Time lapse

Quick update on our allotment, now that the bean poles are up:
Flash animation

Written by exmonkey on May 30th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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With a little help from my friends

Taking on an allotment can be a daunting thing. All that space, often overgrown and neglected to start with, can seem impossibly huge once you’re responsible for taming it. Many people working full time or who have young families struggle to visit often enough and for long enough for them to be able to see results quickly. It’s easy to lose heart.

A really good way of making a visible difference quickly is to enlist the help of a group of friends. A large posse will get more done in one afternoon than you could manage on your own over the entire growing season. Needless to say, they need to be very good friends and you should be prepared to bribe reward them for their efforts.

Having very recently inflicted just this kind of activity on my own pals, I’d like to pass on the following tips for an enjoyable and productive day:

- Book a date well in advance so that your friends have lots of notice and space in their diaries and you will end up with more personnel. Long term planning does mean that you will be gambling with the weather, so choose a relatively summery time of year, cross your fingers and suggest people bring waterproofs just in case.

- Keep your workers happy - take plenty of supplies of food and drink. think carefully about whether alcohol is worth having during or after the event. Only you know which will better motivate your crew.

- If possible, plan the day around a particular project such as erecting a shed or greenhouse, building raised beds or rotovating the plot. People will enjoy the day much more if they can see that this is a big job that you would have struggled with on your own, and there will be a real sense of achievement when the job is done.

- That said, try to have a range of smaller tasks and activities available that people can do if they start to get bored. Your team is more likely to stay around for longer if they are kept interested.

- Finally, don’t take it too seriously. Have a laugh, take photos, tell jokes, get covered in mud. It’s not just about getting work done, it’s also about having fun.

Written by Pumpkinsouper on May 29th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Those pesky slugs…

We harvested our first crop of salad last week and I have to say that it was incredibly good. However, even after soaking it very well in a deep bowl of water I came close to ingesting a slug on two occasions. I’m thinking that next time I will soak the salad in lightly salted water to see what happens. I think I would prefer to keep the slugs off the plants completely rather than run the risk of eating one, so I went looking for tips in my handy Trade Secrets book.

How to keep the slugs at bay:

:: Open a Slug Pub. I think we all know about sinking a container half filled with beer in the ground.
:: Smear Vaseline around the edge of puts so the slugs can’t climb over and attack the plants
:: Scatter crushed eggshells around young plants so that slugs can’t crawl to them
:: Ash, hawthorn twigs and holly leaves scattered around will stop slugs crawling to your plants
:: After having greased the edge of your pots, don’t place them too close to the wall or the slugs will just climb up and leap in
:: Smear lettuce or cabbage leaves with lard and leave them lying around. When they are covered with slugs, just throw them away
:: Encourage frogs onto your allotment or keep a couple in your greenhouse

I’m not sure if any of these will work but they would be worth a try. Feel free to add any more suggestions.

Written by stephen007 on May 26th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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Allotment planning

We are trying to be a bit organised - I download a free trial of a bit of software called ConceptDraw, which (if you know your Microsoft products) is a bit like Visio. It’s basically a program that makes all kinds of diargams.

This is the result (requires adobe acrobat reader)

We were talking to a potato farmer yesterday who reckoned you need to leave 8 years between potato crops. I think this is a bit excessive for allotments, but hopefully having a record of our planting will help us plan the next 3 years.

Written by exmonkey on May 25th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Rainy days

A view from my van, where I had to sit all the time I was at the allotment on saturday due to adverse weather.

On the upside however, all our veg are really going for it with the rain, parts of our more weed infested plot look positively amazonian.

Written by exmonkey on May 24th, 2006 with no comments.
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Plastic Greenhouses

First we had a £10 four shelf mini greenhouse, to get a few things started early. This blew down in a gale and had to be moved back to the house.

Then I saw a plastic one on eBay, 3m x 2.1m x 2.1m and won the auction at a fair price.

I’ve always been interested in Victorian Hot Beds so my objective is to fulfil Monty Don’s challenge to ‘bring home something from the allotment every day of the year.’ I’m not a brassica man as they occupy the land for too long. So in the greenhouse we shall keep the tomatoes etc cropping for slightly longer and then (after changing the soil) will plant salad crops.

In the main garden we will have Winterover Spring Onions, Mooli radishes, mantanghong radishes, anything I can find that will survive or grwo during our winters.

Written by cliff on May 23rd, 2006 with 4 comments.
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Cheap seeds

This morning, I managed to clear a bit of bind weed & horse tail infested plot to sow some parsley and coriander seeds.

Both parsley and coriander prefer slightly shadey positions, so they have been sown at the back of the plot in front of the jerusalem artichokes.

The parsley cost me £1.50 from the garden center - the coriander seeds, however, cost 90p from Sainsburys. Someone told me that many of the seeds in spice refils you can get from supermarkets will germinate, so at a 1/4 the price by weight, I thought I’d give it a go.

Last year I sucessfully grew some sweet peppers from the seeds of a Sainsburys ‘taste the difference’ range red pepper and I have my fingers crossed after putting some onion squash seeds in pots obtained from a squash I bought last year at the farmer’s market.

Written by exmonkey on May 22nd, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Apple and Rhubarb Crumble

Found this on the BBC website:

Roast Rhubarb and Apple Crumble
Serves: 4
Preparation Time: 7 mins
Cooking Time: 20 mins (Oven)

Ingredients
500g (1lb) rhubarb, cut into 2-inch lengths
500g (1lb) apple, cored, cut into wedges
100g (4oz) caster sugar
25g (1oz) butter, cubed
50g (2oz) plain flour
100g (4oz) luxury muesli
1 tblsp. light muscavado sugar
pinch cinnamon

Method
1. Put rhubarb, apple and caster sugar into a small roasting tin and roast at gas 7, 210 C for 20 minutes.
2. Rub together butter and flour and mix in remaining ingredients.
3. Spoon crumble over the roast fruit and bake for 15 to 20 minutes.
4. Serve with crème fraiche.
5. Stem ginger could be added to the fruit for a change.

I’m making it tonight with some rhubarb I ‘found’ on an abandoned plot - so I’ll let you know what it’s like.

rhubarb info

Written by exmonkey on May 20th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Bridging the Hungry Gap

Down the allotment at this time of year there is a lot of activity of the sowing, potting on and general cultivation variety, but generally slim pickings when it comes to harvesting - the notorious ‘hungry gap’. My plot is no different.

Actually, on my little plot, things are probably a bit worse. For some reason it has taken me a long time to realise that it is possible to grow vegetables over winter (missing the subtle nuances of the phrase “over-wintering varieties” in seed catalogues) and I have consequently ended up with nothing to harvest since, well, it was so long ago I can’t remember when. August?

But all that is about to change as today, in an attempt at year-round productivity, I will finally sow some brassicas. Assuming that the noise from my rumbling tummy doesn’t send me indoors to raid the fridge before I get started. Hungry gap, indeed.

Written by Pumpkinsouper on May 20th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Update on the harvest

In addition to radishes that only a small minority actually like, we have now harvested mixed salad.

The main reason I picked the small leaves is because they were interfering with the potatoes. Allow me to explain.

When I planted the seed potatoes, I though I’d try and be clever and plant what some of the magazines call a ‘catch crop’ - ie a crop of fast growing stuff that can harvested before the main crop already planted in that bit of allotment starts to take over. That’s the idea anyway.

So I planted a couple of rows of ‘italian mix’ salad leaves either side of where I thought the spuds would appear. Unfortunatley, I must have put the potatoes in at a funny angle, because they decided to break through right along one of the lines of salad leaves. Hence the early harvest.

Why did I leave it as long as I did? I kept on expecting a nitrogen gas filled plastic bag to appear over the leaves. This never happened - I can only assume that you only get nitrogen gas filled bags in Spain and Israel.

So what does this stuff taste like? Plants. Stephen assures me that it tastes like salad, but I think it tastes like a handfull of grass. Maybe I don’t like salad either. Hopefully, the next crop will be more to my seemingly choosey palate.

Written by exmonkey on May 19th, 2006 with no comments.
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