A vague promise of mellow fruitfulness

August. High Summer.

(insert joke and/or ironic laugh here)

So far we've done amazing things with the plot. When I think back to May and the sea of weeds we had to fight through just to get to the shed I'm astonished at what we have achieved.


Over the next couple of posts I will be looking at the some of the crops that we have on the plot and how they have progressed.

Here is a taste of things to come.


Not bad at all. The beetroot is a bit larger than you'd find in a store but even at that size it tastes great. That was one of the great discoveries for me this year. Beetroot which has not been pickled tastes really nice. Huh! Who knew?

I still hold the view that the first person that ever pickled beetroot had a cold when they opened the jar three months later. The freshly decanted pickled beetroot then paralysed his taste buds. Sadly, Everyone else then ate the pickled beetroot and just humoured the chap because they were really, really hungry. (Mmm! It's lovely. Nice! You used real vinegar and everything.)

In that instant pickled beetroot affected the human gene pool and ruined British cuisine for the next 700 years by destroying a nation's taste buds. It's the only rational explanation for how stores manage to shift so many units of pickled beetroot every year.

The French pickle the tender shoots of White Asparagus in white wine vinegar with a hint of fresh tarragon. We pickle beetroot in malt vinegar. What went wrong? How, in such a short trip across a body of water so small, can one idea be so horribly, horribly tortured?


The cauliflowers have been great this year. Beautiful creamy white, dense crowns with a great smell. Cauliflowers can be a bit hit and miss on a plot but all this warmth and rain has given us an excellent crop. This little beauty is about 10 inches across.


Even the "Gem" lettuce tastes distinct and has a flavour of it's own. Pretty good for a garnish. I can be cruel about lettuce sometimes.

Cute alert:

My Nephew Ben came to help out last weekend. He rode in Grandad's wheelbarrow and ate Nanny's raspberries. This is him with a particularly tricky chocolate digestive. Being two is coooool!

It's not a patio

It became increasingly clear that we were going to need a proper working area at the allotment. Until now the work took place at Coryn and Harry's and was driven down to site. This is becoming increasingly tiresome and it's wrecking our cars. In addition it is becoming necessary to have a flat firm, dry, clean, area just to sit down and have a cup of tea from time to time.

Ladies and gentlemen directly in front of the spider zoo I give you "My flat, firm, dry, clean work area." Woo Yeah! It doesn't have flowers a washing line or a barbecue therefore it's not a patio. Really.

These are blueberry bushes not flowers. See, it's still not a patio.

It's not a swiming pool.

The continuing saga of the greenhouse. Remember this wreck?

We've moved the greenhouse out of the way for a bit and in its place Harry has built some footings which will raise and support our fiendish Frankenstein greenhouse plan. Unfortunately, it does rather look like we've started making a swimming pool.

La.

Currently we have one green house which has no glass, no door and a very suspect window mechanism. My Uncle Paul is donating his greenhouse which currently has a door and glass and an operational window.

As the greenhouses are the same size, we are going to join the two greenhouses together and glaze the two with polycarbonate. The plan is to join the back of Paul's greenhouse to the front of mine and remove the cross members that only support glass. Then the front of Paul's greenhouse provides a working door. This will leave us a Crystal Palace style greenhouse still only six feet wide but now eighteen feet long and seven feet high.

What could possibly go wrong? I'll let you know how we get on.

Fancy pants

In many of my pictures of the allotment the keen eyed among you may have spotted the occasional flash of blue dotted throughout all the greens and browns.

La. This plot belongs to Vic.

I recently discovered that no food is blue. This is why kitchen staff wear blue sticking plasters for treating cuts. This is a troubling thought. I wonder how many band aids made it into our collective mushroom soups before someone worked this out. Blue plasters fall off into our food just as easily as flesh coloured ones, they are just easier to spot. Let us not dwell on this.


The blue flashes are improvised water butts. We have a rather neat arrangement with a local factory. They give the allotment association their spent 40 gallon barrels (which previously contained water-based glue) and save themselves a bundle on waste management fees. We save a bundle on 40 gallon water butts. Happy people everywhere.

To convert the barrels you take a hand saw and cut off the tops and let them fill with rain water for summer crop watering. Some people cut them in half and grow spuds in them.

Of course you can be fancy and with a little application you can have a counter top for growing crops. We've got four of these.

I take credit only for the idea. It will surprise none of you to know that the natty framework was built by Harry and painted by Coryn. After experimenting with an "X" frame which proved a little unsteady Harry decided that, whilst certainly elegant, the "X" frame needed too much safety engineering. These things are surprisingly heavy when full of wet dirt. The cradle design is far more suitable.

This year we have grown carrots and spring onions with surprising success. Once the carrots come out we will being planting salad crops in all the buckets.

From my point of view I am very happy to toil in the soil for broad beans and potatoes and the like, but I draw the line at scrabbling around in the dirt for the cousin of a dandelion no matter how tasty. So our salad crops will be easy to pick and comparatively clean. As organic as I am everything still needs a really good wash.
Here's one I made earlier. Left to right Rocket-Lettuce-Spinach. Bagged and washed and bought in a supermarket a bag of this stuff is about £1.50. There's enough for about 10 bags there and it grows back every week. Sorry Tesco, I now eschew your "lazy-boy" bags of salad leaves.

Nearly there

We have finally bought this dog of an allotment kicking and (barking?) into line. It's been hard work and there is still plenty to do which will easily fill every one of my weekends between now and Christmas. Well it's nice to be busy.

Harry's digging frenzy has finally finished and Coryn's nursing of the fruit bushes means we might get some fruit this year after all.

Let me give you the tour:

Tomato, Tomatillos and Sweetcorn top left plot

Rhubarb and Squash top right boxes

Cabbages and cauliflowers top right

Peas beans and mange-tout Carrots Beetroot and Parsnips Bottom Left Plot

Nothing here yet. Bottom right plot. Will probably be potatoes and leeks and a few exotics that I have my eye on.

Greenhouse

Herb patch. It looks a bit tatty at present. It's had some heavy traffic over the last few days and it's about to get tattier. More later.

fruit bushes, future plot for Bulb fennel and Water butts

Spider zoo.

Compost heaps. We'll get to the bottom of these bad boys in a few weeks.

The Sunshine Home for fruit bushes.

Coryn set up the Sunshine Home for delinquent fruit bushes. We have lots of self sown and out of control fruit bushes growing among the three feet high grasses, poppy fields and award winning thistles. Many of the bushes have been identified, assessed, weeded, pruned tied, staked and smartened up.

Good Gooseberry

Raspberry rehabilitation centre


I later explained to the bushes that this is a stay of execution only and they can either fruit up or ship out. I assured them that I can always build more compost heaps.

The Loganberry and Teyberry bushes are the other side of the greenhouse and we have not reached those yet. However, they have seen what has happened to the others and know they are next on the list. I shouldn't be surprised if they prune themselves this week.

Bad Teyberry.


This Loganberry need a jolly good talking to.

It's a very wet heat

The wet, sticky weather midweek hampered digging efforts although Harry was able to get down one night and dig out the string of rhubarb that had taken a beating from wheel barrows and general foot traffic.

Some was transplanted, and he kindly donated the remainder to our neighbours. Good thing too. I suspect we would have been overrun with the stuff next year as there were a good deal more (roots/tubas/bulbs*) under ground than (sticks/stems/fronds*) above ground.

*delete as applicable.

I fear that some over enthusiastic hacking at what I genuinely believed to be Doc Leaves may have contributed to Harry's surprise at finding so many rhubarb roots. Whoops!


Despite the humidity and no noticeable breeze Harry continued his digging frenzy. His sterling efforts have meant that we have passed the magical three quarters of the digging finished mark.


I continued to clear out the area between shed and green house and built frames for the Sweet peas. Sweet peas are not peas and are not sweet. Huh!

We are at the half way stage! Woo Hoo! Yeah!

These two beds are about 25 feet wide and nearly 40 feet long. I have room for two more beds within my allotment that have yet to be cleared and dug. The next plots will be just a little shorter. I'll dig these during June. First I have to find something to extinguish my shoulders as, at the time of writing, they feel as if they are on fire!

The herb patch has taken shape. I moved a "Hippo Bag" full of rubbish out from this corner. I built another compost heap. Then I dug out all of the grass and weeds and moved in the perennial herbs. I'll sow the remaining seeds on Monday and plant the herbs that are currently in pots.


Enough! Bed!

Plant something, or spend your life hoeing dirt.

It's alive! Alive! Aaaaaaa Hahahahahahah!

Three blogs in and finally I have something planted. I decided that if I just dug over the site and did not at least plant something as I go, then I would spend all my time hoeing dirt. Where's the fun in that?

• Four lines of rocket leaves
  
• 45 Swiss chard seedlings (colourful cabbage-like leaves that crop nearly year round)
• 18 Tomato plants (different types) Planted with flowers to attract Hover flies. Hover flies feed on the bugs that are attracted to the tomatoes. Genius!
  
• One of the compost heaps is being used for butternut squash and courgettes/zuccini.

Cry God for Harry England and St George!


One half of my allotment guru team. My Dad Harry. He knows when to dig, and when to go home.

People point and laugh at my greenhouse. I sometimes join in.

After me. Raise your hand in the direction of the green house. Extend your index finger. Chuckle. Go on, get it off your chest.

I don't know Dad, it could be a triffid. What does Allen Titchmarsh have to say?

Allen says it's a Poppy. Oh well.

Saturday morning spider club

• I spent this morning pottering around. After spending time digging after work during the week I thought I'd concentrate on a job that requires less brute strength. So I cleaned out the shed.
  
  I was alarmed to see the vast array of spiders running in terror from my trusty broom. I won't lie, there were casualties. This one caused just a medium level freak out, so I let him live. This bad boy is about an inch across and then it has legs attached. Gghrrhrr Nasty!
  

Throughly cleaned and largely spider free, for now, I installed the key items that make a shed usable.

• Gas Burner (not shown)
• Kettle
• Tea
• Milk
• Sugar

All sealed in spider proof tubs. I'm good to go!

It is suposed that the British Army are able to survive longer and travel further than any other army in the world because of their inate ability to make hot water for tea anywhere in the world. It's a British thing. It's very comforting.

Progress picture:The big dig continues....

In the beginning there was nothing...

and then God said Let there be WEEDS!

I've finally inherited a plot of land. I assume that the land is under all these weeds.

I'm not kidding, and this isn't funny. This fine plot has been sitting untouched since November 2007 last year, and the very minute the grass and weeds reached three feet high the Allotment Association asked me if I wanted it.

There are some up sides. My Allotment is huge. It has an ample shed and a green house and three compost heaps. So far this is what I have discovered.

The shed is appears to be some type of spider farm and I have sieves at home that are more watertight.

A bug bomb or two and a the liberal application of roofing felt is needed before I can even call this a shelter. We're a long way from shed.

I have at least one fox that visits under the floors of the shed which has seriously (and in this case literally) undermined the floor structure of the south facing side of the shed. This could be problematic. Foxes are timid, flighty creatures but I imagine that destroying their home will make them a bit less timid and a bit more bitey. I'll keep you updated on my progress with this challenge.

The green house has no door and no glass at all. The previous owner decided against flooring the greenhouse so now the grass that covers the floor is nearly three feet high. Compared to the Shed the greenhouse is a simple problem:

• A bit of time.
• A bit of money.
• Quite a bit of glass.
• A bit of building a new aluminium sliding door.

What could possibly go wrong?

Compost heap you say? That's not a compost heap. That's a rubbish heap that looks like it might once have had dreams of being compost heap. If I dig that lot back into my soil the environmental health people will be all over me like a bad rash. Which, indecently, is exactly what I'll get if I keep touching the wretched compost heap. I suspect that this problem can only truly be solved with a dark night and some matches!

So for now I keep digging. I'll break it up in to manageable chunks the way all human beings faced with a daunting task are want to do. I'll keep my back to the vast expanse of low-level rainforest. Hopefully I won't become lunch for the unknown horrors lurking in the weeds and by the end of this weekend I'll have the first third done. Then I'll break it up again....