but she's a girl...

Spring wave

We spent some time on the allotment this weekend, tidying up the beds, digging over and weeding those that had been empty over the winter and checking on the progress of our over-wintered crops. The broad beans are struggling a bit (probably because of all the snow and frost we've had), but the garlic is coming on like a champ. We haven't grown garlic before, so that's quite exciting. Our cavolo nero kale stolidly pootles on as only kale can, resisting all but the rapacious wood pigeons who sneak under the netting. Kale is amazing stuff, and it's a bonus that I actually enjoy eating it too. We found some onion sets in a bag in the wheelbarrow that we should have planted out in the autumn. Some had gone soft and rotten, but others were still firm and had started to throw up optimistic little white etiolated shoots in the darkness of their bag. Since we had nothing to lose, and we felt sorry for neglecting them, we dug over a bed to plant the best ones out.

One of our allotment neighbours (R) was there too, and he gave us some Maris Piper potatoes because he'd massively over-ordered on his spuds. I'm beginning to think that potatoes are an allotmenteer's Achilles Heel: even though we've got more than enough potatoes ourselves, we found ourselves accepting the potatoes and thinking, "Well, we could do with a good variety for baked potatoes..." I hear that branches of Spud-U-Like are opening up again, so perhaps we can sell our excess.

Spring is an amazingly hopeful time on the allotment, and R was desperately trying to get the last of his spring crops in. It's a little early for some of them, but he's scheduled to go in for serious heart surgery very soon, so he won't be able to work on the allotment for several weeks. He told us that he wanted to make sure that he'd given everything the best start he could, so that things would be growing well on their own while he was recovering. Because of his condition, he's short of breath and can only work for short periods at a time, but the green pull of spring is so strong that he felt the need to catch the wave of growth with the timing of a good surfer and ride the first wave of the season. We said that we'd keep an eye on his plot for him while he's out of action, but I know he'll be fretting about it until he can get his hands back in the soil again.

I feel as if I've been hibernating this winter, for one reason or another. It felt really good to get out into the fresh, cold air and feel the sun on my face and the beginnings of warmth in the earth.

The end of a cropping year

I think we've more or less come to the end of the vegetables from our allotment and garden. There are one or two tomatoes left on the plants in our conservatory, but that's it. So I've been looking back on our gardening year.

In some ways, we did better than last year. The allotment is more productive and better organised, and some crops that we utterly failed with last year (courgettes and tomatoes, for example) have done fairly well this year. But we were battling the weather all year. Both the garden and allotment are on heavy clay soil. It's quite fertile, but the downside is that when it rains, it gets waterlogged very easily. And when it's waterlogged, the slugs come out in plague-like numbers. So the incessant rain and lack of sunny conditions really hampered our horticultural efforts this summer.

One or two plants thrived in the rain. The potatoes did very well, and we got a good crop, except for a few tubers eaten by slugs underground. The courgettes also revelled in the rain, and because we sowed the seeds in pots first then planted out when they were larger, they were big enough to withstand the ravages of slugs. Courgette stems and leaves are quite spiky when they get bigger, so I think they deter slugs naturally once they get beyond a certain size. The fruits put on incredible growth in a very short time. We frequently left a small courgette on the plant, thinking it wasn't quite big enough for picking, then came back a couple of days later to find a giant marrow.

The tomatoes outside rotted in the wet, but the ones inside did OK. We didn't get a huge crop, but the fruits we did get were really sweet and delicious, and I felt as if they were worth all the pampering you have to give tomatoes.

The runner beans struggled a bit, but produced a reasonable crop, but our Cherokee beans -- which did so well last year -- were disappointing. All our other beans and the many varieties of greens (chard, pak choi, spinach greens etc.) were eaten to frilly stumps by the slugs. We did our best to control slugs, but despite trying everything (organic slug pellets, coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, plastic bottles cut into spiky protective collars, you name it) the little blighters still managed to munch on our veg.

I hope we have a sunnier, drier summer next year. While we can raise some plants in our conservatory to plant out, we can't do that for all of them, so some have to brave the ravages of the slugs on their own. We're trying to grow some baby leaves in the conservatory over the winter to tide us over. Today I sowed some rocket, Australian yellow leaf lettuce, black Tuscan kale and some bunching onions, so hopefully we'll have some small but tasty home-grown greens over the winter. Meanwhile, I'll order some seeds for next year and dream of a balmy, warm summer.

Spuds ahoy!

Although some of our potatoes are probably not quite ready for harvesting just yet (particularly the maincrop variety), we are impatient and decided to try digging up a couple of of the plants to see how they were doing. Other people on the allotment have been complaining that their yields have been very low this year, so we were pleasantly surprised to get quite a good haul. There are some very tiny ones, but also some that will make more than a couple of mouthfuls. We also -- as is traditional when you grow your own -- got a few amusingly shaped spuds.

The allotment is going pretty well at the moment, after a slow start. We've also got plenty of courgettes (you can see today's haul in the photo, and we have more in the fridge from earlier in the week), and lots of nasturtium flowers for salads. The tomatoes are coming along slowly but surely, and the runner, Cherokee and dwarf beans are finally coming into flower after sulking for a couple of months.

Digging potatoes is brilliant - you never quite know what's going to come up, but it feels like digging for treasure.

Tomato lifestyles

We're growing a lot of tomatoes at the moment. We both love tomatoes and can't get enough of them, but last year our crop was a dismal failure (grand total of fruits: 1¹ ). So this year, we decided to hedge our bets. We grew half of our plants indoors in our unheated conservatory, and half outside on the allotment. Looking at them now, you'd find it hard to believe that they were the same varieties, let alone the same varieties planted at about the same time.

The indoor tomatoes are like supermodels. Incredibly tall (2 metres or more), leggy and skinny, they continually flop melodramatically all over the place despite being well supported with canes. Every day I come in to water them to find that another branch has buckled and is trailing on the ground having a crisis, or threatening to bring down another plant. They are healthy enough, but I think that the higher temperature and humidity in the conservatory has made the new growth very sappy and soft. They have flowers and a few tiny fruits, but I can't imagine how they'll stand up when they have a full crop of fruits weighing them down.

In contrast, the allotment tomatoes are like sturdy hill tribespeople: short with strong stems, tough, leathery leaves and very bushy. They've been exposed to the colder temperatures and the vicious winds that whip over our allotment site, and they almost look as if they'd be able to stand up on their own. They are a bit further behind, fruiting-wise, but I think they'll probably produce a decent crop if we can keep the slugs and pigeons away from them.

¹ Which we cut in half and shared, determined to enjoy our one and only tomato. ↑

Sowing time

It's that time of year again, when a young young-ish not too old girl's thoughts turn to sowing seeds. We saved quite a bit of our seed from last year (chocolate peppers, peas, cherokee beans), but we also went a bit mad with the Real Seed Catalogue to try out some new things. So we've got two types of pea (yellow mangetout and traditional podded peas), two types of beans, three varieties of tomato (I know, but I love tomatoes) and some rainbow chillies amongst over delights.

Peppers and tomatoes need to be started fairly early to get enough of a growing season with our so-called summers, so I sowed a load of tomatoes, chocolate peppers and chillies last week, filling our airing cupboard with pots. The tomatoes have already germinated, as you can see from the picture, and I get a real thrill from looking at them gamely stretching towards the light on our bedroom window sill.

It was our first time growing from seed last year, but I'm addicted to it now. The sense of satisfaction when you (eventually) eat the vegetables that started off as a seed in some compost in your airing cupboard is immense, and even better if you saved the seed from your crop last year. It also feels like a promise that summer will eventually arrive.

We've been really pleased with the Real Seed Company's seeds. The germination is superb (I've had a nearly 100% germination rate with the tomatoes), and the vegetables are easy to grow and -- more importantly -- delicious! I noticed that they were featured in the Guardian Weekend magazine yesterday, which is great -- they deserve the publicity¹.

Perhaps the most telling sign of our total conversion to the world of vegetable cultivation is the fact that we found ourselves buying seed potatoes last weekend. We didn't plant any last year because we don't eat a huge quantity of potatoes (we eat fairly equal quantities of potatoes, rice, pasta, couscous and so on), and we felt that we'd rather concentrate on crops which are either much nicer when you get them really fresh (e.g. peas), or much cheaper to grow than buy in the shops (e.g. rocket). But such is the mysterious and irresistible pull of the potato to the allotment holder, that we didn't manage to hold out against the spuds this year. An allotment just isn't an allotment without a row or two of spuds. Which is why our conservatory is currently home to a couple of trays of chitting potatoes.

¹ I have no affiliation with them -- I'm just a satisfied customer. ↑

Planting roses at dusk

A while ago, we removed one of the many laurel bushes that were gradually taking over our garden. I don't mind laurel (the leaves are shiny, and it's evergreen), but it is intent on garden domination unless you ruthlessly prune it. Anyway, there was just too much of it for our taste. That left a gaping hole in one of the beds, which we filled in the summer with annual plants like sweet peas and climbing nasturtiums, but we wanted something a bit more permanent. Our garden is a rather uniform green for much of the year, so we were after something with nice flowers, but that would also be a good resource for wildlife.

After seeing an offer in the Guardian newspaper, we decided to go for Rosa rugosa rubra. It's apparently pretty tough (always useful with our less-than-expert gardening skills), has lovely, scented, wine-red flowers for much of the summer (perfect for the bees), then deep orange-red hips in the autumn (great for the birds).

They were delivered on Saturday morning (at an absurdly early hour for the weekend, waking Mr. Bsag and I, and my visiting parents). We were busy entertaining my parents for most of the weekend, so the first chance we got to put them in their new home was late on Sunday afternoon. Luckily, the torrential rain that had persisted for most of the weekend had stopped, but it was still very damp and cold, and starting to get dark.

Despite the weather, it felt great to be outside, digging the ground over and clearing some of the neighbouring plants to make room for the roses. Our bamboo plant has been mounting a stealth expansion campaign, throwing shoots up among the trunks of our Euonymus. Now that the last leaves have fallen from the Euonymus, the bamboo's dastardly plot is revealed, so I took the opportunity to get in there and hack back the bamboo shoots. Again. I suspect that it's a lifetime of work.

After a lot of digging, we got the bare-rooted rose plants in place. At the moment, they just look like rather sad brown sticks poking up above the earth, but they hold the promise of voluptuous scent and sumptuous colour in Summers to come. I keep looking out of the kitchen window at the roses-to-be, imagining the fresh, green shoots waiting for the Spring to come.

Digging and saving seed

We had a big sort-out of the garden this weekend, trying to tidy things up a bit before winter strikes. We're also making a concerted effort to save seed. A lot of the crops we grew this year were grown from seed supplied by The Real Seed Company. These are all true breeding seeds, so you know exactly what you'll be getting if you save your seed, unlike the F1 hybrid seed provided by a lot of other companies (although it's always worth saving seed and trying it, because it's free). The Real Seed Company specifically promotes seed saving, which -- when you think about it -- is pretty altruistic of them because theoretically it reduces their own income as seed providers. They even publish a seed-saving guide, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, no less.

They make the very good point that by saving seed from your strongest, healthiest plants, you are selectively breeding plants adapted to your own growing conditions, unlike seed that you buy from big commercial growers, which often requires a lot of inputs to make it do well in anything other than 'ideal' conditions. Quite apart from that, it's fun to save your own seed, and with crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans and peas, it's very easy to do. We'll still be ordering more from The Real Seed Company for next year, because we want to try some new things as well. [I don't have anything to do with The Real Seed Company, by the way, other than being a very happy customer.]

We also dug over our beds and added some more organic matter to get them into good condition for next year. While I was away, Mr. Bsag bought an azada to try to cope with our very heavy clay soil. It is a great tool, and slightly easier on your back than a traditional spade, as well as being very effective for opening up heavy soil. Even so, you really know that you've been getting a good workout after a few hours. It certainly beats going to the gym in my opinion, because it has useful side-effects, as well as getting you fit, but I know that I'm going to be stiff tomorrow.

Despite the stiffness, gardening and allotmenting (if that is a genuine verb) is a great way to relax at the weekend. I think that the gentle and diverse pleasures to be had from running a food-producing garden or allotment was probably best summed up by our new allotment neighbour, and older gent who has worked wonders on his plot over the past few months. We were chatting to him about the torrential rain the previous weekend. "Ah yes", he said. "I was up here then. I just sat it out in my shed, sorting my nails and screws into jam jars." He gave a happy sigh, and the Zen-like smile on his face as he remembered made it clear that sorting nails in his shed, in the rain, on his allotment was pretty much the best possible way to spend a Saturday.

Garden update

After the torrential rain of the past month or so, we finally got out into the garden today to do a bit of tidying up. We're incredibly lucky not to be among the people having to leave their homes because of flooding. We live on a slight hill, and are a reasonable distance from the nearest river, so we've been very lucky. The garden has not escaped quite so lightly.

The slugs seem to have had a population explosion in the damp weather. Most of our smaller seedlings (bunching onions, beetroot and salad crops) just disappeared overnight, with only a tell-tale silvery trail to reveal the culprit. After a very promising start, our 'three sisters' bed (beans, sweetcorn and squashes planted together -- a technique employed by the Iroquois), is down to two rather sickly sisters existing on income support rather than each other's strengths. The squashes started out wonderfully, but despite every organic anti-slug measure we could devise, we would look out each morning and find another healthy plant reduced to a chewed stump. The sweetcorn got a bit munched as well, and with the lack of sun, it hasn't grown a great deal. This in turn means that the beans don't have much to climb up. I was recounting this tale of woe over the garden wall to our elderly neighbour the other day, and he said incredulously, "Didn't you put slug pellets down?". He's probably right: despite my aversion to putting poisons down, it's probably the only thing which might have stemmed the slimy tide.

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A man’s radishes

Today is an exciting day! We got our first properly edible crop from the allotment -- our first 'Long Red' radishes. They are supposed to be long (as the name suggests), but they're not supposed to have leaves with lots of holes in them. I think something had a bit of a nibble, but the radishes themselves are fine. I can't tell you how proud I am of this little bunch.

I had a couple for lunch today, very fresh from the ground. They were juicy and crisp, and properly hot and radishy, unlike the the woolly, bland little radishes you get from the supermarket. Or as we say in our house (referencing an obscure Blackadder episode) -- A Man's Radishes.

Thinning rocket

Our vegetable beds in the garden are coming along fairly well, as are our crops on the allotment, despite the tender attentions of the slugs. It seems that I have a bit of a heavy sowing hand, so I've been having to thin out our radishes and rocket a bit. Now, I don't like good potential food going to waste, and I'm itching to actually eat something we've grown, so I carefully collected the thinned seedlings, washed them and removed the roots. Then -- with some ceremony -- I shared the tiny rocket seedlings with Mr. Bsag. If the full sized leaves taste anything like the seedlings, they'll be wonderful -- hot, and peppery and fresh.

This afternoon, I spread well-rotted farmyard manure/spent mushroom compost on the remaining beds to open up our rather heavy clay, and also spread a mulch on the paths between the beds. Keen to try something a bit different, we've got some cocoa shells to use as a mulch. It's a by-product of chocolate production, apparently deters slugs (yay!) and provides nutrients to the soil as it breaks down. It also smells gloriously of dark chocolate, so I've been alternately raking and sniffing my cocoa shells, then sitting in the sun enjoying the scent of warm chocolate wafting up. Now I really want some chocolate cake. Those veggies had better get to a properly edible size soon, or the mulch-induced chocolate craving will undo my healthy eating regime.

Digging lessons

My parents visited at the weekend, and it was great to see them. When they came up last time, it was an emergency visit to see me in hospital, so it was lovely to spend time with them in much more relaxed circumstances.

During the week, Mr. Bsag started taking the turf off the rather pointless little bit of lawn we have in the middle of our garden. He was only going to strip a test piece back to see what the soil was like underneath, but when I came home, the entire lawn was gone, and half of the soil was dug over. He never does things by halves... We've begun to realise just how much time it's going to take to sort out enough of the allotment to house all of our seedlings, so we decided -- as a temporary measure -- to set up a couple of raised beds in the garden for the overspill. Eventually, we're going to make a wildlife pond in the garden, but it will take a while to get the time and money to do that.

Anyway, my parents are keen gardeners, so they helped me tidy things up a bit on Sunday. There really are an extraordinary number of very prickly plants in the garden, so every move we made in trying to prune things back was accompanied by little yelps of pain. Backing into a berberis is not to be recommended.

Dad gave me digging lessons, and (as usual) he's absolutely right -- it is easier when you do it his way. That's just as well, because we've got tens of square metres of fairly heavy soil to dig on the allotment.

Scraping moss

We have quite a large block-paved drive at the front of our new house. There's a big flower bed to one side, but otherwise the whole thing is paved. It looked very smart when we moved in, but grasses, other weeds and mosses have started to grow in the gaps between the blocks, and they are encroaching on the surface. I actually quite like the moss (it's a lovely bright green and a wonderful texture), but it makes the area very slippery when it's wet, so it has to go. We've been thinking about tackling it for a while, and bought a small, hook-shaped tool for the job, but I decided that today was moss-scraping day.

I started at the top of the drive, nearest the road, and after a few minutes heard a voice saying, "You've got yourself a big job there." I looked up to see an elderly woman with a shopping basket on wheels. I smiled and agreed. "You want to get yourself some weedkiller and spray the whole lot, then you can just brush it up." I know that she was trying to be helpful, but I was thinking, "I don't want to napalm the front garden, thank you very much". Not wanting to be rude (or start a debate about the merits of organic gardening), I half agreed with her out loud.

For the first ten or fifteen minutes, the work was quite enjoyable and rewarding. You scrape between the blocks with the hook, peeling off a fat, green strip of moss, then move on to the next one. But after fifteen minutes, I was beginning to flag as the novelty of moss-scraping wore off, and a very non-organic napalm campaign was sounding like an attractive plan.

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Wombling free

I went to the allotment this morning to do a bit of tidying up and to define the beds a bit more. It was a really glorious morning -- very bright and sunny, with a fresh breeze and occasional brisk showers -- and it was wonderful to be out in the fresh air doing something practical. We marked eight beds out with pegs last time, but ran out of string half way through marking them out, so I finished that off. However, we needed a more permanent way of marking the beds out and defining the paths between.

There's an abandoned plot next to ours, with a very old and collapsed shed lying in pieces on a nettle-strewn compost heap. The shed was too badly damaged to be able to salvage and rebuild (a pity, as we could really do with a little shed). So I decided to be a good Womble (saving money in the process) and reuse the panels for planks to form nice borders to our beds. I spent some time prising the planks off, removing nails and sawing up some of the battens to form pegs to hold the planks upright as a border. It's a fairly rough-and-ready construction, but it defines the paths better and makes the plot look a bit more cared for. It also satisfyingly combined clearing some of the junk off the plot with getting raw materials for free. Actually, that's one of the things I love about allotment sites -- everyone constructs these Heath-Robinson constructions out of whatever they can scavenge, and it gives the place a very quirky, hand-made feel.

I was going to sow some radishes, but we've had a lot of rain recently turning parts of the plot into a soggy quagmire, so I decided to leave it to dry out a bit before sowing. My wellies got sucked down into the mud a few times when I was hammering pegs in, and there was a certain amount of comedy wobbling about and nearly falling flat on my face, as I tried to pull them out of the mud, accompanied by a satisfying sschlooock sound. At the moment, it looks like we could grow rice quite successfully, but I hope it drains a bit in the next few weeks, because I'm itching to start sowing into the ground.