Getting going

At last - some growth.  I have B&Q to thank for the kick-start.  They had healthy looking packs of vegetable seedlings.  I've never grown broad beans, but had a hankering to try.  (and yes, those are unorganic slug pellets.  Has anyone used the wool pellets that swell up when wet and are meant to deter slugs and snails?  I'm looking for alternatives.)


We're still clearing up from the winter, in minimal time.  Could someone please give me an extra day a week?


Below, the 'before' bed where the fork and bucket are.  The mist, by the way, is actual mist rather than camera error.  A good thick 'haar' (sea fog).
 

The following day, broad beans in place with anti pigeon netting.

Look at the warm Spring light in the shot above.  We planted the beans at the start of the recent warm spell, when temperatures shot up to 21 degrees.  Since then we've been away, and won't get back to the plot until this weekend.  Meantime temperatures have returned to a more normal 3 degrees, complete with gales, snow and hail. 

And just to continue with my green manure fixation, here's the current state of the one patch of grazing rye that came through.  It's getting on for 3 feet high now.  All I need is something to graze it.

Almost digging

A very gentle start to the Spring dig last week.  I went to the plot with the week's kitchen waste, and to pull a couple of leeks for a cheese and onion bread pudding (Cranks recipe).  I loved it - the rest of the family was lukewarm about it.  All the more for me!

Because we've been so tight for time the thought of the backlog of tidying up at the plot has been nagging at me, and so I thought I'd dip a toe in the water, or fork in the soil, and at least make a start.   You can see the paltry results above.  The plan for this winter was to have a no-dig, or minimum dig start to Spring, by sowing all bare ground with green manure.  It's been a very mixed experience.  

Below, the wilted-down phacelia.  This has been a success again after a trial last year.  For most of the winter it's stood green and robust, only recently giving way to frost.  But it still covers the ground and inhibits most of the weeds. 

Grazing rye, of which I had high hopes, has been literally patchy.  This is the patch.  Another whole bed sown twice with rye failed to come through at all.  Interestingly, although the rye hasn't come through, neither has much in the way of weeds.  

At the front of the photo below you'll see the first shoots of garlic.  Although we've had hardly any snow, there have been some good frosts, so hopefully the garlic will have got the cold it needs to form bulbs. 

The lighter straggly stuff below is what remains of the white mustard.  It was useful to mask weeds in the most difficult bit of the plot - under sycamore trees, with shade from mid afternoon onwards in summer, a buffer zone between the blackcurrant bushes and the main access road, and prone to infestation by creeping buttercup.  I've tried daffodils, dahlias as a summer display, a wildflower mix, and am thinking of putting spinach here this summer.  The soil is in good heart, rich in leafmould.  Some escapee daffodils meantime are cheering up the rather desolate remains of the mustard.

As for this bed - this is the site of the complete failure of the alfalfa.  Unlike the rye, the alfalfa's failure to germinate seems to have encouraged a mat of lawn-like grass.  This is going to make for painstaking digging.
 

In the event I didn't dig long.  The ground was very heavy - 'clarty' is the Scots word that springs to mind.  A sticky, heavy consistency.  Not to be confused with 'glaur' (wet, squelchy mud), or 'dubs' (drier, forming clods, and often marking the passage of a tractor along a tarmac road).

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.

Shades of green

Some things are flourishing this year. The 56 leeks, minus 2 or 3, are looking more leek-like by the week. Grass seems to be our best crop, helped along by a stream of busy weekends and darker evenings. Even the emerging green manure, to the left of the lush central path, can't compete.

Grass apart, however, this has been a mean summer. Of my first sowing of lettuce, chard and beetroot, only a few seedlings emerged. The second sowing made a couple of weeks ago is marked by the faint lines of sawdust in the shot below. There are some healthy weeds, but not much else.

The close-up below reveals what might be some carrots pushing through. 'Grudging' is the best description I can come up with for this season. In my more fanciful moments I imagine that the plot knows that our attention has been elsewhere.


We have to face the fact that we are likely to be just as busy through the next year, and so we've been making plans for an ongoing regime of green manure that will take us through this winter, then next spring and summer. We'll keep smaller areas under cultivation but we won't try to be productive on a scale that we can't maintain. In the end the soil will benefit, and we'll arrive at this point next year with both children away at university and the plot serving as therapy for the empty nest syndrome that we can see looming.

Marking time

A summer of marking time and clearing the decks at the allotment. We're having the raised beds debate, and so to give us a blank canvas we've opted not to fill up ground as it's vacated by crops. We're using the opportunity to improve the soil structure by sowing swathes of green manure. Above is the first sowing, of alfalfa. Last weekend I sowed phacelia in the empty area at the top of this large bed, and white mustard in a strip beside the blackcurrants at the other side.

We've also been concentrating energies elsewhere, enjoying the company of our children, one home from university, the other going into her last year at home before university, visitors, holidays, home improvements. Sometimes when I've gone along to the plot I've done half an hour's work and then sat and taken in the way the light falls on the plot and the bliss of being outside in summer. I should feel some Calvinist guilt, but I don't. It's been good to have a pause.

Meantime the fox has been enjoying marching through the alfalfa.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - June

Glimpses of blue sky are precious this year. We've had rain and low grey clouds for weeks, it seems. The weather forecast in my sidebar is reasonably upbeat for the next couple of days, tho it's drizzling at the moment rather than the perky mix of sun and fluffy cloud that it's meant to be. Then we take a mid-week dive into rain and cool(er) temperatures, and then just cool temperatures. I have started a regime of Vitamin D tablets for myself and my daughter, to compensate for this summer's lack of sunshine. The male members of the family either don't believe in this nonsense, or are currently lying in the sun in the Canary Islands.

So even if it's a weed, if there's blue sky behind it - it merits a photo. This is our charming garden weed - red valerian. It's entirely self-seeded. My Reader's Digest 'Guide to Creative Gardening' describes it as being easy to grow, and that 'the fierce red flowers of this valerian brighten ancient walls and cliff faces all over the south of England.' I'm gratified that the wall at the back of our garden, which is all that remains of a old railway siding wall (late 19th century/early 20th?), could be classified as ancient. The Reader's Digest goes on to say 'its seedlings shoot up all over the place, though usually not in sufficient numbers to be a nuisance'. Well, it seems to love our cool, damp climate. From its lofty perch it rains down seeds which sprout merrily all over our garden. I would classify it as a lovable nuisance. And here it's got blue sky behind it.


My fragrant Alba rose is blooming, although not in such profusion as past years. The hard winter gave it quite a knock, and it's been slow to pull away in this grudging weather of the past 6 weeks.

The honeysuckle by contrast is rampant. The frosts seem to have killed off the aphids which normally plague it, clustering blackly round the emerging flower spurs and sucking the life out of them. It's busy with bees from early morning until late into the evenings.


I do have a few more blooms - just a few, however. This year I've decided to take stock and think about what will really thrive in our difficult back garden, and to dig wider beds and enrich the soil with green manure. So I'm off to Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for inspiration from around the gardening world.

To plastic or not to plastic?

...isn't actually a question I ask myself. But I see so many plots swathed in plastic sheeting over the winter months that there are obviously plastic afficionados out there. I know that it keeps the weeds down. I know that it means that you don't start the spring by weeding. But I can't reconcile growing with smothering the soil for months at a time. I want to see frost sparkling on the hard earth, puddles shining in a sudden shaft of weak sun, Ted Hughes' 'attentant sleek thrushes' stabbing at worms. It seems the gardening equivalent of keeping the plastic covers on the suite in the front room.

Our winter cover this year was a mass of dead phacelia, flattened under the December snow. I feared a strenuous job of digging in wiry stems.


But the first forkful revealed a clean, bare, fine tilth. It was the tilth of seedbeds, which I have only read about but never achieved. 'I have a tilth', I kept saying to myself as I swept away more stems. No digging in, or up. Just a bit of sweeping, and underneath healthy soil which had been rained, snowed, frosted and sunned upon.


The other thing that puts me off plastic is that you have to do something with it for the rest of the year. And our shed is full already. But are there any bloggers who have answered 'yes!' to the plastic question?

Low ebb

Along with the glaur, we have slime. No crisply overwintering lollo rosso for us. Just a composting-on-the-spot icky mess.

And we knew this would happen - the potatoes stored in the shed experienced sub-zero temperatures, and were bound to suffer.


Perhaps the bright side of all this decay is that the phacelia that we didn't manage to dig in during the autumn is doing its own breaking down, after being buried under the snow. But look closely and you'll see a hint of green peeking out from the leaves and dead stems.

I think we may be about to experience the return of the phacelia for another season, just where we don't want it. Snow for the month of December, followed by rain, illness, other bits of life, all have kept us away from the plot. Although I've been going along to check on the broccoli cage and empty the kitchen waste into the compost bin, I haven't done any real work since November. It feels as if I'm losing touch with it. Just standing looking doesn't make the same connection as putting spade in soil, weeding, sowing, planting, pruning.

For the past two days we've had gales and heavy rain, nothing to match the storms in the US and Canada, but I've gone to bed at night listening to the roaring wind and thinking of the fate of the broccoli cage. Last weekend I was at the plot I spent the time fitting poles back into their sockets, and that was before the gales. Ironically we have all this anti-pigeon protection in the year when the broccoli is sitting there doing nothing. I'm still hoping for a growth spurt in March, but if not it's been a long winter of cage maintenance for nothing.

Getting the garlic in

I surprised myself by planting garlic within a week of its arrival from The Really Garlicky Company. Normally it lies around in the garage for a few weeks and begins to sprout. The individual cloves were plump, only four to a bulb. We'll see how they do in our soil. On the day I planted them, the soil was pretty heavy. The planting instructions did say that if you had heavy soil you should plant them in a ridge, but I was out of time for ridge construction, so just pushed them straight in.

Next on the agenda is digging in the green manure.


By this time the leaves from the ash tree nearby will all have fallen, and a good number of them will be on the green manure. Perhaps we'll end up with a leaf mould/phacelia cross.


It's raining again today, making this afternoon's planned digging session unlikely. But I think I'll go along with the household green waste, if only for the pleasure of a walk in the chill rain and fallen leaves.

12 photos - October and November 2010

October's photo got lost in the general pace of life. The things I notice looking at it now are the lush, bright green grass, and the hazy blue of the phacelia between the blackcurrent bushes and the raspberries.

By last weekend, in the shot below, all growth is shrinking back. The phacelia has been cut back again, this time with a hand-held sickle. The raspberry canes have been thinned out to 7 canes per plant. Not much sign of growth in the broccoli and kale within the brassica cage. I planted them far too late, so all I'm hoping for is that they make it through the winter and then put on a spurt in the spring.



The one thing that doesn't seem to be shrinking is the central path. These 12 photos will be our best motivator for tackling it. Unlikely to be this weekend, tho. Another golden morning has turned into a wet afternoon. From the living room window I can see the white trunk and yellow leaves of a birch tree glowing against the dark sky. We have the lights on at 3.30, and I'm blissfully happy with one eye on Australia beating Wales at rugby, which my husband and son are watching, the latter home from university for the weekend. The path will wait.

Phacelia - the flowering

It is beautiful, isn't it? I would love to let it all flower, and have a carpet of starry blue flowers above the grey-green frond-like leaves. But we strimmed it. Or rather, I let my husband do the dirty deed while I turned my back and dug another part of the plot, unable to watch the carnage.

I know, I need to get a grip. It's only green manure. And it may flower again. I asked for only partial carnage, just taking off most of the flowers so that we don't end up with rampant Phacelia, and leaving a few for the bees to be going on with.

A before and after shot of the whole area would have been good, but there are times when you're working so hard that you forget about anything other than the task in hand. That's what I like about having an allotment - total concentration, even to the extent of forgetting to feed the blog habit.

12 photos - September 2010

Last year on my Occasional Scotland blog I took part in the 12 kuvaa/photos meme, posting a photo each month from the same spot on my walk to work. The Finnish site that hosted the meme doesn't seem to be doing it again this year, but I've been bitten by the bug of seeing the year unfold in this way. (I also extended my meagre knowledge of Finnish, adding 'kuvaa' to the existing 'kiitos' - thank you; 'pankki' - bank; 'ravintola' - restaurant.)

So here's the plot after a morning and afternoon session today. Grass strimmed, green manure strimmed, six broccoli plants set out, cage and netting transferred from the blackcurrants to the broccoli.


And from the other end of the plot, the surviving lettuce plants in the foreground (more about that shortly), the remaining potato shaws next (and more about those too), and then the brassica cage. I still have kale plants at home waiting to go in there, but they'll have to wait until next weekend. At the other side of the plot is a very untidy strawberry bed, the shorn green manure, and the blackcurrant bushes.

The main impression I have looking at these photos is that we have some growing space set in the middle of a lawn. Despite our intentions, the grass has been winning this year. That broad central path irks me more every time I look at it, but our free time has been minimal and it's been one of the things we've had to postpone.

The weather today: blowy, warm, and hazy with smoke from bonfires.

The site today: much coming and going of other plotholders, with gluts of tomatoes and plums being shown off. A sense of the last fine days slipping away and everyone enjoying being outside.

If you want to see the original 12 kuvaa/photos site, it's here:

12 kuvaa/photos

Phacelia

Apart from the over-abundance of blackcurrants, our most successful crop this year has been the Phacelia green manure. This is how it looked two weeks ago.


When I go along to the plot today I'm expecting to find it in flower. Bad news. It's meant to be cut down and dug in before flowering, otherwise it sets seed liberally.

The solution, I think, will be to ask man-with-strimmer to strim the tops off. I'll then rake them up and put them into the compost. It might still be warm enough to wait and see if it will come again, but if it doesn't I'll dig it in.

I have another area that will soon be read for green manure, and I'm wondering what to try there. Perhaps one of the ryes, which can be September sown, or a vetch. The field beans I sowed last year weren't a great success. Tall, thin plants which didn't suppress weeds, seeded very freely, and had such tough stems that they were almost impossible to dig in. They were popular with the bees tho, so I suppose that's something in their favour.

Bit by bit

A scant hour was all the time I had at the weekend for getting to the allotment. I did swither as to whether I should go, but I did, and was glad of it. By the time I walked there and back I had 40 minutes left for digging. The great blessing of this cold winter is that even the weeds have been stopped in their tracks, but that can't last much longer. So the obvious task to tackle first was the mess of dead, frosted red clover. It hasn't rained for weeks, and the withered plants were dry and stringy. But I dug and chopped and dug again, and cleared a patch that looks as if a bit of progress is being made.


The drought of March has broken at last, a little ahead of Chaucer's timing of 'Aprille with his shoures soote'. I'll bet those weeds are even now planning their takeover.

Beginning, middle and end

The first spears of the autumn-planted garlic mark the beginning of the allotment year for me. The autumn variety needs frost to get going, so I'm hoping for a bumper crop from this frosty winter.

In the middle are the autumn-planted Japanese onions, standing like troopers through all the frost and snow. I think I'm meant to be feeding them around now to kick start further growth, but I have no allotment time for the next couple of weeks. Let's hope they realise they're in Scotland and still have a bit of the winter left.


And coming to an end are the Red Duke of York potatoes which we didn't have time to lift in the autumn, and have taken a chance with leaving in the ground. Amazingly they're mostly unaffected by the frost, with only one bad tuber in every three or so shaws, and a good yield all round.


Right at the end, in terms of having had it, is the red clover sown in the summer as green manure. Time to dig it in now. It's suppressed the weeds beautifully, and I'll use it again in preference to field beans which allowed weed growth and were then a pain to dig in.