Category Archives: Uncategorized

Potatoes, Preparation, Soft fruit, Uncategorized

Spud sinking and plot pottering

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Potatoes waiting in the wings
potatoes in situ
Morello Cherry

It’s not raining! It’s Good Friday, and it’s not raining. Yet.

There is rain scheduled, it is after a bank holiday. Before it arrives, I have taken this opportunity to wander down the plot, sink potatoes and check on the fruit trees.

First with the potatoes though:

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You can see the youtube version here.

Kestrel and Lady Balfour potatoes have been sunk into raised beds. I still have to sink pink fir apple, once I have filled the other beds with ‘orse poop. I put the seed potatoes into raised beds as there is better drainage, less resistance for the forming tubers and previous experience has meant a big, quite successful crop. I’m not sure yet if there will be any international kidney this year on the plot.

There was also the opportunity to look at the young fruit trees that are planted on the plot. With the site being windy, they could do with some bracing support so that they don’t keel over. I did quick count, and found that I had quite a few fruit trees, I guess I don’t need to buy any more! In the picture above, you see the morello cherry tree. This one, along with the sylvia, moor park apricot, darling peach, pear du comice, czar  and victoria plum were all tied to a stake sunk beside them.

With the exception of the Czar plum tree, all of the trees appear to be waking up and have buds forms on their boughs. I am not too sure about the Czar, as it has always been a little bit of a miserable looking tree.  The plot most certainly has it’s own little micro-cosm that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the site; i think the peach is the only that is sending out pink fuzzy buds. Have been watching it closely and willing the bud to burst.

overwintering alliums, Uncategorized

@MarshallsSeeds Heritage Garlic update

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There is allegedly some rather nasty weather forecast for the Easter weekend. However, Good Friday has so far presented itself as being fair. There has been pottering around done today, but I have also  been double checking the heritage garlic provided by Marshalls.

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You can also find the youtube version here.

The varieties are as follows:

  • Garlic Bohemian Rose
  • Mikulov
  • Red Duke

With the drier weather, the garlic appears to be doing well. It has most certainly taken root and the foliage is rather lush and green. It does have some level of resilience and should survive well. It will be really nice to see how this crop progresses and to have a good crop of garlic in the summer. I will most likely give it a feed in the coming months, and will have to ensure that the ground around the garlic remains weed free.

 

Uncategorized

Checking in with the Chillies

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As the Easter Weekend draws near, I thought I should check on the chillies.

chillieselection
Hungarian Hot wax, purple haze, devil’s rib and orange habanero

The weather over the last week has been somewhat up and down. There have been says of glorious sunshine and days that like today, have been grey and miserable. The chillies, along with the tomatoes, have been enjoying the sunnier days whilst sat in Dad’s sun trap. However, there have a few nights where frost has been scheduled and they have covered over with a layer of horticultural fleece to protect them from a premature demise.

There a number of different varieties that I am playing with this year:

  • Jalepeno
  • Purple Haze
  • Patio Sizzle
  • Prairie Fire
  • Devil’s Rib
  • Coffee Bean
  • Hungarian Hot Wax
  • Orange Habanero

As you can see, there is quite a spectrum in terms of heat. It is the first year of sowing for devil’s rib and coffee bean, but all the others have been experimented with before. The hope is that these will be just a fruitful as their predecessors.

Coffee bean
Devil’s Rib
Patio sizzle

Purple haze is the only cayenne variety on the plot, and at the moment has seed leaves that have a really nice purple tinge to them. There are a few habaneros, some which like the coffee bean variety are somewhat slower growing. I have found that the hotter the chilli, the more difficult it is to get it to germinate in the first instance and that these are slower growing compared to say a cayenne.

Coffee bean, like prairie fire and sparkler, is a variety that produces fairly small compact plants. This should help with organising the poly tunnel as smaller pots can used. I say small, but I am probably going to use morrisons flower pots as per usual. They are really quite useful for chillies.

One thing that I do hope for, is that these will all catch up to where they should be. Sown later than usual, the plants  are developmentally behind where they might be. I would have expected the milder varieties to be a little more leafier. The combination of later sowing and not enough heat and light is probably the reason why the plants are still not so leafy.

Uncategorized

Girding up the Grapevines

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Oh, it was cold down the plot today. The sun hung around this morning, and then clocked off at lunch time. There was however a job to do today.

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The youtube version can be found here.

An allotment neighbour had kindly donated some random pieces of wood that she wanted to be rid of. So in the spirit of recycling, I have used it to sort out the grapevines. The three grapevines, boskoop glory and madeline Sylvaner, were in danger of falling over.I have spent months listening to my mum telling me to sort them out. Today, armed with a pair of pliers, heavy duty wire and a wooden mallet, I got around to it. There was only one plan. To stop the vines from keeling over.

In the cold.

The donated bits of wood were sunk into the clay with the mallet, and positioned next to the already existing cane fretwork. This was only ever a temporary measure, but it has worked really well. So rather than take the framework away, I am just cobbling things onto the framework to make it work better. The canes are robust enough, when the vines are skeletal and not very leafy. However, when the foliage comes through, the vines become top heavy. A problem, when the canes aren’t robust enough, and start to keel over in a brisk wind. I have been to the plot a few times after the gales have whipped around the plot, and prayed that the vines hadn’t been pulled up and over.

There was a lot of cobbling with the grapevines. Using curtain hooks, heavy duty green gardening wire had been stretched across the wooden posts and now works around the canes. Vines have snaked around the canes already, and quite successfully as they’ve become established; another reason why I am loath to remove the canes. I am hoping that the vines will continue to trellis around the wires and that these will offer a little bit more robust support.

 

 

The Big Sunflower Project 2016, Uncategorized

Sowing Psychology Sunflowers 2015

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sunflowersseeds

It is that time of year again. I have sown sunflowers. Sunflowers are really simple to sow and grow, and offer bright splashes of colour when the growing season is in full spring. For the last few years I have been supporting the The Big Sunflower Project and also trying to get fellow educators involved in sowing sunflowers as stress busting activity.

As an exercise in mindfulness, sowing seeds, watching them grown, is something really important for me. I have experienced the positive and psychological effects of pottering around the plot, so spreading the word is something that I will always do. Sowing sunflowers is just the thing! This year I am sowing seeds that were saved from one of last years sunflowers. I remember to this day, mum decapitating it and waving it at me so that it could dried.

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The youtube version can be found here.

Sunflowers will grow quickly if they have optimum growing conditions. It is a little cold right now, the sun does seem to have disappeared for a bit. This may slow down seed germination, but I am as hopeful as ever. Sunflowers are also really good for wildlife when they have come to the end of their life; birds will eat the seeds and small insects will live in the stems that I tend to leave until Spring.

You can find out here about last year’s post about sowing Psychology Sunflowers.

Preparation, Uncategorized

Sowing Seeds on a Saturday

Today is the first day of my Easter Holidays, and that means starting to think about what is to do on the allotment. In particular, inside the polytunnel.

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The youtube version can be found here.

Whilst I have tried plants and potatoes in the poly tunnel, this is the first for seeds. I have scattered an assortment of radishes, beetroot and different types of lettuces. There were all year round butter head lettuces, as red yugoslavian, lollo rosso, little gem and one called rouge D’Hiver. With radishes, we have a mixture. In terms of beetroot we have have the usual boltardy and Chioggia.

It was very cold in there! Less warmer than it was the other day when the shelving was built.

 

I hid in the poly tunnel, whilst Mum did some digging outside. Whilst it was cold, the plot has started to dry out a little bit more. I think the worse thing that might happen in terms of the weather might be a deluge of April showers. No news yet on the beans sown the other day, I suspect the poly tunnel needs to be a little warmer.

 

tomatoes, Uncategorized

Potting up baby tomatoes 2016

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Only sown a week ago, tomato seeds have cracked, germinated and started to reach for the sky. There were a number of jiffy pellets used, and approximately eight different varieties sown and most of these have successfully come through. With the light levels still very low, and the temperatures low enough to produce snow; the seedlings were starting to get very leggy and demanded immediate potting up. In being gangly, the danger is that they get so tall, they stretch out and snap at the root to keel over. The stems become very spindly if they are left in the heated prop for too long, and most of the seedlings had in fact been fished out so that the lower heat levels might slow them down a little.

Having done the necessary school work for this week, I needed to pot them up. As ever, I have help in the shape of my mum.(Happy mothering Sunday, to all those Mum’s -and dads, grandma’s, uncles and aunties who might occupy that role-on Mama’s day). I was all set to pot up the plants, only for Mum to arrive and wave me out the way. I was having a small crisis in not having any newspaper to put across the floor, so we have had to improvise today.

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You can see the youtube version here.

I have lost count of how many seedlings there are. Suffice to say, there a quite a few. Tomatoes do grow rather quickly when they have optimum growing conditions. For now, I have potted the seedlings into 7cm pots. I-well, Mum has-potted them very deeply and right up to the seed leaves. All being well, this fragile stem-they turn purple when they are cold-will send out root hairs that will in turn anchor the plant into it’s soil and allow it it feed better.

At the moment, they do look very tiny and very small. All being well, these will start to become a little more robust and the true leaves will start to develop.They have interesting lacy quality that makes them instantly recognisable as being baby tomatoes.

Squashes, success, Uncategorized

Plot Pumpkin gets curried

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Mum has just used the second half of the pumpkin, so now all of it has been used. Needless to say, we are probably going to be eating pumpkin for a few days. You can watch it via youtube here.

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With one pumpkin we have created straight forward dishes. Both have contained fenugreek which despite being a green manure, is really very useful in Indian dishes. The recipe used here for the curried pumpkin can also be used with squashes and it’s entirely upto you as to how much of everything you might want to use. I have found that pumpkin can be either be quite sweet or bland entirely. With both of these you can add different spices and condiments to make it how you want to.

The curry and the soup were always going to be the plan for the pumpkin, I have yet to make pies!

 

 

Squashes, success, Uncategorized

Plot Pumpkin meets his fate

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With two of the three plot pumpkins already having met their fate: it was time that my last one met it’s fate. Having survived Halloween, it has been hanging around for a while.

 

The process involved chopping, roasting and adding the combination of pumpkin, tomato and a bit of home grown chilli to an onion base. With this recipe, I have only used half of the 6lb fruit.

The youtube clip is here.

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After roasting, we did this.

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The recipe is fairly straight forward. Having peeled and chopped the pumpkin it was then roasted with an assortment of spices. Once cooked through, this was added to a base of onions, ginger, onions and cumin that had been sweated off. Adding water and simmering till tender, the pumpkin became tender and was then blitzed with a hand blender. The one difference in this soup compared to ones made previously, was the addition of home grown fenugreek for additional flavour. There were also some frozen home grown chillies in there too.

If you hold a second, I will be posting the other half, where we curry Bruno!

Books, success, Taking stock, Uncategorized

World Book Day 2016: Thursday 3rd March

I hear it’s World Book Day tomorrow; the global celebration of literary fiction, of characters that inveigle themselves into our imagine to loom larger than life, and of the passion and pride that authors feel when their words are read and enjoyed.

Admittedly, these were my second. third and fourth thoughts after thinking of my own book and how I could plug it all day tomorrow. Not the most appropriate thought I suppose when there are books for every taste and interest that should be celebrated. I wrote mine as it corresponds to mine, the fortunate thing being that there are people out there for whom I hope it is useful. I enjoy having a vegetable patch, and I wanted to share the lessons learned from it.

It is less than seven months since I published #Plantpottales, and I am trying to think of what to do next. There is a current work in progress, with slow and steady progress being made. I do have a self imposed deadline that I am working towards; and two months in it is feeling rather tight already. I don’t write full time, I don’t even play on the plot full time; so it is shoe horned into the real life. This makes having a monthly quota a challenge, and I have a long list of things I want to write and put into the work. It’s a move away from non-fiction; I am trying to use my imagination and a thesaurus to create a work of fiction.

But I would also like to write another non-fiction gardening book. The thought has entered my mind of late. It will have recipes in it, certainly. I have a list! Of the assorted jams, jellies and chutneys that have been plot experiments. (I’m going to be cautious here and tell you that I am not a professional preserver but a hobbyist, so don’t be expecting full scale rules and regulations for health and safety et cetra. Keep yourself and your kitchen safe, all right?).  Whilst I have the list of recipes, I will need to reflect on what I put in the book proper. This means devising a list of chapter headings in the same way I did when developing #plantpottales. Some serious reflection is required as to what I want to put into it; knowing what I had put into #plantpottales.

This is the first-I think-World Book Day that I can experience as an author. I might be self published, but an author nonetheless, and I like to think that #plantpottales is one of the many books out there that will be appreciated not just tomorrow, but also beyond. The growing season has but just started!

With two possible, projects for the coming year, I can only hypothesis what world book day 2017 might be like.