Plodding on

Seven months since I last posted here, so Blogger kindly informs me, as it keeps track of my absence from its clutches. I've lost track of how many about-turns we've done as to whether we keep the allotment or give it up.  For the moment we've decided to stop being so...introspective about it and just get on and grow what we can in the limited time we have available.  Here's a quick tour of the plot in its post-winter state.

First, the brassica cage.  Actually the cage may be our best growing item!  It's stood up to some ferocious gales this winter.  We haven't had any real snow, however, and that's the weak point of any netting-covered structure.  I saw recently in the Harrod catalogue (that's Harrod Horticultural, not Harrods of London) that they've improved on the 'build-a-ball' construction of our cage and now sell a locking system that keeps the poles lodged more securely in the joining units.  Given how much it cost in the first place we're not about to abandon ours for a newer model, but I do have my eye on it for the future. 

Inside the cage from left to right we have kale, which has been a great success and kept us supplied with greens throughout the winter, although some of us more happily than others.  Let's just say that my husband doesn't share the love I have for kale.  Next is a row of what I was convinced was sprouting broccoli but which grew painfully slowly, failed to sprout, and is now flowering.  Then there's a row of something I will reveal in my next post, followed at the right by the leafy stuff which I thought was spring greens.  Really, I must label what I plant rather than thinking I'll remember.
 

Beyond the cage is the leek bed, variety Musselburgh.  They look like all of us at the end of the Scottish winter - a bit tattered, blinking in the stronger light of spring and realising we need to smarten up a bit because people can now see what we look like.
 

Then come two and a bit rows of overwintering onions, variety Senshyu.  They seem to be suffering from that other Scottish affliction, lack of sunlight and warmth.  Can you tell that it's still very cold here, and I'm grumpy about it?  Did you know that in this month's 'Living France' magazine you could buy a 'charming stone property with pigeonnier and pool, private but not isolated, near all amenities' in the Lot for 248,000 Euros?  To the right of the onions is this year's nameless garlic, probably feeling even more grumpy than I am.
 

Back to reality, and some rather late planted onion and shallot sets.  
They've since started to put out green shoots, so fingers crossed that they'll pull away.
 

A little bit of help from a labourer never goes amiss.  Our daughter was home recently from university for a few days and kindly set about weeding the strawberry bed.  This is probably the last year for this bed.  I'm undecided as to whether to take runners from the plants this year or start afresh with another variety.  The fruit hasn't been great, and I'd also like to extend the season with fewer plants of several varieties.  Of course I can't remember the variety I have at the moment, but I'm  sure I will when I start to look at catalogues. 
 

This was our surprise harvest last weekend.  Surprising because I have got into a mind-set of thinking that we are just doing maintenance rather than anything productive.  But we are actually eating what we're growing.  
 

From top of the 'display plank': what was meant to be spring greens turned out to be cauliflower.  Well, it would have been if I'd left it to grow.  There was a miniscule cauliflower head nestled deep inside, about the size of my thumb nail.  The leave were quite tasty steamed however, and made me realise how much waste there is in supermarket cauliflower presentation.

The rhubarb has suddenly forged ahead, and it's delicious.  The leeks are getting to the end of their run, so I'm going to dig up the rest next weekend and freeze them.  And finally the rainbow chard has made it through the winter and is fresh and exuberant, and very tasty steamed and sprinkled with chilli flakes. 

Throughout the winter I haven't felt that I needed to blog about our forays to the plot, but now that I've returned it's interesting how the act of writing seems to solidify and give substance to the scattered bits of activity that have been going on.  Now we just need a bit of warmth so that I can get that other allotment essential out of the shed - the deckchair.  Otherwise I'm going to be seriously tempted by the 'charming stone property', if a bit uncertain about the pigeonnier.  

First deckchairs of the year

Until now it's been a case of keeping moving to keep warm, but yesterday at the plot it was warm enough to take a break from digging and soak up the sun.  All of 10 degrees, but it felt blissful after a winter that has seemed never-ending.

Not much blogging has been done, but a fair amount of digging.  The blessing of this cold Spring has been that the weeds haven't got going, so digging the ground over hasn't been as hard as it might have been.  Hard enough, tho, and the ground has been hard through lack of rain. 

Below, the strawberry bed in mid-clean.  It's finished now, and plants dressed with sulphate of potash.  Couch grass seems to love strawberry plants, twining itself around their roots and popping up in mid plant.  I don't doubt that it will return to the fray.
 

The bare ground below holds the newly-planted potatoes.  Two rows of Red Duke of York, two of Mayan Gold (hoping that they will live up to Monty Don's praise of them), and one of Ratte, a salad potato.  The tubers had been chitting for so long that I'm concerned that they will be over-chitted - they had started to wrinkle up - so I hope they will get going and grow.

We have had a paltry harvest of brassicas.  The purple and white sprouting broccoli has still to sprout, and frost has killed most of the calabrese.  However some new shoots of calabrese have survived, as has the purple kale and savoy cabbages.  I'm in two minds about the purple kale.  It does look lovely as a plant, and steamed with a plateful of green lentils, but it made a bizarre addition to my traditional Scotch broth, turning the whole thing a pale lilac.

As for the leeks, they have sulked all winter.  I'm making the best of it by thinking of them as gourmet baby leeks.

There has been curiously little sign of life at the allotment site over the past few weeks.  The weather has been fair, if bitterly cold, and it seems as if people are reluctant to emerge from hibernation.  Everything feels suspended, and it's been difficult to think ahead to a time when winter will end.  When the temperature rose during the night yesterday, with rain and wind, I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder in 'The Long Winter', when the chinook started to blow.

A hazy shade of winter

A number of song and book titles/lines sprang to mind for this post, among them 'All the leaves are brown', and '50 shades of grey brown'.  The problem with the second was that I anticipated a spike in spam traffic directing me to sites I really wasn't interested in.  In the end Simon and Garfunkel won over The Mammas and The Pappas, perhaps inspired by Dancing Beastie's 'The dangling conversation' post. 

So here's a stocktake of  a predominantly brown allotment, with a few tinges of green.

First, the bed that was reclaimed from under years of corrugated iron.  Mostly fallen leaves, but with worrying signs of creeping buttercup infestation.  Beside it is the previous plot-holder's weed dump, now mostly earth but given to springing to life with a lively array of weeds.  The year before last it was couch grass; this past season, out of nowhere, it was a fine crop of foxgloves.  We left these as bee-attractants, but it will need to be cleared soon and the earth sieved over existing beds.
 

Interestingly almost weed-free is the bed that had an application of home-produced compost in the autumn.  Spot the rogue garlic shoot.  The light grey substance is the indestructible remains of teabags.  We go through a whopping amount of teabags in our family.  The mesh bags which tear if you so much as look at them in the wrong way when making a cup of tea seem as if they'll have a half life of several hundred thousand years once composted. 
 

Well, this is pretty dull, isn't it?  You know you're a nerdy allotment person when you can write about a bit of bare earth with some grassy tufts here and there.  This is where our failed potato crop 'grew' last summer.  I have a suspicion that there are still some potatoes down there somewhere, and that this bed will benefit from a serious digging over in the spring.
 

Strawberry plants looking rather sorry for themselves, and with the ever-present couch grass making a come-back. 
 

This weed-stopper cover has been on since early autumn.  Who knows what's underneath?
 

Miniature leeks, anyone?  Probably put in too late, these have failed to thrive over the winter.  They may have a 'late surge', to quote Bill Nighy in 'Love Actually'.

Here's a surprise - something growing!  Purple sprouting broccoli and kale are holding out well under the anti-pigeon netting.  No sign of anything purple sprouting yet, and our life has not been in the mood for kale, but we may yet get something edible.
 

Not so with my eagerly anticipated calabrese, now blasted by frost.  A reminder that we are in Scotland, and that a covering of fleece might have been wise.
 

Decision time

How can it have been more difficult to get to the allotment in a summer where one 'child' has spent 2 months in Nepal, and the other has divided her time between France, Greece and working?  And now that they're both away at university (although only very recently), we still don't seem to have found the time.  Work, visitors, time spent as a family and time spent preparing for departures - all have taken priority over working at the plot.

We've made some small gains, despite our hectic summer.  Onions and shallots have been harvested, such as they were.  The hay (our pseudo straw) has been cleared from the strawberry bed and the old growth cut off.  Leeks have been planted, and are coming along oh so slowly.  The blackcurrant crop has been appreciated by the birds, and the fallen berries are creating a rich mulch beneath the bushes.

For the moment, the kale, broccoli and spring cabbage are holding their own beneath the bird netting.  Some signs of snail attack, and a healthy underplanting of grass which I'm gradually and painstakingly clearing by hand.  The soil has been too wet to use the hoe, so hand-weeding is the only option.
 

The old strawberry bed has become completely overgrown with grass, so to give ourselves an easier time we've covered some of it in light-stop membrane which I unearthed from the shed - ordered in 2004 and never used.

At our last visit a couple of weeks ago we came to a decision:  we're going to give the plot two more years, during which time we'll aim to have it productive and in order.  If at the end of that time we're still struggling for time, we'll give it up.  Longer term plans are beginning to take shape now that the children have finished school, and we want to have time to work towards these. 

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).

24 raspberries or 56 leeks?

Not 24 raspberry canes, but 24 raspberry berries. That was the harvest from our 'one more chance' canes this week, so the decision was made that they'd had their chance and were coming out. There was bushy new growth coming from the base of some of them, but this has been the case from the beginning, and the canes then fail and die as they get taller. Most of them had died off completely. Some heavy digging by my husband was needed to get them out - they were firmly rooted despite their feebleness. Luckily this part of the plot was in shade by that point. It was the hottest weekend of the year, when Scotland was plunged into sudden, startling heat. All over the city people were getting that peculiarly Scottish type of one-sided sunburn, sitting outside bars and pubs. We chose to sweat it out at our green gym.

In place of the raspberries I planted 56 'Mussleburgh' leeks, thinking ahead as I did so to winter and realising how quickly the growing year goes round.


It was an onion family stint at the plot, as I weeded the onions and shallots. This year's crop of shallots has been disappointing - small bulbs and a sparse crop.


The weeds liked their spot between the rows of onions. The thick, strappy onion stems kept catching me unawares and jabbing into my face as I focused on the next weed. I envisaged turning up at Casualty and explaning that I was there because an onion had poked me in the eye.

Tender

Cold February days are for dreaming of things growing. And who better to set you dreaming than Nigel Slater. "Just listen to this", he writes. "... a supper of golden pumpkin with a crisp crumb-crust flecked with parsley and garlic; a dish of emerald cabbage leaves with shards of sizzling ginger; a crumbling soft-pastried tart of leeks, cream and cheese; a bright carrot chutney on a mound of ivory-coloured rice to make your lips prickle."

Thank you, family, for my Christmas present.