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.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day October

Getting a bit tattered now, but still blooming in the absence of frost, the dwarf hollyhocks that were part of my bargain buy of plug plants at the beginning of the summer. It seems a very long time ago that I was cosseting them in individual pots.

The nameless hydrangea is into its dusky, burgundy phase, before turning copper and russet later in the autumn.


The second flush of roses has been very strong this year, but with very little scent.


And the Jackmanii clematis goes on blooming.


Self-seeded nasturtiums from a couple of years ago are still popping up. I leave them each year because they provide late food for the bees.


A last summery hydrangea flowerhead. All the rest are now the colour of lace dipped in tea.


In this warm October, this is what's blooming in my garden. But change is on the way, with the BBC weather map tonight showing winds straight from the Arctic by the middle of the week.

More October blooms are at Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

Neighbours

Crisp homegrown apples. Not ours, but a present from our allotment neighbour. Thank you, Robert!

It's a good year for apples, and so far no thefts. Sadly a bumper crop sometimes attracts that dastardly breed, the allotment thief.

My weeds - glass

There's enough of it in the soil to count as a weed in my book. We've dug enough up over the years to make a patchwork greenhouse. Which is probably where it came from in the first place. Plotholders with long Edinburgh memories say that the site used to be a market garden with greenhouses, pre polytunnel era. I always work in the soil in gloves, because the shards can be invisible until they're embedded in a finger. This is the biggest one to date, tho.

Drowning in onions - and comfrey

While the potatoes may be a write-off, we have almost more onions than we can store. A couple of weekends ago I set up an onion processing station in the sunny corner of the plot, shucking off the loosest outside skins and the excess stalk, and dividing the crop into immediate use and storage. I haven't got as far as the shallots yet, which are also plentiful. Thank goodness some things have just got on with it this year while we've been busy elsewhere. Some crops seem to know when they don't have your full attention, but not onions.

Garlic, however, is obviously one of the prima donnas of the allotment world. Or perhaps I didn't plant it deeply enough? Or the French variety I chose didn't like our coldest winter for however many years it was.


The bulbs hardly formed, or rotted away into nothing. It can't be that they didn't have a long enough period of cold weather for bulb formation. Since garlic adapts quickly to local conditions, I'm going to plant a Scottish-bred variety this year, plant 'em deep, and see what happens.

And the green leaves to the left of the onions below?


It's the return of the dreaded comfrey, which I thought we'd got rid of but has suddenly popped up all over the place. This little lot is in its way to the compost, and shortly, just as soon as we have a moment, it's going to be Operation Seek and Destroy. The biggest mistake I've made on the plot was to believe the description of Bocking 14 comfrey in the Organic Gardening Catalogue as 'non-invasive'. Hah! It had designs on my strawberry bed from the start, and has marched straight across the width of a neighbouring bed and now into the grass path. If humanity disappeared tomorrow (I've just finished reading 'The World Without Us', a recent birthday present which satisfied my post-apocalyptic leanings) the Earth wouldn't be taken over by some tree with waxy pods imported to the US from China and currently blotting out native species, but by my comfrey.

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.

Phacelia - the flowering

It is beautiful, isn't it? I would love to let it all flower, and have a carpet of starry blue flowers above the grey-green frond-like leaves. But we strimmed it. Or rather, I let my husband do the dirty deed while I turned my back and dug another part of the plot, unable to watch the carnage.

I know, I need to get a grip. It's only green manure. And it may flower again. I asked for only partial carnage, just taking off most of the flowers so that we don't end up with rampant Phacelia, and leaving a few for the bees to be going on with.

A before and after shot of the whole area would have been good, but there are times when you're working so hard that you forget about anything other than the task in hand. That's what I like about having an allotment - total concentration, even to the extent of forgetting to feed the blog habit.