Recipe: Stocks - the first step in dealing with a glut!

Uses carrot, onion, celery and any other old veg (except brassicas) from the allotment.

One of the best ways of using up a glut from the allotment is to make soups. And the basis of any good soup is a good stock. So the first step in dealing with a glut is to make some good stock!

Whenever I have a roast chicken or a leg of lamb or some whole trout, I keep the bones afterwards and put them in the slow cooker with some carrots, onion and celery. (I don’t like eating celery, but grew some this year and froze it so that I always have a few stalks available for stocks and soups.) I also add any other veg that is hanging round the kitchen, but is past its use by date. That old wilting beetroot or parsnip at the bottom of the fridge, maybe the stalks from some parsley, some pea pods, the green bits discarded from leeks, in fact anything except brassicas, which can make it a bit smelly.  I throw in a bay leaf or two, add water and after 24 hours in the slow cooker I strain it off and have a beautiful stock.

If I want a vegetarian stock I just leave out the bones. (I also make stock with the liquid left over after boiling a hock of ham, and find it a superb base for cooking beans.)

I have found that my stocks usually freeze well. The exception is fish stock. I tried once, but after a month or two in the freezer is smelt a bit odd, so I threw it away.  It was good used fresh though. 

But otherwise, whenever I have a glut, I simply get one of my stocks out of the freezer and make soups. Beats an oxo cube any day!

Crop Rotation 4: When they grow

Now it is time to think about the sequence of crops in their beds, to enable successional planting.  And to do this,  I need, very simply, to be aware of when these vegetables need to be planted, and when harvested.

So, here are the relevant dates for the most important vegetables in my wish-list: 

Potatoes

·        First Earlies are planted in early March and usually lifted by Mid-July.

·        Second Earlies are planted in late March and harvested in August.

     Maincrop potatoes are planted in April and occupy the ground through till the autumn.

Alliums

·        Leeks need to be planted out by the end of July and can occupy the ground through till the following April.

·        Over-wintering Onion Sets and Garlic are planted out in September/October and harvested by July.

·        Shallots are planted between October and March (depending on who you ask!) and are also harvested by July.

·        Spring-sown Onion Sets are planted out in March and harvested by August.

Legumes

·        Peas and Broad Beans are hardy and can be sown in early spring, or in some cases overwintered.

·        French Beans and Runner Beans are more tender and should not be planted out before early June.

Brassicas

·        Calabrese and Summer Cabbages & Cauliflower are planted out in spring and harvested by late summer.

·        Brussel Sprouts & Winter Cabbage are planted out in May/June and harvested as and when ready through the winter.

      Winter Cauliflower, Kale and Sprouting Broccoli are planted out in the summer and harvested through till the following spring.

     Turnips are sown in situ in September and the tops harvested February/March time.

·        Spring Cabbage are planted out in September and harvested through till the following June.

     Swedes are sown in situ in June and harvested in the autumn/winter.    

(Note that, although overwintering brassicas need to be spaced about 2 ft apart, they do not start needing all of this space until about mid-August. So we also need a nursery bed where young brassica plants can grow and thrive until the ground is ready for them to be planted out in late summer.)

·      

Roots

·        Parsnips are sown in March and harvested in the autumn/winter.

·       Carrots and Beetroot are sown successionally from March onwards and harvested in the autumn.

·       Forcing Chicory is sown in June and dug up in November.

Other           

·        Sweetcorn and the Gourd family are tender plants with a short growing season. They need to be planted out in early June and harvested by September/October.

So now we have all the information we need to organize our crops efficiently and pull off the magic trick of turning 20 beds into 29!! Or getting through a 5-stage rotation in 4 years! It’s water into wine stuff!

 I am dividing my 20 beds into 4 sets of 5. The crops in these beds will rotate around the plot in a 4-year cycle. I will call these 4 stages “breaks” as John Seymore does.

Taking into account soil requirements and growing seasons, a suitable basis for a rotation, to satisfy my vegetable wish-list, is as follows:

Potatoes – alliums – legumes – brassicas – others

So, time to sprinkle the magic dust, click my heels 3 times and board the Hogwarts Express! 

Crop Rotation 2: Deciding what to grow

Once I have decided that it is a good idea to practise crop rotation, the next stage is to think about how? I can see 3 different approaches:

a)     Minimal   One way is to keep things as simple as possible. Try to leave as long as possible between potato and brassica crops, at least 3 years.  Try not to follow one crop with another from the same family.  And, try to follow a below-ground crop with an above-ground crop.  And that's it.

This is an excellent method. For someone else. Unfortunately it wouldn't work for me. My memory and record-keeping are both as bad as each other. I would look at a bed in the spring and not have any idea. Did I have potatoes there last year? Or was that the year before. No, hang on, wasn't that where I slipped my sweetcorn? Or was that the bed next door?

No, I need something more systematic, so that I can look at a bed in my allotment this year, and automatically know which family of vegetables were there last year, and which will be next year.

(b)   Prescriptive   There are as many different ideas for crop rotation as there are gardening books in my local library. So why not simply adopt someone else's plan?  The problem with this is that it always involves compromise. And I don't want to compromise.

For example, some rotations consider roots a separate stage, and allocate the same amount of space to roots as to brassicas or legumes, say. Yet I need nowhere near as many beds full of roots as I do legumes, unless I group spuds in with them in which case  (notwithstanding the diametrically different soil requirements) I need a lot more.

Another example: many rotations suggest liming the soil after lifting potatoes and then growing brassicas. The problem with that, for me, is that my soil is very loose after the spuds, and brassicas need a firmish soil. Some gardeners will simply tread the soil to firm it, and then dig over afterwards, but as I have described elsewhere, I want to avoid treading on the soil if I can. I just don't want to dig!

c)  Personal     Rather than slavishly follow a rotation suggested by someone else, I suggest we recognize that we all want to grow different amounts and combinations of vegetables. Therefore every gardener’s plan should be individual, and tailored to his or her own requirements.

In order to design a system that suits me, I need firstly to list what vegetables I want to grow and how much space I need to devote to them.

I have 20 beds at my disposal, and want to have a 4-year rotation, neatly dividing the growing area up into 4 quarters.  This means that each stage of the rotation will consist of 5 beds.

Here is my vegetable wish-list:

Potatoes          1^st Early – 1 bed

2^nd Early/salad  – 1 bed

Maincrop – 3 beds           

Total 5 beds

Legumes         Peas – 1 bed

Broad Beans (overwintering) – 1 bed

Broad Beans (spring-sown) – 1 bed

Runner Beans – 1 bed

French Beans – 2 beds           

Beans for drying – 1 bed

            Total 7 beds

Alliums           Onions (overwintering) – 1 bed

Onions (spring-sown ) – 1 bed

Garlic – ½ bed

Shallots – ½ bed

Leek – 1 bed

            Total 4 beds

Brassicas        Calabrese – 1 bed

Brussel Sprouts – 1 bed

Sprouting Broccolli – 1 bed

Summer Cabbage – ¼  bed

Summer Cauliflower – ¼  bed

Autumn &Winter Cabbage – 1 bed

Spring Cabbage – ¼ bed

Overwintering Cauliflower – ½ bed

Kale – 1 bed

Turnips – ¼ bed

Swedes – ¼ bed

            Total 6¾  beds

Roots              Carrots –  ¾  bed

Parsnips – ½  bed

Beetroot – ½  bed

Chicory (forcing) – ¼ bed

Celeriac – ¼ bed

            Total 2¼  beds

Gourds:          Courgettes & summer squashes – ½  bed

                       Winter Squashes & pumpkins – 1 bed

                        Outdoor cucumbers, gherkins,–   ¼ bed

Total  1¾ beds

Other              Sweetcorn – 1 bed

                        Celery – ¼ bed

Miscelleneous  (lettuce, salad onions, hearting chicories, Spinach beet, ruby chard, mizuna, rocket, summer turnips, radish, autumn spinach) - ¾  bed

            Total 2 beds

(I have excluded tomatoes, aubergines and peppers from the list because I intend to grow them in the greenhouse.)

Now, as I have said, my allotment has 20 beds. However totting up the requirements above, it is clear that I need about 29 beds to grow everything I want.  So I need somehow to grow 9 extra beds-worth of vegetables in the same area

If I don’t want to compromise, I will need to organize my plot very efficiently, and grow more than 1 crop per season in a given space. This can be done it 2 ways:

(a)  Interplanting    This means growing 2 or more crops in the same space, one slow-growing, and one faster growing. By the time the slower-growing plant needs the room, the other crop has already been harvested.

(b) Successional Planting This means sowing or planting out a second crop tas soon as the first crop has been harvested.  Which involves starting one vegetable off somewhere else, either in a  seed bed, or in pots, modules or trays, and planting it out later in the season once the first crop has vacated the soil.

This method often requires a nursery or holding bed in which the young plants can develop to a viable size but at much closer spacings that they will eventually require.

Now that I have my wish-list of vegetables to grow, I need to work out what order to grow them in -   which vegetable best comes before or after another, and what treatment the soil needs in between.

And then I need to look the planting and harvesting dates of the veg in my wish-list, to find interplantings and successions that can work.

           

Crop Rotation 1: Why bother?

This particular post is going to get quite detailed. I am not claiming to be an expert on the subject of crop rotation, but it is very important and I want to summarize here what I have learnt.

There are many good reasons for not growing vegetables from the same family on the same piece of ground year after year. 

a) Avoiding Pests   The first is to do with pests.  If a particular grub likes to eat your sweetcorn, say, and overwinters in the soil, then it makes sense for you to have moved your sweetcorn somewhere else when the next generation of the grub hatches out in the spring.  The grub finds that its sweetcorn cafeteria has moved away, and has to look somewhere else to find lunch.

It’s a moot point whether moving crops around a plot as small as an allotment is going to be that effective. Many pests (such as the dreaded carrot fly) can scent their desired meal from great distances, and will just follow their noses and fly to your new bed.  But moving the crop will at least make the pest go look for their favourite meal, rather than having breakfast in bed when they wake up.

One example: failure to rotate your potato crops can lead to damage by a microscopic pest called potato eelworm. So they say. As far as I know I have never had eelworm in my potatoes and wouldn’t recognize it if I did. By moving my potatoes to a fresh bed every year I hope to never have to find out.

b)   Avoiding Diseases    Similarly with plant diseases. If crops are moved round each year, there is less likelihood of a build-up of a particular disease in the soil.  Going back to potatoes again, the Irish potato famines of the 19^th century were the result of growing potatoes on the same land year after year. Blight built up in the soil, and the results were devastating.

Another example is with brassicas, which are susceptible to an unpleasant fungal disease called club root. One of my neighbouring allotmenteers used to grow his brassicas on the same bit of his land year after year, presumably because that is where his anti-pigeon cage was situated. Now he has club root.

c)   Use of Nutrients in the Soil     Another reason to rotate crops is to do with plant nutrients. It is good policy to follow one crop with another that takes different nutrients from the soil. At the simplest level, this would mean following an above ground vegetable, such as cabbage, with a below ground vegetable, such as parsnip.

Annuals 
It makes sense, then, to organize your allotment so that you follow one annual crop with another from a different family.  The various families are:

1.     Legumes:  peas, broad beans, runner beans, french beans

2.     Brassicas: cabbages, brussel sprouts, cauliflowers, calabrese, sprouting broccoli, kale, swedes, turnips, kohl-rabi, radishes, cress, rocket, mizuna

3.     Potato Family: potatoes, tomatoes, chilli peppers, sweet peppers, aubergines

4.     Carrot Family: carrots, parsnips, celery, celeriac, Florence fennel,

5.     Alliums: onions, leeks, shallots, garlic

6.     Beet Family: beetroot, spinach, swiss chard, spinach beet,
      Gourds: cucumbers, courgettes, marrows, pumpkins, squashes, melons,

8.     Salads: lettuce, chicory, endive,

9.     Other: sweetcorn

Perennials
Some vegetables however, have to stay in the same place, either permanently, or at least for several years, for practical reasons. These we can consider perennials:

The important perennials are: rhubarb, asparagus, globe artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, seakale.

I grow my annuals at The Allotment, and my perennials, together with the fruit, at The Orchard.

Exceptions to the Rule  
Rotation is most critical for brassicas and potatoes, less so for some other vegetables. Here are some examples of liberties that can be taken:

Brassicas  I don’t worry about growing fast-growing brassicas such as radish, rocket and mizuna in the brassica beds. I reckon that they are in the soil for such a short period of time, that there is little chance of damage.

Lettuce   Similarly, lettuce , and other salad veg, are fast growing, and can be just fitted it in wherever there is space.

Tomatoes  Many gardeners group their tomatoes, aubergines etc with other fruiting crops, such as sweetcorn and courgettes, rather than with potatoes, which is of course a root crop.  For me this isn’t an issue; the British climate is rarely dependable enough to get a good crop of tomatoes outside anyway. I did try to grow tomatoes outside twice. In both cases I lost the crop because of blight. So I grow them in the greenhouse instead. (Rotation inside a greenhouse is more difficult. Best is to rotate the soil, rather than the crops. I will talk more about that another time.)

Runner Beans  Many allotmenteers have a permanent framework for growing their runner beans, and grow them in the same site year after year. They seem to be able to do this without ill-effect. It makes sense to refresh the soil each year if you are going to do this, however.

Recipe: Pumpkin Pie

Uses pumpkin (or squash) and eggs from the allotment.

Pumpkin pie is an American tradition, served during autumn and winter, especially at Thanksgiving, which is some strange American festival to do with turkeys, American Indians and Pilgrim fathers. For some reason it hasn’t caught on here.  (Maybe because England is short on American Indians and Pilgrim Fathers nowadays.)

However it provides a tasty dessert, and is a good way of using a glut, which is what I have at the moment.

From trawling the recipes on the net, it would seem that most U.S. cooks cheat, and use a tin of pumpkin pie mix, and evaporated milk. I use a tasty British recipe that uses fresh pumpkin and double cream instead.

I do sometimes cheat with the pastry, though, and use frozen.

1.                  To prepare the pumpkin, cut it in half and remove the seeds. (I have had good results with both butternut squash and a regular (small) pumpkin.)

2.                  Either roast or steam until soft and scrape the flesh from the skin.  Sieve to remove excess water (after steaming).

3.                 Whisk 3 small or 2 large eggs.

4.                 Put 3 oz of soft brown sugar and 10 oz of double cream in a pan. Add 2 tsp mixed spice (use a mix that contains some or all of nutmeg, allspice, cloves, cinnamon and ginger) Bring to simmering point and pour over the eggs, giving a quick stir.

5.                 Add 1lb of pumpkin flesh and whisk together with a blender until smooth.

6.                 Line a dish with pastry and pour in the pumpkin mix.

7.                 Bake at 180^oC for 40 minutes. Cool before serving.

I have had nothing but complements for this pie.

What's up with the Hens?

We have just bought some young hens to replace the old girls who are now in their third year of lay. (These we gave to a neighbour who is just starting out.)

Our 6 new birds were hatched last spring and should be laying right through the first autumn. Unfortunately they obviously didn’t read the manual, and have slowed right up. We're getting on average just 1 or 2 eggs a day from our 6 ladies.  They don’t seem to be moulting, they are just not laying very well.  The only reassurance is that everyone else who bought hens from that batch has the same problem, so it’s not something I’m doing wrong.

Poor Mildred!

Oh yes, and one of them, let’s call her Mildred, has gone broody. I have tried in my best hennish to explain that, as we don’t have a rooster, any egg she sits on is not going to hatch, so she is never going to be a mother, so she may as well resign herself to being an old maid and get outside scratching and pecking with the others. She doesn’t seem to understand (maybe I am speaking the wrong dialect) and still trills unhappily when I lift her backside up and retrieve her eggs.

What we’re eating now: mid October

Fresh   We have just eaten the first of the leeks for this year, and I have just harvested the last of the late lettuce. The brassica beds are doing well: we have eaten some kale this week and there are a few savoy cabbages which have hearted up well and are ready to use. There are a couple of rows of leaf beet and swiss chard which I have been using in stir fries. The last of the year’s tomatoes are ripening in a tray in the greenhouse.

 Tomatoes ripening

Some sugarloaf chicory plants are starting to heart up. I have taken the odd one early to use as a cooked vegetable (braised in butter). I managed to find a handful of raspberries on the autumn canes yesterday. This will be the last, as we have quite a frost last night.

Freezer  Now that the fresh beans have finished, we have started eating them from the freezer. We have broad beans, runners and 3 different kind of french beans: (purple podded and yellow waxpods, from dwarf plants, and green pencil pods from climbing plants). We are starting to use frozen calabrese and cauliflower, from the early summer crops.  There are also a couple of bags of parsnip chunks; I am being quite frugal with these, as this year’s crop was a failure.

Store   There are still a dozen or so squashes and pumpkins sitting on the conservatory window ledge.  There are couple of sacks of potatoes in the shed, though we are still using up the ones we found to be damaged at harvest.  There are also onion strings and some beetroot  and carrots in sand. (There are still a lot of carrot pieces in the bottom of the fridge which need to be used first - remnants after the carrot fly damage was cut away). 

What else is growing?

There is a bed of brussel sprouts which are starting to bud up and should be ready in a few weeks. There are a few sprouting broccoli plants, which, if they survive the winter (last year’s didn’t!) will provide welcome veg in the hunger gap next spring. I have a few spring caulis and red cabbages growing happilly, though these were bought seedlings and I can only hope that they were suitable varieties for the time of year.

I have a few hardy lettuce plants growing in a spare corner of one of the brassica beds, and also several rows of them in the greenhouse. There are also some hardy salad onions growing at the end of the leek bed.

As mentioned, there are some sugarloaf chicory plants which are starting to heart up and should provide us with salads in a few weeks. There are also some forcing chicory plants, which will need to be dug up next month, and then stored in sand before forcing for winter salads. 

There is a bed of autumn planted onion sets, which are just starting to show. These were sowed late last month. There is also a bed of broad beans, and half a bed of garlic, both sown/planted last week, which haven’t started to show yet.

Hens

We have just bought some young hens to replace the old girls, which we gave to a neighbour who is just starting out. These new birds were hatched last spring and should be laying right through the first autumn. Unfortunately they obviously didn’t read the manual, and have slowed right up. We are getting on average just 1 or 2 eggs a day from our 6 ladies.  They don’t seem to be moulting, they are just not laying very well.  The only reassurance is that everyone else who bought hens from that batch has the same problem, so it’s not something I’m doing wrong.

Poor Mildred!

Oh yes, and one of them, let’s call her Mildred, has gone broody. I have tried in my best hennish to explain that, as we don’t have a rooster, any egg she sits on is not going to hatch, so she is never going to be a mother, so she may as well resign herself to being an old maid and get outside scratching and pecking with the others. She doesn’t seem to understand (maybe I am speaking the wrong dialect) and still trills unhappily when I lift her backside up and retrieve her eggs.

Poor Mildred!

Digging, Liming and Edging

Digging over the potato beds

I have written earlier about how much I hate digging. But some digging is necessary. You can’t get your potatoes out of the ground without digging. (This doesn’t actually feel like digging, it feels like harvesting, which is much more fun.)

I have found over the last few years that I miss too many spuds first time through. As a result, potatoes grow in the middle of the next crop the following year, as weeds.  Both annoying, and a waste. So nowadays I dig over the potato beds a second time looking for strays. This is quite easy to do, as the soil is already loose.

I put a couple of wheelbarrows at one end of the bed, dig out a trench a spade wide and one spit deep, putting the soil into the wheelbarrows, then move them to the other end of the bed. (That is the hardest bit.) Then I turn the next spade-widths of soil into the first trench, salvaging any stray spuds that surface, and so on until the whole bed has been turned, finishing by putting the soil from the wheelbarrows into the final trench.

Double-digging

This is optional, and admittedly does feel more like work and less like fun. And I only ever intend to do this once. But while digging over the potato beds, I loosen the soil at the bottom of each trench with a fork.  This is called “double-digging” and is a way of increasing the depth of soil available to plants.

Some books say that you should put compost or manure at the bottom of the trench before double digging. I am not sure about this. The crops that follow potatoes in my plan are alliums (the onion family) and legumes (the pea and bean family).  These are all fairly shallow-rooting crops and need nutrients nearer the surface rather than deep down. And there should already be sufficient nutrients in the soil after the previous year's manuring for the spuds.

After double-digging, roots can more easily penetrate deeply in search of nutrients and water. (I knowI have just said that the plants that will immediately follow have their roots near the surface. But other crops, especially root crops like carrots, parsnips and chicory, will benefit greatly from the increased depth available.)

I am also slowly increasing the depth of soil from above too, by regularly adding compost and manure to the beds. By increasing the soil available vertically in this way, it is possible to grow plants closer together, thereby increasing yields.

Of my 20 beds, I have 5 beds down to potatoes each year, and if I work on each of these beds I will have double-dug the whole thing in 4 years. Afterwards, by scrupulously avoiding treading on the soil, this increased depth should continue to be available to plant roots every year without any further double-digging.

Liming

Repeated heavy cropping and application of manure increases the acidity of soil. Most vegetables don’t like acid soil. The main exception is potatoes. To grow good spuds, the soil needs to be fairly acid. At the other end of the scale, the brassica family hate acid soil. To grow good cabbages, cauliflowers, etc the soil needs to be quite alkali.  Other vegetables lie somewhere between these 2 extremes, although most are closer to the brassicas on the acidity-alkalinity scale than potatoes.

To reduce the acidity of soil, it is necessary to add lime. Some allotmenteers don’t bother. Those that do lime tend to do this before planting out their brassicas. One advantage of doing it then is that lime does help combat the dreaded club-root disease.

I don’t have club-root on my allotment and prefer to lime after the potatoes. So once I have dug over the potato bed, recovering any stray spuds and loosening the soil, I rake it level and then apply lime.  Some books tell you to use a soil test kit to assess exactly how much lime to add, but I don’t bother. I just add the amount recommended on the packet as a general soil treatment for vegetables.

Edging

Now that my outgoing potato bed has been dug and limed, the soil is loose and ready for the next crop. It is at this stage that I find it easiest to edge the beds with scavenged planks or bought decking boards. I simply slide the boards into the loose soil and then bash in retaining posts (which can very easily penetrate more than 12 inches into the double-dug soil), securing them with screws.

Last year we edged the central path which runs the length of the allotment. This year I am edging 5 ex-potato beds, and over the next 3 years I will be edging the remaining beds after lifting potatoes, until the entire allotment has edged beds. 

Something's been eating my Carrots and Beetroot!

I have dug up the beetroot and carrots for winter storage this week. In both cases I was disappointed.

Beetroot

When I lifted the beetroot for winter storage I found that all the decent sized roots had been eaten. Not by an insect, but by something much larger with teeth. No one else seems to have the problem, just me! I thought at first it was rabbits, but looking at some of the half-eaten roots more closely, I think the heads which owned the teeth had to be much narrower than a rabbit.

What's eating my beetroot? 

So rats then! Autumn is the time of year when the rats leave the fields and have to look elsewhere for their food. And of course there are many hens around at the allotments, and where there are hens, there are rats.

Most of the large roots were destroyed, leaving only a few golf-ball sized roots. Fortunately I still have a couple of jars of last season’s pickled beetroot left, so I can manage with the pickles, but I have very few now to store for winter use.

Next year I suppose I have to use rat bait – not a prospect I relish.

Carrots

When I lifted my carrots I found that many of them had been affected by carrot fly. Only about a third of the crop were in a good enough condition for storage. With the rest I cut out the blackened holey (unholy!) bits and threw them in the bottom of the fridge until I have time to process them.

Carrot soup anyone?

Carrot fly damage.

I grew the roots under mesh (enviromesh) weighed down with bricks, but clearly I haven’t been vigilant enough to ensure no way in.

I do practise rotation, so this year’s carrots are grown somewhere else than last year’s. At least that means that when the overwintering grubs hatch out in the soil they have to go somewhere else to look for their food, rather than finding breakfast in bed ready and waiting. The problem is that on an allotment the flies don’t have that far to look. This year’s bed is inevitably only a few yards away from last year’s.

So what to do?

(a)  Variety            Maybe grow varieties that are resistant to the fly. I looked on the net to find out which variety was best and came across this entry for the carrot flyaway:

The result of over 15 years breeding, this is we believe the closest to being a completely carrot fly resistant variety. In recent trials it came out top when grown against over 20 other 'resistant' varieties. Its resistance lies in it having low levels of chlorogenic acid, a chemical which the larvae of the carrot fly needs for survival. This means that it appears to be unattractive to the fly and even if your crop is attacked to some degree the larvae will soon die after doing relatively little damage.

Of course this is a totally biased account from someone who wants to sell me seeds, rather than an unbiased account from a consumer. Nevertheless, it looks promising.

(b) Cover   If I cover more diligently making sure there are no gaps, the fly should not be able to get in. Of course, when while the mesh is temporarily removed to harvest/thin/weed, the carrots are vulnerable. 

(c) Avoid crushing foliage  If I grow a “bunching” carrot, then I won’t have to thin and will be able to lift several carrots at a time without crushing the foliage  and releasing the scent.   When I harvest I must carefully lift from below rather than pull from above. If the fly can’t smell it, it won’t find it.

(d) Interplanting with onions  Traditionally rows of onions were sown between rows of carrots and the scent of one was meant to confuse the fly of the other. However recent research suggests this to be of minimal effectiveness.

(e) Harvesting at the right time  Apparently the scent doesn't carry when it is raining.  Also, I have read that the flies only fly during the daylight hours.  So maybe I should harvest when it's raining? Or at dusk? Or, even better, at night in the rain?

I can't see that happening somehow!

The Allotment and The Orchard

We have two plots on two different sites. One in town is just a 15 minute walk from home; the other in a small village just outside town is a 10 minute drive away.

The Allotment           

The nearer plot is The Allotment proper. We have just completed our third summer there. It is not quite rectangular, although you don’t really notice this until you get to the corners. It is in fact a parallelogram. 

There I have constructed 20 beds for vegetables, each 5ft by 12ft. There is a 10ft by 6ft greenhouse towards the back of the allotment, and 4 compost bins at the front.  In the back left-hand corner there is  an area about 12ft by 10ft where we keep 6 laying hens. Next to it is a rough area with a shed.

We grow all our annual vegetables in the beds and greenhouse apart from runner beans which  grow up a fence of chicken wire near the shed.  In the greenhouse I grow lots of tomatoes and chillies (successfully) and some cucumbers, aubergines and sweet peppers (less successfully). I am experimenting this year with winter lettuce.

There are about 120 allotments in this site, and unfortunately pilfering does take place. A couple of years ago I lost a hose (which was left laying on the path) and a new roll of roofing felt (for the shed). Since then I have improved our fencing and lock and have not lost any tools, or indeed produce.  If thieves really want to get in, they will; all I can do is make it harder for them. Or maybe more attractive to raid someone else’s plot.  (Two summers ago a neighbour lost an entire polytunnel!)

Improved security - using an old motorbike chain

Neighbours say that if you lose tools on the Saturday night, you can go to a nearby car boot sale and buy them back on the Sunday morning!

Many allotmenteers don’t worry about security and simply take their tools home with them every day. If I lose any more tools I may well start doing that myself.

The Orchard            

The first allotment I was offered was in a small village just outside town. This was the plot I described in “Clearing an Overgrown Allotment”. We worked hard to establish it as a productive area again after years of neglect.  This plot too is not quite rectangular. It is trapezoidal in shape. Again you don’t notice the shape until to get towards the back and realize that the beds are getting shorter and shorter.

When we were offered the other plot nearer to home, we decided to retain both and convert the original plot to grow lower maintenance crops. This we now call The Orchard.  Here we have a caged area for growing berries: blackcurrants, gooseberries, late raspberries and redcurrants. There is an asparagus bed, which should start producing soon, and a rhubarb bed. 

Last November we planted out 8 trees on dwarfing rootstock: 4 apple trees, a family pear tree, 2 plum trees and a cherry (inside the cage). We also planted out a dozen summer-fruiting raspberries next to the fruit cage, with the intention of enlarging the cage to include them when they became established. Unfortunately most of them did not survive last year’s extreme winter.

There is a strawberry bed, which hasn’t produced anything worthwhile, mainly because of my neglect, and an experimental bed where I have started to grow some cut flowers for the kitchen table.

There is room for another bed if I should need it.

The Orchard is much wilder than The Allotment – there are corners which still need to be tamed. However, there seems to be no problem with theft, at least of the two-legged kind.  However, The Orchard is situated on top of a rabbit warren, so we have to constantly block up holes when they appear and fill even the smallest gaps in the perimeter fencing.

"I" or "We"

Reading over these posts I have noticed some inconsistency in using "I" or "We". Let me explain.

I retired as a maths teacher some 6 years ago. Mrs Spud still works full-time.  Originally the allotment was my hobby, and Mrs Spud just helped me out occasionally.  Gradually though, as it has become more productive, she has started to say "Our allotment" rather than "Your allotment" and is happy to more frequently give up time at the weekend to help me. Especially when the weather is good.

So it is basically my allotment. Except when it is ours.

Is that clearer?

We make a good team. She loves weeding (!) I hate weeding.  She hates planning and detail. I love detailed planning. And we both love eating fresh organic fruit, veg and eggs.

Why Fixed Beds?

Let us compare growing vegetables in rows with growing them in fixed beds.

The Row-based allotment

In a traditional vegetable garden, the plants are laid out in rows, with enough space left between the rows for the gardener to walk up and down to gain access to the plants.  This constant to-ing and fro-ing between the rows inevitably compacts the soil. Which is why, for the traditional gardener, it is necessary to dig the plot over every winter. 

And in terms of the allotmenteer’s daily routine there can be a point to this.  It can give him a purpose to visit the allotment at a time of year when not much else is happening there. He needs an excuse to get out from under his wife’s feet for a couple of hours every day. Digging the allotment provides just that excuse.

The Fixed Bed Allotment

Now compare with a fixed bed allotment, which I suppose should more accurately be called a fixed path allotment. The paths are where the gardener walks, never the beds. If you never tread on the beds, the soil does not get compacted and therefore there is no need to dig in the winter. 

I don’t like digging!

While my neighbours are digging, I go away on a winter holiday in the sun!

The Size of Beds and Paths

I have designed our beds so that we can reach the middle of each bed comfortably from the path. As Mrs Spud and I are both quite tall, we use a width of 5 ft. I can easily reach 2ft 6in to the middle of a bed from the path. If for any reason I want to be on, rather than beside, the bed, I use an old door to kneel on, which spreads my weight over a large area and avoids compaction. The beds are about 12 ft long.

So what about the path?  Well, if you used old carpet to mulch the allotment initially, to suppress weeds, you can cut the carpet into 2 ft strips afterwards and use it as the base for paths – an 18 inch path dug in 3 inches on either side. (I find you need this 3 inches to prevent any persistent weeds from invading from underneath the carpet.)

Fixed Beds or Raised Beds?

In principle it is more important for my beds to be fixed than raised. However, after just a few seasons, I have found that the soil in the beds is higher than the level of the path. This is inevitable given that I am regularly adding manure and compost to the soil.  I designed them as fixed beds, but they are evolving into raised beds.  

With raised beds there is the problem of loose soil tumbling down onto the path below. So I have started edging my beds.  I am slowly scavenging old planks and using them to prevent the soil falling onto the paths. Sometimes I use bought decking boards. Then I can surface the path with sawdust or wood chippings. (We get regular free deliveries of this to the allotment throughout the winter from local tree surgeons.)  

Preparing for Fixed Beds

It is important to deal with all perennial weeds from the outset, either by digging or, as I have described elsewhere, by mulching. In our allotment mulching was a more effective method than digging. Old-timers suggested that it wasn’t necessary to remove the weeds at all, we should just dig them in instead.  We tried it on one bed. That one was the worst of all. We were still digging out yards of couch grass roots two years later.

Other Advantages of Fixed Beds

(a)   Less waste   When you add manure, or compost, or lime, or whatever to the soil you add it only to the area used for growing, and not to the area used for walking.

(b)   The Worms do the Digging   I have found that I don’t even need to dig in the compost. I simply lay it on top and after a couple of months it is gone – the worms have dug it in for me. I put this down to less compaction.

(c)   Avoids Spreading Disease    Some of my neighbours have got club-root – a particularly nasty disease that affects the brassica family: cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts etc.  “Once you have got it you can’t get rid of it” I was told. “You carry it around the plot on your shoes. It spreads everywhere.”

I don’t have club root. And as I don’t tread on my soil, I am not going to carry it into the allotment on my boots and spread it onto the beds.

(d)  Helps Planning, Organization & Record-keeping   Having beds rather than rows makes it easier to keep track of which veg was where when, so that you can rotate your crops more easily.
(e)   Closer Spacings   If you do not need to leave space between the plants to walk up and down, you can afford to plant them more closely.  Some books suggest using the suggested seed-packet distance between plants in rows , and putting all the plants that distance apart in all directions.  I have found it better to leave enough space between rows in the bed to push a hoe. I have far too many annual weed seeds in my soil to plant any closer. Still, in most cases, I still get far more out of each square yard in my allotment than my row-based neighbours.

Clearing an overgrown allotment

The New Plot
So, you have been on the allotment waiting list for a few years, then finally the day arrives that you receive the offer of a plot. With great excitement you go to inspect it, expecting an orderly garden you can start work on straight away. However, when you get there you find that the expected well-ordered plot to be an overgrown jungle of weeds.

Unfortunately this is only to be expected. The reason that an allotment becomes available is mostly because the previous occupant gave up on it and let it run wild for a year or two. I did overhear one new allotmenteer complaining,”Surely the council could have tidied it up a bit for us first” ! Unfortunately that's not the way it works.

Welcome to your new allotment!

This was the situation Mrs Spud and I found ourselves in 5 years ago. Although we were a fair way down the waiting list, everyone else who had been offered that particular plot had rejected it because it was so overgrown.  There were brambles encroaching from the boundary, and a chest high forest of nettles and other weeds throughout.

So firstly we spent a couple of weekends cutting back the brambles, pulling up the top growth by hand and putting it all in a pile ready for burning. Then we marked out our first bed.

How not to do it

Both Mrs Spud and I have bad backs, but our new neighbours assured us there was no alternative to simply digging the plot over bit by bit. So I dug. First I would turn a spadeful. Then bend down and pull out all the weed roots and debris and put to one side. And then the next spadeful. And so on. It was backbreaking work, and as my back was already broken, I could only work like this for very short periods of time.  Progress was so slow it was almost non-existent.

After a while we developed a 2-man technique to avoid constantly bending up and down. I would stand upright and turn the soil with the spade, while she, on hands and knees, removed all the weed roots she could find. It was a lot easier, as neither of us had to keep bending up and down. Nevertheless it still hurt and progress was still slow. Over 2 months we managed to clear just 2 beds, a small fraction of the allotment.

How to do it.

Remembering something I had read about the use of mulches to suppress weeds in one of Bob Flowerdew’s books, I decided to try a different approach for the early potato bed. I bought some weed suppressing mulch - the kind of black woven material that is often used around shrubs and covered with bark chippings in borders. I rolled it out where I wanted a new bed and pegged it down. Then I cut star-shaped slits in the fabric and used a bulb planter to removed a core of soil. Into the hole I threw a potato, and then replaced the soil and folded the fabric back over the top.

When the potatoes started growing, the shoots pushed through the hole (together with one or two adventurous weeds, which I just pulled out.)  Potatoes are heavy feeders, but there was ample food from the rotting weeds and their roots beneath the mulch. There was no need to remove the mulch to water, because it is porous and the rainwater was able to seep through. 

When it was time to harvest the potatoes,  I simply pulled out the haulms and rolled back the mulch.  A few of the potatoes were laying on top of the soil, but because they were under the mulch they had been kept in the dark and had not gone green.

After harvest, the mulch was removed and the bed forked over.  In four months many of the weeds had died and rotted but some had survived. However, since the soil had already been loosened while removing the spuds, it was easy enough to fork them out.

I used this technique on two other beds that first year, one for maincrop potatoes, and one for courgettes, squashes and cucumbers. In both cases it worked very successfully. In fact, as the mulch did not need to come off these beds until the autumn, it was even more successful in killing the weeds than on the new potato bed.

I see no reason why the technique shouldn’t work too with things like sweetcorn, and also the brassicas, eg cabbages, brussel sprouts and cauliflower.  In fact anything you can start off and grow to a decent size in pots, and plant through a hole in the mulch.

It might be possible to use the same technique using free old carpet instead of bought mulch. I don’t know, I haven’t tried.

Carpet Mulches

We only cultivated a small part of the allotment that first year. The remainder we covered with old carpet scavenged through Freecycle (or Freeagle as it now calls it self) and ignored until the following season.  After 12 months, when the carpet was removed, the soil was completely clean apart from a few weakened and blanched dock plants, which just pulled out easily.  The other weeds and their roots had rotted, the worms had dug them in for us, and the soil was ready and waiting for planting. We did fork it over first, but I’m not sure it was necessary. 

Of course using this technique you have to wait for a year before growing other plants, like onions and carrots, for which you need the soil to be already prepared. But patience is what growing vegetables is all about.

Rotavating
Rotavating a garden can save labour on digging, but you should only consider this option once all of the perennial weeds have been removed.  If used as a quick fix on overgrown ground, all that happens is that each perennial weed root is chopped into ten pieces and the weed problem is ten times worse.

At some point, on our allotment, a previous occupant had grown some horseradish.  Then came the rotavator for several seasons. Now one of our biggest weed problems is with horseradish - deep-rooting, hard to dig out, and everywhere in the allotment.

Why keep a blog?

This is my first ever post on my first ever blog.

So why am I writing it? Basically I want to suggest  to any other veg growers out there that it is possible to succeed without slavishly following what either the "Experts" say, or what your father/grandfather insisted was the best way of doing things, or indeed what the other allotmenteers around you insist is correct.

When I started growing my own food I, like many others, followed Dr Hessayon's advice. But if his hugely influential "Expert" series is "the box", then nowadays my heroes are people who dare to think outside it, like Bob Flowerdew, Charles Dowding and even, bless him, Monty Don on occasion. And also the late John Seymour, whose visions of self-sufficiency encouraged me to aim high.

I am starting to get decent crops from my allotment, without the huge amounts of effort that most people assume is necessary. I usually spend 10 to 12 hours a week on my 2 plots, less if the weather is poor and maybe a bit more at peak times, but not an excessive amount.

My neighbours shake their heads when they see  me using fixed beds, not digging every winter, growing more than one crop in a year, not earthing up my spuds, etc. But much of what I do works.  I do make mistakes, lots of them. Some of my ideas simply don't work and have to be scrapped or modified. I promise to be ruthlessly honest when things have gone wrong. But I will also pat myself on the back and crow when they succeed.

But, and I know I am repeating myself here, it is allowed to think for yourself, to try out new ideas, to go against the grain. And it's fun!

I intend to keep this blog for at least one calendar year, but hopefully more, starting in detail at the end of the coming winter, in early February 2012. Which is when, for me, the gardening year begins. Before that I plan to publish a few posts describing my gardening practices in general terms, plus the occasiobal description of what I do to tuck the allotment up ready for winter.

A by product of keeping this blog is that it will help me with what I see as one of my weakest points, record-keeping. Oh yes, and as I am also the cook of the family, I may well describe what I do with what I grow and give the odd recipe. Maybe not. We will see.