of plots: 6
This site is adjacent to Horfield B allotments and is level.
The site description says it all. This is much less of an allotment site than it is a strip of land to one side of an access road to a line of garages. Three plots appear to be in good use. A further three are covered in black polythene, although there's no way of telling if that's council polythene or if the plots are already rented.

All in all the site is in very good order, and is probably the closest to our house, but the lack of any sort of security fencing is a worry - especially given the site is readily visible and easily accessible from the road.

Horfield B
Number of plots: 33
The site is almost fully let following recent site improvements that have included the erection of green palisade security fencing. The site is flat with a good water supply and an active site representative. It is hoped to install new haulingways in the next few years.
This is clearly the place to be, with ready access, lots of very tidy plots and water butts. It also has good security fencing. Maybe this is why there's a very large sign on the gate saying "Fully let with a waiting list". That'll be a "no" then.

Horfield A
Number of plots: 16
A medium sized site that currently has only a few tenants. The site is level and has water.
Utter madness. Enchanting madness, but madness nonetheless. To get to this site you go past the well trimmed order of Horfield A, round a very large bush blocking your path, and set off down an overgrown path. On your right is a waist high gate that leads to a field of shoulder high brambles. There are occasional signs of life here. Someone's mowing paths through the site, and there are half a dozen locations where people have dug blocks a few metres square and are successfully growing potatoes, onions and cabbages. Strangely, if you wander all the way through the brambles you get to a large area that appears to be a very well kept lawn.

While this site is no quick fix, it is utterly enchanting simply because it's so difficult to get to and so derelict. Also, as the grainy photo shows, I wasn't there alone.
It's madness, it's pure folly, but the romantic in me is hooked.