School holidays in sunny Essex

First day of the school holidays and first break in of the year. Coincidence? I don't believe in them. Day one and they are already bored. Scheezh!

We learned that a padlock is only as strong as the thing is its screwed to, in this case 15 year old wood. Hmmm.

These feral kids need stopping. In these more genteel times children are protected by laws which mean that they can't be tortured or imprisoned against their will. (oh wait a minute, I think every one is protected by those laws) so we'll have to let the police deal with this one.

The kids climb over the fence to take a short cut through to the high street during the day. I guess they see all the sheds and think they must be full of valuable stuff. There is, but not things that are valuable outside of an allotment. There must be £60 worth of seeds in the shed. We'll have to get the anti climb paint out and paint the fence again. Hopefully that's all it will take and they won't pester us again.

Fortunately we did not lose anything important. It appears that they have only taken a gas burner which is inconvenient but it's replaceable. We should be grateful that they didn't use the thing to burn the place down.

I'm off to watch Commando (starring Arnold Swarchenegger) to practice making booby traps. Hahahaha!

Never red

We need flowers on the allotment. I'm not a flower person but I understand the basics of pollination so we grow flowers too. Being a Tottenham Hotspur fan I have made an effort not to grow red flowers. It's complicated, and If you don't know this is not really the place to explain it. Think... Yankees v Mets or Yorkshire v Lancashire or England v France.

Here are some pictures of nature in all it's splendour which also happen to be in Spurs colours.


Sun flowers. If I had a favourite flower it would be these. Of course I don't have a favourite flower because I'm a bloke.


They are kind of pretty though.

Borrage. It's edible, in the same way that hay is edible. This is the chap you need to attract bees. They go nuts for this stuff. This is a big hairy beast of a plant that grows like a weed and has huge sprays of these blue flowers. Bees are attracted to the borrage and then they spot your fruit trees and bushes and the bees pollinate the fruit trees too. When it's finished growing cut it up and put on your compost heap. Borrage is your buddy.


Yep. That's an ant. Click on the picture to see it in full size and stare in awe at the Panasonic Lumix DMC FX12. Sorry! Mother Nature, I meant Mother Nature.

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.

Growing food you don't like

The gardeners among us may have noticed that the food you don't like very much seems to perform the best.

Take runner beans. Please take all the runner beans you want. They're over there with the French beans which you can also keep. Our runner beans are in full flower and growing fast enough to give Dwain Chambers a run for his win bonus.



Are these beans getting special treatment? No.
Are these beans taking vitamin supplements and cold and flu remedies? No.
Do these beans have Linford Christie as a trainer? No.

My Borlotti beans are in the same trench and on the same frame and they are a shadow of the French and runner varieties.




It's the same with my Italian black cabbage. Nothing. Stoically refusing to grow.
On Sunday I saw a round head cabbage slap a pigeon that tried to peck at it. The cabbage is in rude health.




So has the bubble burst on my quest to grow more "fancy" vegetables? Will I have to make a trip to Borough Market every time I want to make home-made minestrone soup? Am I doomed to grow spuds and strawberries and runner beans?

HECK NO!

Say yes to wafty Italian cabbages;
embrace the shiny pink Borlotti bean;
pour over the Asparagus; and
play Mariarchi band music to Tomatillos. (What?) Never mind.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Perhaps a watched pot really does not boil.

Good things come to those who wait, but you can have runner beans now.

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.