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.
 

In suspense

This blog certainly is, and I am too about what is happening to my brassicas at the plot.  November, December - busy, busy months, also quagmires of mud months.  Followed by being away for Christmas and New Year. Then work starting up again - aargh.

These are the latest shots I have from a visit to the plot on the 25th of November.  Actual broccoli, like the kind you buy in the supermarket.  Savoy cabbage, hearting up but also being munched.  And purple sprouting growing steadily.
 

My husband was at the plot last weekend to repair the shed roof, which is covered with tar paper.  It's been leaking, and with the heavy rains we've had there's been quite a bit of water coming through.  He had to wait until the temperature reached 10 degrees to apply the tar sealant, and luckily last weekend was warm enough.  

Today it's snowing - not nice fluffy flakes, but wet snow falling heavily in raw, damp air, so although I have a free day when I could pop along and see what's happening, I feel in full Scottish hibernation mode.   For the moment I'm not really thinking too much about the plot - my concentration is all at home, on my gorgeous Christmas cacti and on spring bulbs both inside and in the garden.  January and February are long winter months in Scotland.  There will be time for planning once some signs of spring appear.  With no greenhouse and very little suitable windowsill space I can't do early indoor sowings, but I'm quite content to wait.

Dodging showers

I heard on a TV weather forecast this week that Edinburgh has only had 1.5 hours of sunshine so far this July.  It certainly feels like it.  We have almost given up expecting anything of this summer.  Getting any work done at the allotment has been a struggle:  June is always a busy month for us, and this year with the end of our daughter's schooldays it's been especially hectic.  But constant rain, particularly at weekends, has held us back even more.

The arrival of an order of brassica plants this week from Delfland Nurseries meant that rain or not we had to get to the plot at the weekend.  I expected that the soil would be waterlogged, but wasn't prepared for the depth to which my foot sank into the soil when I stepped on to the strawberry bed.  Actually it wasn't so much soil as liquid mud.


Still, a few strawberries had ripened despite the lack of sun.

A very kind work colleague who keeps horses supplied me with several leaves of hay to spread around my strawberries.  It was fun getting the hay home on the bus.  Of course I now realise after reading Monty Don's 'Ivington Diaries' that it would have been smart to put organic slug pellets down before I spread the hay.  So I may have created a snug home for slugs and snails, but at least the berries are raised off the soil mud.

Ideally we would have  moved the netting cage that is over the broad beans, peas and French beans, but the chances of being able to fix the poles in the liquid mud made us abandon that idea.  A floating fleece protection against pigeon attach was the best we could do, but we'll have to loosen it as soon as we can.  We're away from Edinburgh at the moment, so the plants will have to survive until next weekend.  Two types of sprouting broccoli, calabrese, two types of kale, spring cabbage and winter cauliflower.  Planting into liquid mud was a horrendous experience.  I'm not sure what the plants will make of it.  All instructions to 'firm the plants well into the soil, drawing it up round the stem' had to go by the board as I inserted them into the mud as best I could.
 

Otherwise, not a lot is happening.  One of the garlic varieties has rust.  The shallots, seen behind it, are rather thin and weedy and I can only hope for some sun to plump them up.
 

The broad beans, alas, are what we call 'couped' (pronounced 'cow'pd') in Scots, i.e. fallen over.  They were supported by twine, but since I only had metal poles to hand (ex-children's climbing frame) the twine has slid down the metal with the pressure of the bean stalks.  We had no time on Sunday to put things to rights, so this may be another casualty of weather and lack of time.  The beans on the lower part of the stalks are forming well, but higher up the pods have all shrivelled away into little black remnants.  Advice please, from any experienced broad bean growers!
 

For the moment we are up on Speyside, where conditions are pretty much the same as in Edinburgh.  Perhaps slightly drier, as there hasn't been the absolutely constant rain we've had, but everything in the garden is very backward and shrunk in on itself.  I have the left overs from my brassica order up with me to plant out in my Dad's garden.  The soil here is lighter, since it's on a river plain and was once good arable land rather than inner city goodness-knows-what.  It will be interesting to compare the fortunes of the two brassica plantings.

Finished

We had to admit defeat on Sunday. During the week the broccoli and kale had been stripped bare by the pigeons. The netting had pulled free of its pegs at one side of the frame, leaving a big, inviting gap. At that point I lost heart completely and decided just to take the plants out and get the ground ready for something else.

The winter netting has been a big disappointment given the investment in a 'proper' cage and heavy duty netting. We think that the netting is too heavy for the pretty lightweight aluminium poles. It offers a good surface for the wind to catch, and it's so heavy that once it's in motion it drags out the steel pegs from the soil. On the build-a-ball cage this also knocks over the supports. On the recycled climbing frame there's no such problem, but the netting just lifts free from its moorings leaving a doorway that basically says 'pigeons: this way'.

We'll try again but with lighter netting. Meantime, any suggestions for what to do with yards of heavy-duty netting, apart from a good bonfire?

As feared

The aftermath of Thursday's gale, as we'd feared. The wind had whipped the heavy netting up and away from the metal pegs anchoring it to the soil, and deposited it neatly along two sides of the cage. We were surprised that any of the cage was left upright. For a minute or two we contemplated taking the whole thing down and leaving the struggling broccoli and kale to their fate. The pigeons had already been right in there.


The ground was so soft that we didn't think the uprights would last long. On the basis that the old ones are the best, we pressed the climbing frame into service. It's been overwintering beside the shed, and we'd planned to dismantle it.


I don't quite know what it reminds me of. A hovercraft? The Apollo command module?

Phew!

After seeing the state of Mal's brassica netting at his post here, I was anxious to see how ours had fared. Perhaps we have a different type of snow over here at the other side of the city, but the cage was standing up for itself. The broccoli is pretty much buried, but it wasn't any great height to start with. Another note to self - plant it out earlier next season so that it can grow on faster before autumn sets in.

We enjoyed at allotment sunset at 2.50 p.m.

Plot in the snow

Since this photo was taken on Sunday it has snowed, and snowed and snowed. Goodness knows what state the brassica cage is in now, even after being tightened up and the snow knocked off.


Perhaps the snow will stop whatever mollusc has been chomping on this broccoli plant.


I'm concerned about the fox in this weather. Last night we parted the living room curtains to look out at the falling snow and saw a fox trotting down the pavement a few yards from us. I don't know if it was 'our' allotment fox, but it certainly looked very thin.

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.

September contrasts

September opened like this.


And is finishing like this.

Yes, the sunflower is off-centre. It was blowing a gale, but at least the bee was sitting tight.

The very late broccoli and spring cabbage are at last all in - rather too close together, but at least they might have a chance to grow away now. As I was planting them I was aware of a difference in the soil, which nagged away as I worked. Eventually I realised - it was on the dry side, and I was going to have to water the plants in. What a novelty!

Brassica tidy-up

In the three hour stint that I put in on Sunday before the rain came on it was difficult to know what to do first. So much needed doing, but the ground is still so wet that I had to give up on digging as preparation for putting in the spring cabbage and broccoli that I'd sown (late) in August. The kale and broccoli planted in the spring are now well established, but under attack by snails.


I'd put netting over the plants to protect them from pigeons, but since there are no broccoli spears yet I figured an attack on the snails was timely. It turned out that the plastic bottle ends that were holding the netting over the canes were acting as snail nurseries.


As I weeded around the stems 'our' robin appeared to take advantage of whatever beasties I was turning up.