Garlicking along

In January the annual allotment fee invoice came in, and we had another stocktake about whether we had the time to keep the plot on.  We hadn't got to the end of that when, what seemed like a week later, a red final demand notice came in.  The waiting list for plots near us is very long - between 5 and 7 years - so although we hope not still to be in Edinburgh by that point, we couldn't face giving up and plot and going back on the waiting list.  So here we are, committed for another year and watching the garlic grow.

I planted garlic on 4 January.  By 16 February it was showing green shoots.  When I was at the plot two weeks ago it was higher still, but I didn't get any photos.  I'm just about to go along for a morning's work and will check on its progress then.  Thankfully, despite the late planting we have had some days of frost to help bulb development. 
 

Meantime, potatoes have been chitting away.  Charlotte and Desiree, not too many of either because we want to leave space for more interesting things.  Not that a home grown tattie isn't a delight, but there are other things which cost more and taste of nothing in the supermarket. 
 

And finally - our new weed for this season.  Foxglove seedlings, liberally strewn across the plot by the wild floxgloves on our inherited weed heap/compost pile.  I'll dig a couple up for the garden, but the rest will have to come out.  It seems a shame, but they are definitely a 'plant in the wrong place'.
 

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 watched potato

A watched potato, like a kettle, never seems to boil (or in this case, chit).  I was late buying seed potatoes this year.  The seed catalogues had all sold out, and I was resigning myself to a year without potatoes.  But I came across boxes of them, several desirable varieties, in that wonderful emporium A&I Supplies in Elgin.  The A must stand for 'agricultural', and the I 'industrial'.  Chicken coops, gigantic rakes and hay forks, protective clothing of every sort, steel toe-capped boots, mucking out boots, vast bags of dog food, bird seed....

My goodness they took a long time to sprout.  But here they are just before planting, spread out on the sports pages of the newspaper, which are the section no-one in our household reads unless it's a report of a Scotland rugby match (husband) or rowing or cross-country skiing during the Olympics (me).  The cricket report above is written in a strange foreign language of trajectories and spin and bounce.  I haven't a clue who the footballer below is.

However the potatoes are now safely in the ground - Duke of York and Charlotte.  No growth showing yet, and I don't blame them.  Temperatures here are bumping along at 8 or 9 degrees.  The ground is cold.  Trees are struggling to come into leaf.  I'm not even thinking of sowing seeds outside.  I go to work wearing my down-filled winter coat and gloves, so the thought of pushing seeds into stone-cold earth is not attractive, either for them or me.

New bed activity

So many photos backed up, so many aching muscles from working at the plot, so few blog posts... It's the hungry gap in my blog world. Just to redeem myself quickly, here's the new bed as at Sunday, with the Anya potatoes coming through.

And just as forecast, we had frost this week, as the potato foliage shows.

A new bed

A blogging silence doesn't mean that nothing is happening at the plot. Somehow I'm not managing to get the photos I take at the plot each week transferred to a blog post. But we've been busy every weekend. After the harvest of rubbish I showed in the previous post, we finally got down to bare earth in this area for the first time since taking over the plot. Above, just a few rocks left to move. The imprint of the corrugated iron can still be seen at the back of the bed. That iron took some moving - iron posts had been driven deep into the soil by the previous plotholder, and I feared for my husband's blood pressure as he hauled them out.



We planted two rows of Anya potatoes as a first step to clearing the soil. I was heartened to see how many worms there were, so it can't be as bad as we feared. Now we (just) have the massive ex-weed heap on the left still to move.


Because it's still chilly up here, with the risk of frost, I'm being canny and not rushing ahead with sowing. That's one excuse, anyway. The reality is that I'm also busy with other things just at the wrong time for forging ahead with sowing. This weekend for example we've been up in Moray visiting my Dad and attending to his garden. In fact I'm off outside now to weed a border and cut back last year's stems of an everlasting pea. Once I've put on a couple of fleeces - it's cold out there!

Saturday morning in the kitchen

Finally I'm getting round to ordering for next season. On a damp, chill Saturday morning yesterday it was a comforting thing to do, especially with that leisurely weekend mug of tea at hand.

From Suttons, I've ordered onion and shallot sets. Sturon and Hercules in onions, Jermor and Delvad, both French varieties, in shallots. Although I grew overwintering onions last year and they came up well, I ended up harvesting them at the same time as the spring-sown ones. With no advantage in terms of early cropping, at least up here, I didn't want to take up ground over the winter when we plan to make headway on the central path and general structure of the plot.

And I gave in at the last minute and ordered a small bag of second early salad potatoes - Anya. We'll see how they do. I hope they'll be the waxy, nutty-tasting salad potato that they claim to be.

Since my garlic this year was a miserable failure, I've gone for Scottish-bred varieties from The Really Garlicky Company near Nairn. Various people have recommended 'Music' as doing well in Scottish conditions, so we'll give it a go.

If you're noticing the castles and thistles on my mug, it's a commemorative Emma Bridgewater design celebrating 200 years of Johnston's of Elgin woollen mill. I'll post some photos of the mill on Occasional Scotland soon.

Eeeew!

is the correct horticultural term, I believe, to describe the state of my potato crop this year. Nearly every tattie dug up is like this. Wormy, rotting, weevily, cracking leathery skins. The yield per plant is small, thankfully, because I have to dispose of this lot. This is the total from three plants:


The variety is Red Duke of York. I also planted Charlotte as a waxy salad potato, which has been nothing of the sort. The potatoes boil into soup before they're fully cooked.

Right now I'm in the huff with potatoes. Last year we planted Pink Fir Apple, which turned out to be a 'never again' variety. Fine if you have the endless time of the gourmet cook to negotiate the bumps and carbuncles when peeling. Not so fine that very many were rotten at one end, but subtly, below the skin, so that when you took hold of a potato it turned to liquid between your fingers.

So I'm giving myself a potato holiday next year. There's no law of allotment life that says you have to grow potatoes. When we took on the plot we decided at once that we would liberate ourselves from what seems to be an allotment law in these parts: thou shalt grow whopping cabbages that no-one is going to want to eat. Now we're going to enjoy potato freedom for a bit.

On a less curmudgeonly note: good luck to Michelle today in the Federation of Edinburgh and District Allotments and Gardens Associations annual produce show.

From my deckchair - May

A neglected blog doesn't mean a neglected allotment. At the moment I'm TBTB (Too Busy To Blog). Work is nearly all-consuming, and the bits of life it doesn't consume take up the little that's left of the day. Today, however, on a hard-working day at the allotment, I managed to relax in a deckchair for a few minutes and enjoy looking around. Above, our neighbour's well-tended plot and a line of wallflowers beside the standpipe.

Below, gigantic flowering rhubarb.


Our potatoes are through, with all but this tallest one burnt by frost. How did it escape? Perhaps far enough on to have tougher leaves.


Looking north, which is where our weather has been coming from recently. Bright, cold days and occasional frosty nights.


I've missed what's been going on in gardens and allotments of fellow bloggers. A 3 day weekend would be good, as would another 12 hours in the day.

Back to basics

We're almost weed free, thanks to the bitter winter, most of the plot is dug over, and we're further ahead in terms of clear ground than we've been since we took on the plot. But we've decided to go back to basics this year, and spend our time on getting the shape of the plot in hand. Sorting out the borders, defining the central path (look how ragged it is), evening up the size of the two beds on either side, getting rid of The Heap and the corrugated iron.

So this whole big bed is planted with potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic. Red Duke of York and Charlotte potatoes, Shakespeare overwintering onions, garlic (Solent Wight??? I've forgotten already), and several varieties of onion which I must remind myself of. And that's it. Nothing fancy, no celeriac, no green peas which need staking. Just a basic Scottish diet and a lot of hard work on edges and earth moving.

Just to situate you - the bed in front of the dark orange shed is ours. The other half of the plot is off to the left, and the bed to the right, in front of the black shed, is our neighbour's. The hand that is just reaching out to close the blue-spotted shed door is my husband's.

I will post about the other half of the plot when I emerge from another busy spell at work, daughter about to sit important exams, son looking for flat for next university year, hamster in the last couple of weeks of her short life (sob).

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.

Inching along

It's been a lot of work, but somehow it feels as if we're just inching along at the moment. Busy weekends are partly to blame, and the season has been cold. The shot above shows the state of play at the end of a rather dogged afternoon's work last Sunday. Between the posts and the Weed Heap the potatoes are coming along nicely. The net and post contraption is the site of the first lot of green peas - 'Ambassador'. In the foreground are the ten celeriac plants that I put in the week before, and some short rows of a random mixture: two rows of beetroot, one of 'Boltardy, the other of 'Barabietola di Chioggia'; a row of rainbow chard; a row of spinach; and a row of radishes. Here's the celeriac in more detail. I hope to convert my family to it: I was first seduced by celeriac at school lunches in France when I worked as an English language assistante, and have hankered after growing it ever since.


The peas have come along slowly, probably because they haven't been watered frequently since planting. In fact although it's been cold it's also been very dry - the grass hasn't really grown again since it was strimmed the previous week.


I'm taking no chances with the pigeons and the green peas, so have swathed the young plants in netting.

Salads are still just creeping towards maturity. Perhaps I sowed them too early, in April. The lamb's lettuce is at last showing, but the spinach at the top left of the 4 rows in the photo below is being very grudging.


Now my early season ordering has caught up with me. The first of the phased delivery of purple sprouting broccoli arrived this week from Delfland Organics, and had to be potted up temporarily. The replacement raspberry canes arrived too, and are also in temporary quarters. I remembered with some dismay that I also ordered alpine strawberries, and they too will pop up midweek sometime soon.

Meantime I'm flat out at work finishing up before I go on leave for a glorious 7 weeks. Just 2 weeks to go, but the cost of that pace is a distinct lack of energy in the evenings. Add to that the end of term shenanigans at school and spare time is hard to find. Tomorrow I plan to be out in the garden at 7.00 a.m. - weather permitting of course.

Blight, already?

Nothing sweeter than a May evening at the plot? Yesterday evening's quick jaunt to the plot, which I expected to be balm after a fraught working day, turned out to be nothing of the sort. "Never construct", wrote one of the French dudes I wrote my thesis on. Gustave, you were right.

For a start, it was bitterly cold, that bone-chilling cold peculiar to the East coast of Scotland in May (and June and...). We were muffled up to the ears in anoraks and wished we'd worn gloves. We found the grass verges and 'lawn areas' of the plot romping away - well, we'd expected that after two weekends away, but all the same it looked unkempt. We met another plotholder whom my husband knows from church, and her news was all about her husband's stay in hospital and his declining strength. We looked around the plot and knew we had no time to do anything much, but could see so much that needed doing. I hoed between the shallots and onions. I walked to the gate and back with a distraught plotholder who had lost his keys to the site and couldn't otherwise get out. The bitter wind blew.

We stared glumly at the raspberries, and decided to cut our losses with the row that hasn't come through this year. And then we saw a potato plant that hadn't been there two weeks ago, with what looked suspiciously like blighted leaves. And then I noticed that our new season's crop, just peeking through, was also looking rather nasty about the leaves.


We dug out the rogue plant, but left the others for the time being. After checking in my Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, I now wish we'd dug them up too, or at least taken off the affected leaves. It seems that rogue potatoes from a previous year's crop (or 'volunteers' as they're known) are a prime source of blight. I'll have to see if I can steal time to get along to the plot tomorrow evening to whip out the three plants that are affected.

Good news? Well, I got a special offer on pot-grown raspberries from Ken Muir, and ordered a replacement six canes. They're a variety called 'Tulameen', named after a community in British Columbia. This pleases me a lot! Apparently they come through late each year, so are less susceptible to frost, and are pretty winter hardy, having been bred in BC.

But just now, it's slow going indeed.

Hard work

This is from a week ago now, when we put in a strenuous afternoon of the sort you're not meant to do. The once a week blitz that's so frowned upon by some sectors of the allotment fraternity, and was the impetus for starting this blog. Last weekend an afternoon was all we had, and we worked flat out. The children (strong, healthy teenagers) pleaded exam revision, but there's going to be no escape for them once the exams are over. So it was the aging parents' work party.

Achievements: two rows of British Queen potatoes planted, giving us five rows of tatties so far. I still have Desiree potatoes chitting, but I may not have room to fit them in. Digging over a weedy patch where the leeks had been. Removing the net from the broccoli and kale to let the bees in to the flowers. Weeding around broccoli and kale. Watering raspberries with ericaceous feed. Watering salad sowings. Pushing in onion sets that had been pulled out by birds. Clearing weeds from around the blackcurrant bushes. Picking rhubarb. And strenuous digging by DH to start to reclaim more ground.

This is the result of that digging:


It doesn't look much, but it was hard work, and it will give us another row of something.

The salads were just beginning to come through, although the corn salad wasn't showing yet. I have my doubts about it - again. Am I sowing too late when it's too warm? It certainly doesn't feel overly warm.


The ground was very dry, hence my watering. It must have worked as a rain dance, for during the week we've had a good deal of rain. A day of heavy drenching at first, and then days of showers and sun. People in my office thought I was mad to be delighted at the sight of rain.

The soil round about the blackcurrants is such a joy. It gets the brunt of the leaf fall from the sycamore trees every autumn, and all that leaf mould year after year makes for rich, crumbly soil.

Ordered - at last

Finally! I don't know what's slowing me up this autumn. Well, I do - non-stop school activities and teenagers' social lives. So the time is going on and I had a panic that I had ordered nothing for next year's growing. A flurry of activity at the weekend will see the following on the way to us:

First Early: Charlotte; Maincrop: Desiree

And because I wanted a traditional floury potato, British Queen. It was very difficult to find a floury tattie. All the descriptions were of 'waxy flesh'. At last I found British Queen at Mr Fothergill's.

On the onion front, I've found that this year's Red Baron haven't kept as well as promised, so I've gone for New Fen Globe. Shallots will be Topper and Jermor.

But I still have to find garlic. Marshall's was sold out.

Interesting

That's probably the most we can say about this year's potato experiment. Pink Fir Apple has had its moment on our plot, all five rows of it, and the family verdict has not been favorable. From "what is THAT?" from teenage son, to "it looks like something the cat might bury" from the man with the strimmer. Once they're boiled, or even better, roasted with a little olive oil, they do indeed have 'yellow flesh, with new potato flavour'. But getting them there is another matter. I never thought I'd feel squeamish about a vegetable, but digging them up actually makes me nauseous.

To begin with, they're...mottled. The pink bits give way to yellow-ish bits, which may just be yellow, or they may, as you discover when your fingers squelch through the flesh, be semi-liquid. Even if they're not mottled, most of the tubers are rotting away at the pointed end. And then there are the knobbles. Lots of knobbles, which make preparing them a tedious business. And they're so small...

It's probably in the Scottish genes to feel so acutely about a potato. Next year we're not deviating into any of this fancy nonsense. It's going to be a national stalwart, like Duke of York. How do we get through the winter with Pink Fir Apple? For my grandmother, the height of culinary satisfaction was having a decent "tattie to your soup" - a floury boiled potato added at the point of serving to a plateful of Scotch Broth. I now understand.

Here they are then, the horrid little pink things: