Allotment beauty

The plot isn't very beautiful just now. It's either frosty, with friable, crusted earth, or frost-burnt, wet, sticky and weedy.



But occasionally there's an unexpected glimpse of beauty.





These chinese lanterns and polyanthus are part of a little flower bed tended by a group of plotholders who try to counteract the gloom of the site in the fallow months. During the winter it can seem nothing more than a sea of huts, black plastic, sagging netting and tatty cabbages. But here's a reminder that allotments needn't always be dour and functional.

Getting tiresome

The fourth break-in at the shed. This is really getting tiresome. A notice at the entrance to the site alerted me that there had been break-ins on the night of 12 January. As before, metal cutters had been used to break the hasp. The still-locked padlock was lying on the grass in front of the door. You can see in the photo how the cut ends have rusted since 12 January.

Nothing seemed to have been stolen, however. We had taken the strimmer motor back to the house before Christmas, making the strimmer head alone a much less attractive prospect. Our forks and spades were grimy with dried mud, which I had fretted about slightly but which turned out to be a blessing.

Time seems to be passing strangely during January. I could have sworn that I had been to the plot since the 12th. It seems like months rather than weeks since Christmas. Perhaps it's the short, dark, busy days that create this effect. But just in the past few days it's been noticeably lighter by the end of the afternoon. With the growing light has come frost, which is often the case in Scotland, so no digging just yet. Still, I feel the first stirrings of Spring interest in the plot. It's been a long, fallow winter with many other preoccupations.

Wish they were mine

Healthy new raspberry canes, with a sprinkling of sulphate of potash lightly forked in around them. How I wish they were mine, but following our persistent raspberry failure syndrome we're not rushing to try again. For the moment I can practise on my Dad's raspberries.


Perhaps it's our soil. Although the soil in these photos looks dark, that's only because of recent rain. Forking in the potash, I was struck by the difference. Here, it's light, slightly sandy, former farmland, river plain soil. At our Edinburgh allotment the soil is black, heavy, shot through with clay.



You can see my usual hit or miss approach when it comes to quantities. How much IS 25g per square metre, anyway? Perhaps this shot will be interesting to look back on in the summer. Will the third cane from the right turn out to be a poor, weak specimen? Will the one at the right with the generous application be a super-cane? Or will I have killed it with kindness?

Looking back - and forward

Looking back - at my overly optimistic promise of a post before Christmas and lots of blog-visiting. Where did the autumn go? Weekends were swallowed up, and for the most part the plot has been unvisited. A question of out of sight rather than out of mind: I've been very conscious of it just 10 minutes walk away, hibernating under its (patchy) covering of green manure. It will be quite a reunion when we do get along after the New Year.

Looking back also at these retro illustrations. They almost have the look of engravings from a Victorian gardening treatise.



In fact they're from the Reader's Digest 'The Gardening Year', 1968. Don't you love it? "rewarding but seldom grown vegetables". Courgettes, seldom grown??? But who grew courgettes in 1968, at least in Scotland? I remember my first taste of green pepper - in 1977. Incredibly exotic. I remember the first time my mother and I ventured to use garlic in a recipe, circa 1976. We asked the greengrocer (NB greengrocer) for two cloves of garlic, being wholly ignorant that garlic was sold in bulbs.

I've been sorting through boxes of books in my Dad's loft this week, and have been enthralled by the discovery of The Gardening Year. A first edition too. Perhaps it'll be really valuable in about 200 years time.

Among the lurid-hued photos of bedding plants and flowering shrubs, the instructions for pruning newly planted floribunda roses, and the never-ending list of 'general tasks' for each month, was this little global warming prickle of anxiety.


This December's temperatures have seldom dipped below 4 degrees, it seems. And taking as a yardstick the year of my son's birth, 21 years ago, I remember watching for the first spikes of crocus and daffodils in February. For the past few years, despite frigid December temperatures, the spikes have been showing before Christmas.

But the looking forward I'm doing just now is to carving out a bit of time for the allotment. Perhaps I'll use The Gardening Year as my guide. So, for January: "The coldest month is the time to plan ahead with seedsmen's (sic) catalogues and to send mowers and other equipment for servicing." And "General Tasks: order seeds, gladioli, onion sets and shallots, and garden sundries such as tree stakes, pea sticks, bean poles, string, canes, insecticides, fertilisers and weedkillers." How many different kinds of stakes and sticks and poles and canes were there in 1968?

Getting the garlic in

Just in time too, before the frost and snow came this week. I was even later than usual in ordering garlic this year. Somehow I was trying to avoid my order arriving too early and starting to sprout before I could plant it. Too early turned into too late, and my supplier of preference, the Scottish Really Garlicky Company, had sold out. I did the rounds of the Organic Gardening Catalogue, Suttons, Thompson & Morgan, and finally found some at D T Brown's.

Above, my first foray into elephant garlic. And if you look closely, you can see a little triangular shard of glass just to the left of the bulbs. Where does it all come from?

Below, Tuscany Wight, a softneck grown on the Isle of Wight and said to store well. I hope it stores better than the bulbs I was sent, one of which was soft and rotting. Of course I should have sent it back, but life was far too busy for frills like that, so I popped in the good cloves and will hope for the best.


The Chesnock Wight bulbs below were in much better condition. A hardneck bulb, meant to have a distinctive, strong flavour.


I meant to take a photo of the green manure, but it took all the time I had available to dig over the bed where the garlic was to go. Not much change really - the phacelia and white mustard were growing strongly, the grazing rye most definitely was not, and the alfalfa was being taken over by a vigorous crop of shepherd's purse, which seemed to relish its bed of alfalfa seed.

Soon I expect to feel the first stirrings of winter planning fever, when gardening books and catalogues will suddenly become compulsive reading. It hasn't stirred yet, however. Perhaps it's because of our exceptionally mild autumn. Now that the cold has arrived, I'm relishing it, and want to enjoy the season rather than gloss over it and look ahead to Spring. It feels like a physical lifting of the spirits to have frost and snow. A bit of balance has come back into the world.

Greening up

How can it be nearly two months since I've last posted here? Our visits to the plot have been almost as rare, with just a couple of kitchen waste runs and a strimming session. Life has got in the way with a vengeance, including that novelty for us of weekends away. But I don't like the separation of life and growing/gardening. We're planning a foray to the plot this morning so that rain forecast for the weekend doesn't get in the way. I actually feel nervous about what we'll find. What will have been the outcome of Weeds v. Green Manure?

The shots here were mostly taken at the beginning of October. Above, my unique green manure patchwork. From the top, phacelia, alfalfa, grazing rye. Below, a close-up of the phacelia and alfalfa. The latter was slow to come through and germinated sparsely. It was probably sowed too late. The light in late August/early September is really waning, so another year I would sow in July.


My medieval peasant seed-broadcasting technique wasn't up to much in the case of the rye, below. Or perhaps the pigeons got the best of it. The seeds are large and although I raked them in they still seemed to shout 'eat me!'


Most successful of all has been the strip of white mustard. Was that because of early sowing, or the fact that this small strip has the best soil of the whole plot, a rich, leaf-mouldy loam due to the annual dump of leaves from the nearby sycamore trees?

Or at least that was the state of play at the start of the month. Who knows what awaits us today?

As well as posting an update this side of Christmas, I really hope to get round some other allotment blogs. I have a lot of catching to do.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - September 2011

Not a huge amount of change in my garden since the August Bloom Day. Still, the season is moving on, and Autumn is definitely here. There was a day last week when everything that was growing seemed to shrink back slightly. The light is declining, with sunrise nearly at 7 am, and sunset by 7.30 pm. The equinox approaches.

Above, a marigold droops in the rain. Marigolds are a cottage garden favourite that I can't get enough of in Autumn. The sowing I did this year seemed to take reluctantly, and so the blooms are very sparse and all the more precious as a result. I don't know what happened to germination of my seeds this year, either in the garden or at the allotment. I'm going to read up about biodynamics over the winter, although I can't quite get my head round the preparations such a horn silica.

Below, autumn colours are beginning to appear on my blueberry bush.

Still a few fruits appearing on the woodland strawberries, and strangely the slugs don't seem to have found them.


Below, red clover which I sowed in a border as a mini patch of green manure, but which has also failed to germinate well.

Roses are making a brave second showing, although I doubt if the profusion of buds will all flower unless we get a very balmy spell now.

A bit of confusion here: a Spring-flowering polyanthus has decided to bloom, behind the seed pods of 'Love-in-a-Mist'.

A climbing fuchsia is doing well, but has a long way to go before rivalling the hedges we saw in Skye this summer.

Visit Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens to see what else is blooming this month.