photo journal mid-May 2012

 Here are the two warriors - the survivors of the recent fox attack. The lady on the left was quite traumatised after the attack and would hardly move for a day or so. We didn't expect her to survive. But then after just 2 days, she started behaving normally and laying again, and her feathers are starting to grow back.

 This picture shows some beetroot seedlings I put out a few weeks ago.  The weather has been so cold that they haven't made much progress.  On the right are some leaf beet and ruby chard.

The compost bins made from wooden pallets. The left hand bin is in need of some repair.

 The last surviving overwintering brassicas. These late sprouting broccoli have produced several welcome pickings over the last few weeks.

 Some brassica seedlings emerging in the seedbed.

 Cabbages interplanted with lettuce. The darker-leaved lettuces in the front are Winter Gem and have overwintered from an autumn sowing.  The lettuces at the back are All the Year Round and were sown indoors in early spring. In between the rows of lettuces there are, in fact, cabbages. Because of the cold weather they are blue(!) and hard to see at the moment.

 The pea bed is doing well. The Meteor First Earlies on the right are growing strongly. There is also a row of Kelvedon Wonder Second Earlies along the left hand fence. I have already started some Hurst Greenshaft off indoors to fill the remaining space on the other side of the rows.

 The shallots in the front of this bed are doing well. It is now impossible to see which rows were put out in the autumn, which in the winter, and which in the spring.   So it seems to be just a matter of choice. I will wait before I make a final verdict, however, in case there is a difference in the quality of the final bulbs.

 The garlic bed, with a rogue raspberry plant guesting front left. I inted to establish a raspberry bed in the autumn, so we are tolerating his presence here for the time being. When the garlic is lifted in a month or so, I will lift the raspberry too and put him in a more suitable place.

 These leek-like monsters are in fact Elephant garlic.

 This bed contains the overwintering onions growing strongly. However I am worried that many of them are showing signs of bolting.

 My first early potatoes are sheltering under a blanket of fleece, as there are still frosts forecast.

 These two pictures show my ultra-early potatoes that I am growing in pots. I started them off in the greenhouse, adding compost as they grew, stopping only when I ran out of room in the pots. When I needed the space in inside, I mover them to a light but sheltered spot behind the greenhouse.  They are growing strongly now, and I expect them to start flowering soon. If ever a frost is threatened I can just cover them with fleece.

 This year I decided to build a bamboo scaffold inside the greenhouse to support the tomato plants as they grow. I have found that single canes are simply not sturdy enough.

 The tomato seedlings growing well in the greenhouse. I have a paraffin heater in case a late frost is forecast. 

 My new strawberry bed.

 The field beans are already flowering.

 

 The two broad bean beds. The bed on the left were sown in September and have been full of flowers for a couple of weeks now. The bed on the right contains February sown beans.

 I hope to get a lot of broad beans from this bed. Masses of flowers, I just need to wait to see if they all  set seed.

Feeding the Soil

There is an old adage “Feed the soil, not the plants” which makes sense to me.  Here is how I go about it.

Fertilizers            Nowadays I grow my veg adding no artificial fertilizer, and minimal amounts of natural fertilizer to the soil. My aim is to eventually add none at all. I haven’t always done it this way. I still have half a tub of Growmore in the shed that I used to sprinkle around every now and then, if I remembered, before sowing or planting. But then I read somewhere that soil which has received a lot of artificial fertilizers tends to see a diminishing earthworm population. I haven’t seen any serious research to back this up, but I don’t want to take the risk – I need my worms! (And anyway, on a point of principal, natural must be better than artificial.)

I subsequently bought a pack of Fish, Blood & Bone granules, and a tub of organic chicken manure pellets (organic because I don’t want to support battery farming in even the smallest way).  My aim is to use these only as a transitional measure, until my rotation has gone a full cycle, and each of the quarters has been enriched with manure. 

However, my soil is very light and riverbed silty sandy, so nutrients leach away more rapidly than would be the case on heavier soils. I am not sure the effects of the manure will still be felt 4 years on. So the soil at the end of the rotation may well need some kind of boost – especially the root beds for which the manure will be an ancient memory.  Hopefully I will eventually have enough compost to afford to give the roots a couple of inches before sowing or planting. I don’t yet though.

DIY Fertilizer - The clever legumes            The rotation I am using at the moment delivers 5 crops in a four-year cycle

            Potatoes – alliums – legumes – brassicas – other

The legumes occupy the soil 1 or 2 years after the potatoes, when there should still be enough residual nutrients in the soil to get them going. But legumes have the amazing knack of catching all the nitrogen they need from the air. Not only that, but they squirrel it away in their roots for the future.

This means that after the peas and beans have been harvested, I can cut the stalks off at or just below soil level, and leave the roots there. The following crop will be a brassica, which will happily use up the nitrogen released to the soil as the legume roots rot away.

Clever little legumes!

After trying this approach last year I have realized that it is doubly important to keep the pea and bean beds well weeded. If there is a mass of weed once the legumes have been harvested and the stalks cut down, it is very difficult to avoid pulling out their roots while weeding. French and runner beans, and peas are fairly easy to deal with. But the broad beans are harder, as I grow them in a block into which it is difficult to reach to weed. Maybe I should cut the stalks down twice – once leaving about 6 inches, then weed, then the final cut to soil level.

Soil Improvers            There are many different kinds of soil improvers – some free, some expensive, and some better then others. The main thing is to get as much as possible into the soil.  These are the ones I have used.

(a)            Home Compost            I compost all of my kitchen waste, except for meat or fish remains (which would attract rats).  I don’t have a lawn, but I have some neighbours who do, and I have persuaded them to give me their lawn mowings rather than pay for a brown bin. I ask only that they don’t give me the first cut of the lawn after any sprays (moss killer, etc) have been used.  I also take from them any other compostable garden waste, eg old bedding plants, autumn leaves, etc. I ask them not to put in anything thorny, such as brambles or roses, that might cut my hands.  Anything that is too woody to compost I put aside for the wood-burner.

I don’t turn my compost.  I don’t add lime, or any extra water, and only pay the slightest attention to balance of brown and green. Neither do I stack things up in piles to make a heap when ready.  Everything goes in at the time I need to dispose of it. I empty the entire teapot, stale tea as well as teabags, into it every morning. I also wash out the kitchen compost bin and empty that in too. These two actions seem to keep the compost sufficiently moist. Each time I add kitchen waste, or lawn mowings, I scrunch up some newspaper and throw it in to add balance. This laissez-faire system has always worked for me, but then with 3 bins, I don't need to be in a hurry.

I have three “dalek” compost bins, and when one is full, I leave it to mature and move on to the next. I have learnt that we need some sign to indicate which bin to use, otherwise other family members get confused and throw kitchen waste into maturing bins. After a month or 2, small red worms, called brandling worms, magically appear and colonize the bin. (I have no idea where they come from – this happens even if the bin is sitting on a concrete base!).  (My bins rest on a base of chicken wire over soil, to discourage rats, which like nothing better then to set up residence in a nice warm compost bin over the winter.)

After about a year, the bin is ready. The contents will, depressingly, have shrunk to about a third of their original size, but will be sweet-smelling, brown and crumbly. The only thing still recognizable are the fragments of eggshell, which I leave, and the inevitable bits of plastic and metal (eg bottle tops, chocolate wrappers etc), which always seem to find their way in. 

I use this compost if I need something I I hope will not have many weed seeds, such as the asparagus bed, or the seedbed. 

(b)  Leaf mold             Every autumn I collect 30 or more bin bags full of leaves.  There is an area of town I regularly drive through which has broad avenues lined with huge, majestic sycamore trees. When they shed their leaves, I fill the back of Clio (our hatchback) with 9 or 10 bags full at a time.  If I time it right, usually mid-November, the council will have swept the leaves into piles ready for me, waiting to be collected.

The traditional way of using leaves is to make leaf mold rather than composting them. The easy way to do this is to water the leaves in the bin bags, tie the top, punch a few holes all round and leave for a year or two.  Leaf mold is meant to be good to improve the texture of the soil, but does not contain many nutrients.  I have tried this in the past, but nowadays I use the leaves in a different way.

(c)  Chicken compost       Instead of making leaf mold I  throw a bag or two a week of the leaves at the feet of my hens. They get very excited about this, and scratch away for hours looking for titbits.  I also throw them any remains from spent vegetable plants, weeds, (except perennial roots or seedheads), and the bedding straw when I sweep out the chicken house.  I even throw in the stalks of old brassica plants, though after then hens have picked them clean I remove them to dry for burning. (It is possibly to mash them to smithereens with a mallet and then add to the compost, but burning works for me.)

The hens scratch and peck and pee and poo on all of this, breaking it down and mixing it up, and accelerating the composting process enormously. Gradually the soil level rises as more and more stuff get thrown in.  A bye-product of this approach (I hope) is that in this way the chickens are constantly living on a new surface underfoot. I haven’t the space at the allotment to move them to a fresh site every few months, as recommended, to avoid a build up of pests or diseases. By constantly introducing fresh organic matter for them to tread in, I aim to give them fresh ground underfoot all the time without actually having to move them.

Then every few moths I dig the chicken run down to the original soil level, and barrow the contents to one of the compost bins. (At the allotment I have four bins made of old wooden pallets, secured in place by wooden stakes through the corners.) At this stage it consists of a sodden mess in various stages of decay, with a typical chicken manure  whiff to it. However, after a few months it has changed into beautiful, brown, crumbly, compost.  I know that it is likely to contain a fair few weed seeds though, so I use it where that is not so critical. For example I recently used the chicken compost when making planting holes for this years cucurbits (cucumbers, squashes, etc)

(d)            Animal Manure            I also import manure from outside.  Contrary to popular belief there is a lot of manure around for grabs: cow farms out of town, and riding stables in town being the most likely sources. The only problem is getting the stuff from the farm or stable to the allotment.  (Mrs Spud is tolerant of Clio often containing allotment odds and ends, but even she draws the line at using it to transport sacks of stinking manure.) One year I paid someone with a pickup to collect from a nearby riding stable. Last year a friend offered his trailer and together we filled 50 bags of cow manure from a farm  and delivered them in 2 loads.

(Incidentally I would recommend keeping the manure in bags while it matures rather than emptying it into a heap.  It seems to rot down equally quickly, or at least quickly enough, and saves a lot of effort when it comes to carrying it the beds.) 

A word of warning when it comes to importing manure: there have been a few cases of manure being contaminated with a particularly persistent herbicide recently. As a result some allotmenteers have found their plots sterile, at least temporarily, after applying this tainted manure. I would hope that the cow farmer would know if his manure is dodgy and not pass it on to us. I’m not so sure that stable owners would know so much about their straw though. If in doubt I suppose it would be best to try some out for growing on a small scale first. Personally I have never bothered and not had any problems.

I use imported manure exclusively on my potato beds.

(e)            Brown Bin Compost            Nowadays most councils collect (for a fee) garden waste in brown bins. This is then taken to a central depot where it is all shredded and composted into compost, sometimes sold in garden centres as “soil improvers”.

For a while our council allowed allotmenteers to collect as much of this as they wanted from the depot for free, on production of the allotment contract.  So for a couple of years I filled Clio with bags of the stuff, a dozen or so at a time.  (Matured compost like this was much less offensive then manure.)  I probably overdid the weight though, and at times was resting on the suspension, so had to drive very carefully to get it home.

However, a couple of years ago, when money became tighter all over, they started charging. It was still quite reasonable – about £10 a ton – but unfortunately they wouldn’t let me collect my ton in 4 visits. They used a weighbridge, and I would have had to pay the same no matter how little of the ton I had managed to load on each time. Nevertheless that is still an option for the future. I wonder how Clio would fancy a trailer?

Recipe: Janssons Frestelse

Uses: potatoes and onions

This recipe is Swedish and means Jansson's Temptation!.

This is a difficult time of year for those of us who are trying to feed ourselves from the allotment.  Very little is coming ready to eat fresh, the new year's crops will not be ready until June, and yet the stored potatoes and onions are past their best. The potatoes are starting to go soft or throw up shoots. And the onions are developing green central shoots.

So this is a recipe which uses up those tired potatoes and onions.

You need, potatoes, onions, anchovies and cream.  The proportions are are up to you. I use a small tin of anchovies, and a 300ml tub of cream when I cook for 2 of us.

1.  Slice the potatoes and onions.
2. Grease and overproof dish
3. Put layers of potato, onion and anchovy in the dish. The top and bottom layers should be potato. Add pepper (the anchovy should provide enough salt) to each layer.
4. Pour over half of the cream and the anchovy liquid.
5.  Bake for half an hour at about 200 degrees C.
6. Pour over the rest of the cream and return to the oven until the potatoes are cooked through.

The potatoes are the vehicle for the flavours of the anchovy, cream and onion.  It;s nice with more cream, but very decadent.

Hens & Foxes

Keeping hens on an allotment is easy, providing you can keep the foxes out. However if a fox does get in, it will kill in a frenzy, just for the hell of it, rarely seeming to take the carcasses away to feed its young.  And if the fox does leave any hens alive, it will return a night or two later to finish the job.

When I first started keeping hens 25 years ago, we lived in a small Norfolk village, and, in my innocence, I gave the hens minimal fencing, which simply surrounded the area under some apple trees. It was intended to keep the hens in rather than any foxes out. Any mildly energetic fox would have been able to dig under or climb over in seconds.

At first the hens roosted in the trees, which was probably out of harm’s way. But after a while they started flying over the fence and into the jaws of our large dog.  So we clipped their wings, which stopped them flying (I suppose they could have flown round in circles) but also stopped them roosting in the trees, and brought them back down to fox level.

Nevertheless, in 13 years in that rural village, we didn’t see a single fox.

In my first day at our urban allotment, however, I saw my first fox walking up the path between the plots in broad daylight, bold as brass. And in the early hours one summer's morning, I saw a couple of foxes mating in the road.

This just reinforces my sense that foxes are nowadays an urban rather than a rural problem.

Since starting up with poultry again at 4 years ago, we have been visited by a fox twice. The first time a couple of years ago, he dug and pushed through a corner where the netting was not secure. He killed 2½ hens out of 4. (The ½ was still alive but with her neck chewed through and head hanging off. So we dispatched her the next morning.) To make the run more secure I improved the depth of my fence down a full 18 inches, and then laid some old metal grids under the soil horizontally around the perimeter of the fence. And 2 days later I could see scrape marks where Mr Fox had tried to dig his way in again.

This arrangement kept my hens from the foxes for more than 2 years . But just 2 days ago, he got in again. And it was my own stupid fault. I had removed one of the grids when I dug the new asparagus bed next to the chicken run, and simply forgot to put it back. The fox had dug and pushed through again, same corner. It’s as if he has been patiently watching me for 2 years and waiting for me to make a slip. 

This time he killed 4½ from 6.  (One has lost some feathers, and is limping and seems so traumatized she is almost catatonic. I’ll pop down in a minute to see if she has survived the night.)

So, how to keep the fox from the hens?

The most secure way is to let them out yourself every morning and put them to bed every evening. Foxes generally (but not always) hunt at night, and by these means you are keeping the hens out of harm’s way when foxes are about.  Most of my neighbours do it this way but I don’t. My main reason is simply that I don’t want to have to go down at dawn and dusk every day. I justify myself by saying that the hens get more hours of daylight, and therefore stay in lay for longer, if they put themselves to bed. But really, I wouldn’t keep hens if I had to go there twice a day in addition to any visits to do other allotment work.

My method relies of secure fencing! I fence the entire area in, including ceiling, so that the hens live in a kind of chicken-wire room. Foxes can both climb and dig, so the hens have to be protected from above as well as below. The fencing needs to be dug in about 18 inches all round. In addition it’s best to lay some kind of barrier around the perimeter, either inside or out – paving slabs would be ideal. The hens let themselves out at dawn and put themselves to bed at night.  I just visit once a day to top up food and water, collect eggs, and throw them some grain or greens.

After the fox got in, we piled bricks, scrunched up chicken wire, and even an old garden fork, in the corner where he had got in. This is only temporary, until I have time to reinforce the fencing. And yesterday morning there was a large hole where he had tried to dig his way in again. He failed though, I suppose that as he dug under the bricks they would fall on his head!

Recipe – Rhubarb Fool

Uses: rhubarb   (This is a recipe for those weeks in spring when you have a glut of rhubarb.)

Many fool recipes use double cream as a base. Others, older and more frugal, use custard.  I find the former too heavy and the latter too….well, I just don’t like custard. So I use greek yoghurt, and it seems to work well.

The ratio of cooked rhubarb to yoghurt is a matter of taste and availability. I aim for about equal volumes of each, but you can get away with less rhubarb. 

1.              De-string the rhubarb and chop into 1 inch lengths.

2.              Place on a pan on a low heat with as little water as you can get away with – just enough to stop the rhubarb sticking. Leave until it softens and goes mushy.

3.              Stir in sugar to taste and leave to cool, (but remember the yoghurt is a bit sour and the sweetness is going to be diluted by the extra volume of the yoghurt).

4.              When the rhubarb is cool, stir in the yoghurt and spoon into bowls or glasses. Chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

5.              Before serving, I like to sprinkle on some flaked almonds or desiccated coconut.

Variation: Other soft fruits will work equally well. I like gooseberry fool.

Photo Journal - Early April 2012

I'm not very good at integrating photographs with this journal. It's just that, nowadays, I'm much more interested in words than pictures.

However, successive blocks of nothing but text can be a bit turgid I realize. So I have persuaded my wife (who is interested in photography) to take a series of shots once a month. So I hope to include a monthly picture diary of the allotment's progress.

We took these pictures more than a week ago, but it has taken me till then to work out how to transfer them on my AppleMac from iphotos where Mrs Spud kindly put them, to somewhere where I can transfer them into the blog. I am a bit of a technophobe, and every setback finds me closing the computer and deciding to try again tomorrow.

  The seedlings in the greenhouse

 The red pots in the middle show some healthily growing calabrese. Unfortunately a hard frost 2 days later did for them, even underneath a double layer of fleece. Similarly with the Igloo cauliflowers, in the modules top left.

I am still learning what can stand the cold and what can't, and of course, I am making mistakes. Intuitively, I would expect lettuces, which cannot withstand the winter cold as mature plants, to suffer from frost more readily then cauliflowers, which can. However the opposite seems to be the case with seedlings. The young brassicas were nipped off, whereas the young lettuces (in green tray to the right) shrugged off the cold.

 This strange picture shows my potatoes growing in sacks in the greenhouse. They are growing so fast that I have to cover the shoots with soil almost daily.

 The Field Bean Bed - sown in November - is now looking good.

 Some spring onions, sowed in the autumn (variety  white lisbon hardy) are supplementing spring salads. This bed also hosted the leeks. The board just visible at the top of the picture I stepped on while harvesting the last of the leeks. (I am diligent about not treading on and compacting the soil.)

  Here are some lettuces that I have planted out in a brassica bed.  These lettuces were sown in the autumn and have overwintered outside without protection (variety Winter Gem). I intend to plant out early cabbages and cauliflowers in between. By the time the brassicas need the space in early summer, the lettuces will have been eaten.

My pea bed consists of 2 temporary lengths of netting with a temporary path between.

 My first early peas (variety Meteor). If they need to, they can hold onto the netting. However first earlies make quite sturdy plants, which often manage to survive without supports. These were started off (by soaking and sprouting) on 1st March, and planted out late March. My neighbour keeps cursing, and triumphantly trapping, mice which love to eat the pea seed he sowed directly in the soil. By starting mine off indoors, I avoid this problem.  The metal grid leaning against the netting is to protect against the other menace when growing peas, birds, which love to eat  the tender young shoots.

 An Allium bed. In the background is garlic I sowed in the autumn, in the foreground shallots.

  The garlic really does need weeding!

These shallots were sown a different times - autumn, winter and spring, yet all appear much the same.

The broad beans, sown in the autumn (variety Aquadulce Claudia), are growing strongly

The Seedlings’ Journey

(i)            The Propagator

I sow my seeds in an electric heated propagator whenever possible. I have three – one which holds 7 small seed trays, and two which hold a full-sized (or more normally 2 half-sized) seed-trays each. And they are working overtime at this time of the year.

As soon as seedlings poke through, I open the vents, and then a day or 2 later transfer them to the conservatory window-sill. There is always something waiting eagerly to take their place.

(ii) The Conservatory

After a couple of days on the window-sill, I remove the lid to the seed tray. The trays sit on capillary matting and I water from below. Carefully! (This is mainly for safety reasons, as there are normal domestic electric sockets installed, and electricity and water don’t go well together.) The amount is critical. The matting must be moist, but the trays/pots must not be standing in water.

The window-sills in the conservatory are full at the moment, (about 20ft worth), as are a variety of improvised shelves and tables I have placed alongside.

During the day I keep the French windows into the house open. The conservatory  faces south, so in sunny weather it acts like a solar heater, pumping hot air into the house (and away from the seedlings which might otherwise fry). In cold winter I have the woodburner lit and the warmth helps bring the seedlings along. The building is of sufficiently high quality that I can be confident that when I close the French windows at night, it will remain frost-free at this time of year.

The seedlings  will be pricked out into pots before continuing their journey.

(iii)The Greenhouse

When the seedlings are sturdy enough, I transfer them to the greenhouse. Here they sit on staging and I water them every other day from above with a fine-rose can.

After my experiences a couple of weeks ago, I need to keep a eye out for frosts. Tonight, for example, the forecast suggests -2 degrees. So I will fleece the seedlings inside the greenhouse, and make an extra journey there in the morning to remove the protection. The potato sacks can simply have their tops turned over.

(iv) The Plastic Mini-greenhouse

The winter storms mashed up my plastic cold frame in January, and I have decided not to repair it, but instead to replace. (I was never that happy with it anyway – it was a real pain to get the lid to slot into place.) So I have replaced it with a discounted plastic mini-greenhouse. This has the advantage that it allows vertical gardening - I can save ground space by placing it against a fence and securing it against wind.

This is where I will harden off seedlings. In the past I have found that moving seedlings from the cold greenhouse, to a cold frame with the lid open works well as a way of hardening off. Now I can just leave the plastic door rolled up instead.

Once it is no longer needed for hardening off, I am hoping to use it as somewhere to grow cucumbers. I have had poor results in the past trying to grow cucumbers in the same greenhouse as tomatoes. The thing is, cucumbers like a humid environment, and tomatoes don’t. (Or at least, I’m worried about splashing water around near the tomatoes because of blight.) When I remove the shelves in the mini-greenhouse,, the lateral shelf supports should be ideal for tying in the growing plant and taking the weight of maturing fruit.

The main disadvantage is that it is flimsy, and the plastic will deteriorate and crack and need replacing in a few years. And, or course, by then the garden centre will have stopped stocking this line and it will be hard to find. (Have you noticed how they do that?) With this in mind I will buy a replacement already and keep it in a frost & sunlight –free environment at home.

So my seedlings start their life in the propagator, move to the conservatory window-sill, then later to the cold greenhouse, then again to the new mini-greenhouse/cold frame before finally being planted out.

I am hoping that by growing far more seedlings than I actually require myself, I can pass on to friends and family, and maybe sell a few to defray the costs of seed & compost.