Allotment 29/3/10

One of the things I like about this time of year is the appearance of wild garlic or Ramsons. When the flowers come out you will know about it because of the overwhelming smell of garlic when you wonder through the woods.

 If you don’t like garlic I would ignore this next bit. The leaves of this plant taste fantastic (good mixed with salad leaves or chopped into a risotto) and you can eat the flowers as well (they are also great sprinkled on a salad). For many other recipes you can click here.

 As usual I am quite lucky with living where I live as I have wild garlic growing just up the road from me so I can pick it fresh when I want to. It does have a season so I recommend that if you see some pick it and give it a go.

You may remember that in the last post I made a bit of a fuss about the over complicating of germinating seeds.  It is only fair that I put my money where my mouth is and show you how my seeds are getting on.

Here we have cucumber, melon, courgette, and chillies but you will note that the squash seeds are yet to show,

And here are cabbages, cauliflowers, chard but no celery yet.

Is it going to be cold again because I want to get my potatoes in?

Allotment 15/3/10

One of things that really annoys me is when the perfectly normal things of life are fetishised by the media in order to turn them into “Lifestyle” issues. Food is the most obvious of these things. There are endless shows and articles, many of which descend into nothing more than food porn, about cooking and how hard/easy it is. If you want to see this in action have a look at a menu. Even the Wetherspoons pub next to my house has “Lincolnshire” this and “Organic” that, “Grass feed” this and “Seared” that. Oh for goodness sake, I’ve seen it arrive frozen in the back of a lorry and it is the sort of hot you can only get for either a nuclear reactor or a microwave. You are fooling no one.

The other thing that gets me is people making easy things sound difficult. Again I am looking in the direction of cooking shows; even the ones that claim to be “cooking made easy” still make it sound hard. I make my own bread because it is easy not because it is hard (I’m not Kennedy trying to convince people that we can go to the moon) but you tell people that you make your own bread, damn they are impressed. Why? Because lifestyle programs and Sunday supplement sections tell them it is hard. It’s only got 4 ingredients. Mix it about and leave it for a bit. Make a shape, leave it a bit longer. Put it in a very hot oven and bingo, bread.
Watching the first of the new series of Gardeners World 2 weeks ago and I had this same feeling. They were doing a item on seed planting (which followed a how-to-tell-if-this-plant-is-dead bit which was, “if you cut it and it’s green, it’s fine, if you cut it and it’s brow,n it’s dead. We cut this one and it’s brown.” Dead then? “Well, it might come back later in the year.” What was the point of that then?) Any way back to the seed planting and I’m sure I’ve read that the LHC is less labour intensive than the methods that the presenter went though. It’s no wonder people think that gardening (and by extension, allotment keeping/tending, what’s the term? I like Allotmenteering myself) is hard. He went on about the size of soil particles in seed compost and the surface area of seeds!
A friend of mine was trained by the RHS (makes it sound the SAS, she can be in, prune a Rose, and leave and no one will be any the wiser) and confirms that they take seed planting very seriously, there is a section in the exam on it and they even check the firmness of the compost in the pot, but bet’s be honest, most of us grow the same sorts of things and we treat them in roughly the same way. Shallow trench, sprinkle seeds, cover, water, thin them when they germinate and that’s it. If they don’t germinate, try again or try something else. Well that’s what I do and we feed ourselves through the summer so I must be doing something right.

Allotment 8/3/10

The sun has remained visible so I have continued to get things into the ground. I’ve been removing stones from the soil and adding my own compost. It all looks lovely. The problem is you have nothing to show for all of your work except for some lovely bare soil.
Here for instance are my carrots,



And here are my parsnips,



And today I put my onions.



Yes that is just 3 pictures of soil but it is lovely soil.

The bare-for-a-long-time soil problem is the reason I advise people who are starting out to grow salad crops (Yes, I know that it’s odd that people ask me for advise as I know nothing but they do) because they grow really quickly. I planted my parsnip seeds last week and I will start digging them up some time in October but radishes only take about a month. You don’t get that nothing is happening feeling if you are picking some leaves after about 6 weeks.

There is some life on my patch, here, for instance, is my garlic bed,



I am pretty sure that onions are the easiest things in the world to grow; well they are if you use onions sets (little onions). If you grow your onions from seed then you are just showing off. And if you grow them from seed you saved yourself from last year then you about to be hit in the face with a shovel, smug git (I am aware that I am growing so stuff from seed that I saved last year but this is different. Why? Because I say so, alright.)

I do hope that this lovely weather continues.

Allotment 1/3/10

Quick! The sun is out! Get outside and do stuff!

 As you may have guessed I got to the allotment and, finally, got those seeds in that I wanted to last week. Just to remind you, this is my attempt to grow early salad leaves and radishes under plastic cloches. I think it will work just fine as a few plants that were covered have survived the winter here. Yes I know that my winter wasn’t as bad as yours, I had much less snow, but it was cold so I am happy about the survival. Let’s see if it works.

 That is not all I’ve done today either (I love not working on Mondays) oh no. Off to the allotment shop to get onions sets (because they sell out really fast) and seed potatoes. I also got a little over excited and bought some early peas and some sweet corn seeds (yes I know I am supposed to be using ones that I save last year but I didn’t store them in correctly. I put them in a plastic thingy, so they were mushy when I looked last week, which was less then nice). I popped them in a mini-greenhouse thing as well.

 So now it is not just seed trays in the garden, oh no. On the windowsill of our dining room are 2 egg boxes that contain 3 types of potato that are “chitting”.

Chitting is one of those odd things that we allotment types do but we are not sure why. Basically you pop the seed potatoes somewhere sunny and warm until they start to sprout a bit. The theory is that this gives them a better start in life but there is some debate as to whether this makes the slightest difference. I am agnostic on this point.

  The 3 types of spud that I am going to try and grow are Pink Fir (a salad type), Duke of York (first Early) and Valor (main crop). Last year (and the year before) I tried growing them in bags but that wasn’t super successful so this year they are going in the ground. Let’s see if this works better.