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!