Soilman's Allotment Blog

Preparing for battle

Here are the Walcheren Winter cauliflowers I'm relying on for my spring brassica hit. Calling them cauliflowers is a bit of a con. Really they're heading broccoli, but no less tasty for that.

Note the heavy duty, ultra-tall, anti-pigeon netting. Over-wintering brassicas are a prime target for enemy attack. Defences must be unbreachable. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

This morning felt like the first day of autumn. The air has that heavy, damp, smoky feel. Let's hope it's not a wet one; poor old Blighty will become part of the North Sea.

Trial by ordure

Today I 'achieved' this pile of shit.

I didn't produce it, you understand. That would have been easier, and no doubt more enjoyable. No, today's task was to hump a ton of horse manure from a nearby stable (thanks Vanda!) to my allotment.

So I hired a transit van and spent the day barrowing it from place to place. I ache all over, I smell dreadful and I'm utterly shagged out.

But hey, who cares? Because next year's brassicas are going to be great.

Spores and stores

They look all right. But then, so did the handful I lifted three weeks ago... and one of them showed signs of blight 10 days later. So God knows if these Arran Victory spuds will store.

Drying in the sun

To improve the odds, I've done everything by the book. You cut off the haulms and wait three weeks before lifting the tubers. In theory, that should stop them being infected by blight spores lying on the soil surface.

If they're not infected already.

Next, you need to dry them thoroughly. And that means thoroughly. Spuds with damp skins rot in storage, blight or no blight.

Ready for storage

Harvest them on a dry, sunny day. Then leave them in the sunshine for a few hours, turning regularly. If you have heavy clay soil you'll need to scrub it off to dry the tubers properly.

That's the theory, anyway. Mine will probably still rot. In the meantime, I have to dig three more rows of Desirée.

Then visit my osteopath.

Wanted: Animals, two by two

This basket of peas is hardly lavish. Barely enough to feed one person, let alone two.

But I'm delighted, because I picked them during a 10-minute dry patch. Can you believe that? A whole 10 minutes without rain! Is that some kind of record for 2007?

If there's ever been a wankier summer in British history, I'd love to hear about it. I'm beyond rage, laughter or any other emotional reaction. Now I just stare out of the window, dead-eyed and catatonic.

So let it rain. Or snow. Or pour liquid cow shit from the sky.

Like, whatever.

Gratuitous brassica shot

I know, I know. You've seen it all before. Thing is, I have four excellent reasons for posting this picture:

1. Cauliflowers are gorgeous
2. They're almost over
3. The purple one is enormous
4. These ones match the colour scheme of my blog

Now do you understand?

Soilman's Allotment Bistro

Forgive crap photos. I have strip lights in the kitchen and they give everything a ghastly green overtone.

Much though I don't want this blog to turn into 'What I Ate Last Night', I have to report on this meal with pride. This is corn fresh from the plot (and sweet as nectar), fennel braised in stock and butter, roast chicken and Vitelotte potato chips. Yum.

This is when growing vegetables comes into its own. No matter how excellent your local shop (if you've still got one, that is), you can't buy food as fresh and wonderful as this.

Back down to earth

Looking back over recent posts, I realise I've painted a rather glamorous picture of my allotment gardening.

I appear to have been swanning about in Neronian style, gambolling through acres of gorgeous flowers, pausing only to harvest some delicious morsel and carelessly scoff it in situ.

Er, I don't know quite how to break this news: There is some hard work, too. Occasionally.

To balance things a bit, here's a summary of my hour's back-breaking weeding this morning. Bet you wish you were there.

Crimean Blight

 

 

Drooling in anticipation

The corn is just days away. Scoffed the first cob last night, raw, and it was almost perfect. Another week, at most, and we'll be gorging ourselves.

Less good news is that I've lost control of the weeds in parts of the plot. All this rain has kept me away, and they've gone critical.

This little creep, in particular, winds me right up. I think it's called Good King Henry, although I've seen the name Goose-foot, too. Anyone know better?

Anyway, whatever. It grows like a bastard and pops up everywhere. If the rain ever stops, I'll be massacring acres of it this weekend.

Psychedelic feast

Great excitement at the plot. These Romanesco cauliflowers are starting to come on stream.

I picked this a bit young. Greedy and impatient, as usual. One look at a Romanesco and I start slavering.

They are quite the most delicious brassica of all. And they're amazing to look at. Stare at this for 10 secs and your eyes boggle.

Rosy-fingered Dawn

Insomnia drove me to the allotment at the crack of dawn today. Couldn't think what else to do.

I'm not really the poetic type, but it was very beautiful. Dewdrops twinkling on everything and pink light flickering through swirling mists. Felt glad to be alive (a rarity).

Plus I managed – for once – to capture some of it in a photo:

Guess what's for dinner?

... again.

This is the fourth bucket of French beans from the allotment so far. It's getting silly.

I'm freezing them as fast as I can harvest. But they just keep coming. It's like that mole-whacking arcade game.

Well, mustn't grumble. A month ago I was convinced I'd grow nothing worth eating this year. Yet another Soilman Super Accurate Prognostication.

Light bulbs

Celeriac update: So far, so good. Although by early August the bulbs should be a bit bigger than this.

Two reasons:

• No sunshine
• Not enough humus at the roots

Celeriac is a marshland plant and likes rich, water-retentive soil. I didn't dig in any compost before planting these. Despite the rain, I'll pay the price in smaller bulbs come October.

One pleasant side-effect of the lousy weather is that I didn't get any damage from the celery leaf-miner this year. It normally appears in May. Pick off the affected leaves and the plant usually recovers from an attack fairly quickly.

Vulgar and loving it

Snooty British gardening experts have a lot to answer for. They usually pooh-pooh 'gaudy' flowers like gladioli. They get all excited about 'species' this and 'alpine' that. Anything big, bright and blowsy is treated with patrician froideur.

What's wrong with a cheap and cheerful cultivar? And how come roses are always exempt from scorn?

Well, I love vulgar flowers. I grow several examples at the allotment. Let's hear it for gladis, Siberian irises, lilies, hollyhocks, poppies and dahlias. They're bloody wonderful and I won't hear a word against them.

Salty snack

Gherkins I can take or leave (though I'd rather leave). My wife, on the other hand, is passionate about them. She can't help it. She's from Eastern Europe.

Even I can dimly see their attraction, however, when they're salted with dill. Russians snack on salted gherkins with vodka.

They're dead easy to make. Cut the ends off six or seven gherkins and bung them in a saucepan with lots of dill and six chopped cloves of garlic. Pour on 1.5 litres of boiling water with 2 tablespoons of salt dissolved in it. Let it cool overnight, then refrigerate.

Voilà: home-salted gherkins. Leave them in the liquid and they''ll keep in the fridge for up to two weeks.

Better late than 'late'

These tiny French bean flowers are almost too pretty to belong to a mere vegetable. If I wasn't keen for them to turn into beans, I'd pick them for house flowers.

What a difference a bit of sunshine makes. These Purple Teepee were looking terminally ill a few weeks ago. Now we're getting tons of beans and they taste delicious. 

Even the courgettes, stunted and ill hitherto, have exploded into growth.

Ah well. The good times couldn't last.

ASBO winners 2007

Some excellent entries for the 2007 ASBO (Allotment Success despite Bastard Odds) awards. I fear I must surrender the crown to two particularly worthy competitors.

Joint ASBO winner is Liz Wallace, who's not strictly an allotmenteer. But she's battled with evil conditions on her garden veg plot on a hill just outside Bath: hellish rain, battering winds and all the misery of blight and mildew.

She lost her whole tomato crop to blight. Incredibly, though, she's produced these gorgeous onions:

There can't be many organic onions that beautiful in the UK this year, Liz. So feel free to bask in ASBO glory.

At the other end of the success spectrum (ahem) is Celia, whose onions – though tragically small – did somehow survive the worst of the floods in Oxfordshire. She even, she tells me, got a meal out of them. Er, just.

I think you'll agree that this must constitute the tiniest and crummiest onion in the world:

Inspirational though it is, this is not Celia's best entry. Oh no. For that, which cruises effortlessly to joint 1st place, we must turn to the Smallest Courgette In The World. This picture, which cracks me up every time I look at it, sums up the purest essence of the ASBO spirit:

A big thank you to everyone whose sense of humour was sufficiently intact to send in an entry. The awards are closed now, but I'll gladly give an Honourable Mention to any late entrants.