Bigamous blogging

OK I admit it - I've been two-timing my blog.

Those nice people at online retailer Crocus are branching out from their Chelsea medal winning range of herbaceous perennials and such like, and have started selling fruit and veg plants (and seeds). They kindly but perhaps a little foolhardily asked me about my allotment. So I told them. At length. Again and again.

So all my witterings have now become their kitchen garden blog. Actually I've been secretly wanting to do this for ages - I'm a compulsive grower of fruit and veg and have been for years, but only occasionally allow them onto these pages. They will still turn up here from time to time, but now I can also go on about them at great length and in more detail than you could ever have thought possible.

You, too, can live through the harvest of every pea pod by my side: all you have to do is click here....

The start of the new year

So many people just abandon their allotments at this time of year and just turn up again in the spring (most likely to a patch of rampant weeds which it'll then take them another couple of months to get going again).

Surprise, surprise, I'm not one of them. I'll confess to missing the odd day when it's really tipping down with rain, though even then I sometimes have a mung around in the greenhouse. And there are some weeks around January time when I'm reduced to sitting at home grinding my teeth because the ground is just too soggy and horrible to do anything with, so I have to give up and stay off it.

This week I've been starting off my new season - my fifth year on the allotment, and it's just getting better and better. You learn a new thing with each year that passes, and just fine-tune what you do until you get it right. This year my big learning curve has been the broad beans, which almost totally failed in spring because I sowed them indoors in November and then planted them out in January as strong, but overly tall-stemmed specimens without protection. Result - the whole lot were wiped out by a combination of wickedly bad weather and stem rots. Actually, I say the whole lot, but several re-sprouted once the weather improved, giving me a fairly measly crop but a crop nonetheless. These really are tough plants.

Anyway: this year I'm experimenting with sowing in the ground, but under cover of polythene cloches. I used to avoid sowing direct, as everything just got eaten straight away, but since the mice are having a hard time even getting out of bed thanks to my ever-vigilant pussycats, I've felt able to risk it this time. The result ought to be sturdier plants, more able to cope with being outside all winter, and a thumping great glut of broad beans (which thankfully freeze beautifully) come May. Can't wait.

PS: that's my trusty allotment dog appearing in the background, mooching around looking for smelly things to eat. Am considering setting up a rebel Gardening Dog movement to counter the army of rabid cat-lovers around here. Or perhaps a Gardening Chickens movement, for which I am similarly well-armed with pictures with which to bore you rigid.

I've been got

I thought it couldn't be long - especially with the summer we've just had. Blight has made its first unwelcome appearance on the allotment.

The first you see is a few little harmless-looking brown spots like these.

The spots just get bigger and bigger...

... until they start destroying whole leaves, then the stems too.

Finally the poor potato plant ends up looking something like this - every leaf shrivelled, every stem brown and sick-looking. You shouldn't let things get to this stage: when you first see the leaf-spots, remove the foliage completely, as rain will wash the fungal spores down through the soil and onto your potatoes otherwise (and you've never smelled anything bad until you've smelled a blighty potato).

The above photos were all taken on the same morning, of the same patch of potatoes ('Desiree', in case you're interested) so it just goes to show that blight comes on in stages, and some bits can be worse affected than others.

Anyway - so now all those stems have been cut off at ground level, bagged up like toxic waste (never compost them - the spores overwinter) and thrown away. I haven't quite dared lift the potatoes just yet: partly because I haven't had the time, but also because I detest the slimy mess of a blight-infected potato slightly more than I detest cleaning my downstairs loo. So both tend to get left for a long time in the spirit of procrastination (which in both cases generally just makes the problem worse).

One last thing - these are my 'Sarpo Mira' blight-resistant potatoes, on the same morning, growing just eight feet away:

This has deepened my admiration for this spud variety even more. It's a good roasting spud, though people say it falls apart if you boil it so it's steaming only. Anyway, from now on I'm making them a regular on my seed spuds order - when potatoes grow this well when blight is rampant all around, it's daft not to.

Hasta la vista, ratties

This is a cob on my sweetcorn the day before I got my two feral cats to keep down the rats and mice:

Sweetcorn is an irresistible favourite of all things verminous, and I've never yet managed to get any to maturity, even though I still plant it (more in hope than expectation). It always, always ends up like this - scoffed by either rats or mice, or both, before it even gets ripe.

Now this is how the rest of my sweetcorn looks, a couple of weeks after the cats were let out of the shed:

Oh, my... I am too excited for words. I think I may be about to harvest my first-ever home-grown sweetcorn cob after four years of growing the stuff.

I think it can be said that the cat as mousetrap experiment has worked. Outstandingly well.

(the cats are having a great time too... :D)

Meet my mousetraps

I don't know why it is that none of those worthy tomes about growing things on allotments ever talk about mice and rats - but in my experience, these twin scourges are second only to slugs in terms of what damage they do to crops. This year their tally includes my entire early pea crop, eaten to the ground when just seedlings, and now the first of my sweetcorn cobs to ripen.

I've tried everything: humane traps (they laughed scornfully and nicked the peanut butter while holding the door open with their tails); home-made not-very-humane traps (sweet jars sunk in the ground - they find their way in and then can't climb out. Trouble is, the rain gets in too and then they drown - I don't hate them that much); and not-at-all-humane traps (the conventional kind: once again, scornful laughter, no peanut butter and no dead mousies).

So it's time for the nuclear option. Meet my new mouse traps.

Mousetrap No. 1: aka Sweep. And...



Mousetrap No. 2: aka Sooty. This is about all I've seen of her so far - she hides under the soil sieve in the corner nearly all the time - and Sweep, though more courageous in that she'll come out if you've got a tin of cat food in your hand, isn't exactly trusting.

These are feral cats - I got them from the Cats Protection League after reading that they were very short of homes for these basically wild animals. They aren't pets, which is of course what most people are looking for when they want to rescue a cat - so they need people with outhouses, barns, stables or in this case sheds on allotments who can look after them but don't expect them to be very domesticated.

As far as I'm concerned, they're working animals with a job to do. Doesn't stop me being a bit soppy about them - they're very cute as they're only about 6 months old and have that kittenish look still - but I don't try to stroke them. I let them out for the first time this weekend - until now I've been keeping them in the shed so they know where home is - and am now keeping my fingers crossed that a) they'll come back and b) they'll massacre the mousies. And I hope rats, and possibly even bunnies too. Oh, I may be an animal-lover, but where my veggies are concerned it's war.....

Knowing your onions

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to brag a bit.

You see, I've been spending this week digging up the onion crop up at the allotment - the tops had gone over so it was clearly time they were out of the ground.

What you have to understand is that I've never - and I mean never, in about 8 years of veg-growing, had any luck with onions. They always turn out mingy little buttons, better for pickling than for eating. I've tried everything - different varieties, different spacings - but no joy.

Until now. Just look at these whoppers. The largest ones are around 6" across. They look like proper onions - you know, the ones you buy in the shops. The above picture shows just half the harvest - there was another 11ft-long bed full to go (you see, I overcompensate for the shallot-size onions by planting loads of them). My entire greenhouse is now stuffed to the gunwhales with drying onions and I've run out of racks. I'm even thinking of entering some for the village autumn horticultural show, I'm that chuffed.

Mind you, I have to confess to a sneaking suspicion that this is not actually anything to do with me. It's been a wierd year all round - early summer crops (peas, broad beans, French beans) which I'm normally dead good at have failed utterly this year. And cabbages, which I fail with quite as spectacularly as onions as a rule, have turned into kings - my 8-year-old picked one of my red cabbages up the other day and disappeared behind it.

If this is climate change, we're going to be eating a lot of cabbage from here on in...

Worrying about my veg

Until now I've had a separate blog for my allotment, but pleading severe lack of time to do just about anything, I've decided that my veg are going to invade the otherwise ornamental portals of this blog (so I've got rid of the other one).

It was kind of inevitable anyway, as I discovered a previously unsuspected vocation as a vegetable garden designer this spring (about five enterprising people were brave enough to let me experiment on their gardens and we got some pretty good results) and this has since mushroomed into a) a garden design course so I can at least pretend I know what I'm talking about, and b) a cunning plan to incorporate as many edible plants as possible into my back garden. So for some time now my veg-growing - previously banished to the allotment - has been shacking up with my more decorative plant-related enterprises and the two are now pretty much indistinguishable.

Only thing is - I've been pulled up short by the current concerns over contaminated manure. Since I'm mainly organic, not being able to be sure of my sh** is a real setback. I'm currently debating the options: buy the manure, but compost it for a year? (and if so, where?!) Spent mushroom compost (hard to get hold of, and besides wasn't that manure to begin with anyway...)? Super-expensive sterilised soil improver from t' garden centre? Or just take the risk?

They say nobody's going to take any notice of this until the market growers are affected. And I'm not sure how much of a crisis it is anyway: someone said to me the other day they thought it was only a problem in the London area (which almost means me, but since I'm just outside the M25 I usually exempt myself).

Will no doubt continue dithering until someone more sensible says something. Could be a while, then...