Decision made - perhaps

All Spring we've been swaying one way and then the other as we discuss whether to keep on with the allotment.  First of all I was absolutely convinced that we should give it up.  We would have so much more time for all sorts of things we keep meaning to do but never get round to.  Escaping Edinburgh and going walking at weekends.  Staying in Edinburgh and discovering parts we have never visited in 28 years here.  Tidying the loft.  Painting the house.

My conviction was absolute.  Then we went to the plot one glorious May evening, and I wavered.  The next day I swung back to my original gut feel.  The following weekend I sowed lettuce, Swiss chard, beetroot, carrots, spinach, rocket, and veered sharply in the opposite direction. 
 

And so it has continued, and at the moment we are being swayed by a bountiful harvest of strawberries and blackcurrants.
 

We have more lettuce than we can handle.  Our neighbours are resorting to making soup with what we inflict on them.
 

The onions are filling out, and it looks as if we will have a crop worth lifting this year.
 

And even the neglected and weedy pile of earth (a former compost heap/weed dump of the previous plot-holders) has put forth a stunning display of self-seeded foxgloves.
 

For the  moment it seems as if we are staying put for another year.  But we still have to find time to squeeze in our list of 'must-do' and 'nice to do'.  A few more hours each day, and a few more days each weekend would be good.

Benign neglect

Benign neglect, of this blog and the allotment, sums up my approach at the moment.  It's been a busy family time, including university student son leaving today to spend the summer volunteering in Nepal.  The weather hasn't helped either.  The cold and rain of May have continued into June.  Temperatures are grim - a maximum of 13 degrees C (55 F) tomorrow, before falling to 9 degrees (50 F) for the rest of the week.  The shots above and below were taken on a rare sunny afternoon a couple of weeks ago.  The onions and shallots are continuing to do well, if a bit weedier between the rows when we had a quick foray to the plot recently.  The potatoes are coming along strongly, and we've now earthed them up.

Below, my first attempt at transplanted lettuce rather than sowing direct into the soil.  Last year my direct sowings failed completely, but these cos are coming along nicely.

I caught Gardeners' World on Friday for the first time in ages.  At the end of the programme Monty Don spoke about his shooting onions, caused by the weather veering from hot and dry in May to cold and wet in June.  The thought did pass through my mind, 'at least we won't have that problem, since we've only had the cold and wet sort'.  But no - my garlic is starting to shoot.  Perhaps it's been a case of the weather veering from very cold and wet to cold and wet.  Anyway, I followed Monty's advice and lopped off the flower bud, so we'll see what it ends up like.

The first time too for broad beans.  I have a particular fondness for broad beans - not so much for the beans themselves, which are not top of my list, but for their flowers.  They have such a beautiful perfume - if it was bottled I would buy it in preference to any major perfume brand.

I realise now that my affinity for broad beans came from of all things a description in a book by Rosemary Sutcliff, 'The Lantern Bearers', which was a great childhood favourite of mine and which I continue to reread.  Set in the time when the Roman legions abandoned Britain, there's a passage where the Roman hero has escaped from thralldom in a Saxon camp and is fleeing from the part of England occupied by the Saxon invaders.  He finds sanctuary with a monk who has also fled the Saxons.

"Yesterday's rain was gone, and the still-wet forest was full of a crystal green light.  In the cleared plot before the huts, the man in the brown tunic was peacefully hoeing between his bean-rows...the beans were just coming into flower, black and white among the grey-green leaves, and the scent of them was like honey and almonds, strong and sweet after the rain."

I had always thought that bees pushed their way inside the flower trumpets, and in fact this is what Rosemary Sutcliff described: " The little amber bees were droning among the bean-blossom, and at that moment one fell out of a flower, the pollen baskets on her legs full and yellow.  She landed sizzling on her back on a flat leaf, righted herself, and made for another flower."

But down among the beans while weeding between the rows I noticed the the bees making for a tiny hole on the top of the flower, near where it joins the stalk.  A momentary lapse in Rosemary Sutcliff's usual attention to detail!

Below, evidence of some dasterdly deed among the beans.  My heart sank when I saw the feathers inside the cage - my fear is that a bird will find its way inside and be unable to get out again.  But in this case there was no corpse, so I assume there had been an arial fight of some sort above the cage.
 

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.

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.

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

Nothing doing

Seeds sown on 23 August, and so far only three carrot seedlings have come through. I sowed more lettuce a week earlier, and there's no trace of that either. Too warm for the lettuce to germinate? Too late for the Autumn King carrots, probably, despite their name. I had a rosy picture of lettuces going on into the autumn under cloches. It's been a funny old year for germination.