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.  

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. 

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

Still Growing

When I get discouraged about amount of time I have to spare for the plot at the moment, it's good to look back at progress. Above, the shallots and garlic on 16 May. Below, 9 May.


2 May:

2 months ago in March, with the demised red clover waiting to be dug in.


So that's good. But then again, things are getting rather shaggy round the edges. Whoa! When did that central path take over? There's a Big Dig looming.

Progress

It's wonderful what can happen when you're not looking. After another busy-busy two weeks, during which we've been away for Easter, the garlic has not only sprouted but is well up, and the shallots are beginning to pull away.

I had a hard-working session at the plot on Tuesday, my last day of holiday before the office swallowed me again. My order of onions, 'New Fen Globe' arrived just before we went away on holiday, and were overdue for planting out. The lovely thing about planting onions, and shallots and garlic too, is just being able to push them into the soil. Easy! So I popped in four rows of onions, quick as you like.

Although the weather has taken a milder turn (tho not today), the plot wasn't covered in a fine green fuzz of weeds as I'd expected. Instead of weed-busting I was able to sow some salads: corn salad 'Vit', lettuce 'Romana Bionda Degli Ortolani' (that rather rolls off the tongue in an impressive Italian way), lettuce 'Quattro Stagioni', and spinach 'Hector'. I love corn salad (or lamb's lettuce, or mache), but I find it very challenging to grow. It rarely germinates well, so this year I'm sowing earlier in case our fierce Scottish summers (!) are to blame.

The purple sprouting broccoli is having a last, pigeon-free flourish:


The blackcurrant bushes are in flower:


And I even managed to turn some compost. This one of those shots where you realise afterwards just how...weird this photo-blogging lark is, when you eagerly snap the contents of your compost bin. But it IS interesting! Look - here are the remains of the beautiful Mother's Day flowers I received, along with wee matchstick things which my son contributed from his mega bedroom tidying operation brought about by having new carpet laid. The sticks are from one of those kits which are meant to be good presents for 10 year old boys - 'Build the Taj Mahal from matchsticks - hours of fun!' Eight years later the Taj Mahal is still unbuilt, but the wee sticks will do just fine as woody content for the compost bin.

Too busy for photos

This weekend's visits to the plot were real workparty affairs. We dug. We planted two rows of 'Solent Wight' garlic, and four rows of shallots, 'Jermor' and 'Topper'. I love planting shallots - just pushing them into the ground and that's it. We dug some more. We turned one of the compost bins and spread the lovely dark brown, crumbly finished compost over a couple of beds. A very short rest in the deckchairs, and then we dug again. There's still lots to do. While not overgrown, there's a certain scruffiness around the edges.

Amazingly, against all the odds, the purple sprouting broccoli has sprouted, in a late defiance of the pigeons. I didn't get a photo, because I was too busy picking it. We ate it that evening, lightly steamed, along with couscous, mixed salad, salad dressing made with balsamic vinegar, and oven baked organic salmon from West Voe, Shetland. Hence this shot of a Shetland salmon farm. I've posted it before here, when I was feeling nostalgic for Shetland (and posting it again is probably committing some dreadful blogging faux pas, but never mind).

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.

Soggy

'Soggy' makes a change from 'wet'. I pulled onions and shallots at the weekend. 'Lift onions and shallots and leave them on top of the ground in the sun until they have dried off', say the books. Not this ground.





Isn't that just disgusting? Wet and weedy.
Nevertheless, I lifted the rest of the shallots
and most of the onions.
We've run out of space at home to dry off
the oniony harvest, so I laid the shallots on a former
IKEA shoe rack in the shed, and took the onions home
to dry in the porch. Ideally they should all dry in the shed
and be stored there too, so that they don't begin to sprout
in the dark. As it is we'll just have to use them quickly.
The onions and shallots will get used up long before the
garlic - there's only so much garlic a Scottish family can eat.

We used to have a window in our shed, but we boarded it up after the first break-in, and after a second break-in we have no intention of replacing it. There's nothing of value in the shed any more, but I think the board is there to stay. The joys of city gardening. If we DID have a window, this is the sort of set-up we would have (perhaps without the Tibetan prayer flags).





I love this - it's so...'allotment'. Often I'll down tools and wander off round the site to see what's new, what's quirky, what's growing.















The ground still wasn't fit to be stood on, much less dug or weeded.

There are a couple of miniscule yellow courgettes just
peeking through. Normally by this time we would be
putting a brave face on yet another meal featuring courgettes, but this year I think we've picked four so far.
















One crop that is doing well is the slug. The little horrors were feasting on every head of shallots I lifted. Some were the fat little pink-ish cream beasts as here, others were vast, bilious khaki green tiger slugs.








Thank goodness for dahlias.