OK, so I altered this artichoke pic a little. Humour me. What's a few manipulated pixels between friends?
They said jerusalem artichokes were easy. They said artichokes would grow anywhere. Well, it's bollocks. Half of mine haven't emerged. The ones that have are slow, lumpen and... charmless. They put me in mind of Ed Balls.
Anyone else have difficulties with artichokes? Or are you going to torment me with how absurdly easy you find them?
Thought I'd give you a brief glimpse of the sordid Soilman reality, rather than the carefully posed pictures.
My parsnips took seven weeks to emerge – a new record. Here they are, thinned and ready... but smothered in weeds. A day or two more in this weather and they'll be swamped. Just haven't had time to sort them out.
Suppose I should be grateful they germinated at all. Instead, I'm kicking myself for being a neglectful allotmenteer.
Hurrah! Celeriac plants are out on the plot. Left them under a fleece tunnel for a week to get fully acclimatised to allotment conditions.
Talking of which, it's not just the plants that need hardening off. After my massive dig-and-weed-a-thon on Saturday, I have a seriously stiff arse. Sitting down is posing problems.
Wasn't aware gardening exercised the gluteus muscles so effectively. It's yet another benefit of the madcap funster allotment lifestyle.
Soilman: Buns of steel.
Intellectually, I know March is a crap month. Always has been, always will be. Yet hope springs eternal - goddammit.
You see, it's not the despair. I can cope with the despair. It's the hope.
Anyway, the weather is so spectacularly appalling that indoor gardening is the only option. I've been potting up my celeriac and okra seedlings. Dull, dull, dull.
Here's the last of 2007's root crops. They achieved a good size in the end, despite the grotty weather.
I could lie to you and say I'll cook them in some exotic gourmet dish. Truth is, I'm bored shitless by celeriac. We've been eating it for months. So this lot's going to another home.
I end up giving away something like 20% of the vegetables I grow; I can't bear chucking stuff on the compost, and there's only so much you can face during the gluts.
Does this sound particularly generous or mean to other vegetable gardeners? How much do you give away?
Ready or not, it's all about to kick off. And actually, I am ready. For once.
Except for those leeks by the water tank, I've cleared the winter veg; I harvested the last bucket of celeriac and carrots today. Best of all, I've dug the whole plot and manured everything bar the roots bed.
It's raining now, of course, but this morning was gorgeous. The sun shone (sort of – nothing to write home about), and it reached 16C. Can't say fairer than that for mid March.
My early potatoes went in last weekend, so the Soilman allotment regime is bang on schedule.
All far too good to be true; something ghastly is sure to happen any minute.
At last it's warm enough to sow something direct. I chose a fairly crap day for it, but there it is. For anyone who's not done this before, I hope this may help:
Nothing more delicious – or more satisfying to grow – than a cauliflower. Raising a good cauli is one of the great challenges of vegetable gardening. If you can manage it, the sheer excitement is life-threatening.
Perhaps I should get out more.
Anyway, to get good early summer cauliflowers it's best to sow indoors now. I'll harden these off and plant out in mid to late March.
The tortoise-like progress of celeriac seedlings astounds me. A month after sowing, they've just grown their first true leaf. How did celeriac survive before it was domesticated?
Its preference for boggy conditions can't be coincidence; it relied on herbivorous dinosaurs drowning in the swamp before they got close enough to scoff it.
What a fabulous weekend for growing vegetables. Planted two rows of Jerusalem artichokes. Gastronomically speaking, this is terrific news.
From a flatulence point of view, it's not so great. To say artichokes make you fart is like saying castor oil eases constipation. More than a very few mouthfuls and British Gas could plug you into the national grid.
Not that I care. I love 'chokes and I don't mind farting. So there. Stick that in your pipe and, er, don't light it.
In other news, I'm still harvesting carrots, leeks and parsnips.
Hungry gap? What hungry gap?
A fortnight after sowing, the celeriac's finally germinated. Now for the really tedious bit.
Celeriac is the snail of the vegetable world. Watching it grow is like waiting for the Sphinx to crumble into desert sand; you know it will happen one day, but perhaps not in your lifetime.
I'll thin these out in about 10 days. Then wait at least two weeks before they're big enough to transplant into individual pots.
By the time they're ready to harvest, I'll be dribbling in a home for the bewildered.
I know what you're thinking:
"It's just a parsnip. And a crappy one, at that. Why's he posting it? Has he finally lost his marbles?"
Thing is, it's not just any parsnip. This is a parsnip that took 13 minutes to dig up.
Reason: Like a klutz, I went to the allotment this morning. Like a double klutz, I didn't think about the effect last night's frost would have on the ground.
Result: 13 minutes (I counted them) hacking at rock-solid soil to excavate this pathetic morsel. It would still be there had the sun not been warming the earth as I toiled.
So it's official. I HAVE lost my marbles.
In other news: I now have the official Soilman 'winter banner' on the site. Regular visitors: Hold down shift and hit your browser's refresh tab to see it.
PS: Scoffed the parsnip this evening. Never were so few calories won by the expenditure of so many.
Carrots are still coming thick and fast. I've left the Enviromesh on, squashing the ferns inside to provide a bit of frost protection. We had minus 4C the other night, but it didn't do any damage.
It's the darkest time of the year now. It's dark when I go to work and come home. I've not seen my house in daylight for weeks. I only remember what my legs look like because I have to turn on the light to visit the khazi at night.
If God had intended us to live like bloody moles, He'd have given us paddled feet and made us small and furry.
How vile it is to live at 52 deg North in December.
Two gentle ground frosts do not a parsnip make. But hey, sod it. I couldn't wait any more.
These are a decent size, and they were surprisingly tasty (scoffed them last night). Parsnips are one of the few things about autumn I look forward to. That and Vacherin cheese, which you can't buy in the summer months. I have a particularly noisome and runny one in the kitchen, and it's calling to me right now.
May have to slurp some up with a spoon before going to work. Yeah, baby.
I'm gagging to get my teeth into these leeks. I go to the allotment salivating,
hoping against hope that today's the day when they'll be ready. But they're still not quite there.
This is the plant with the thickest stem, and it's still less than an inch in diameter. I can't bring myself to harvest leeks that small.
The parsnips are also keeping me waiting. They're more than big enough, but without frost they don't taste of much. And these days, we don't get frost until November at the earliest.
So it's all rather frustrating.
Now that's what I call a carrot.
Nice to end 2007 with carrot success. It's eluded me all year, and I hate going into winter without a good stock of basic crops.
We have two 4m rows of these, so there's every chance they'll take us through to spring.
Phew. Something to supplement the beetroot. Not a day too soon.
This is a fair-sized celeriac, given the crappy season we've had. And it only took 8 months to grow. Effortless!
Actually I'd still grow it even if it were 10 times harder to cultivate. I love celeriac, especially raw. Grated and mixed with mustard mayonnaise, it mutates into something exquisitely ambrosial. Seriously: If I could eat only three foods for the rest of my life, it would be on the list (along with freshly cut asparagus in hollandaise sauce and bouillabaisse with crusty bread).
Curses. Now I'm hungry. And it's only 8am.
They say you should eat beetroots when they're small.
Well, this advice certainly holds true for most vegetables. But with beetroot, I really don't think it matters. The ones I grow are as sweet and tender at this size as when they're small. So – guess what? – I let them grow pretty big.
Is this fiendishly controversial?
Yes! At last I've bloody done it!
I'd given up on carrots this year. The first lot were an utter disaster. OK, so these Autumn King aren't perfect... but they're a damn sight better. And no carrot fly damage.
Plus the beetroot is unimprovable. Where's my medal?!
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.
I was getting pretty cocky about carrots. A few years of nice, fat, straight roots and I thought I'd cracked it.
Well, Nemesis has duly followed Hubris. These are the best examples from a whole 4m row. And they're shite. Worst of all, they taste of absolutely nothing.
Must be the weather, I suppose. And yet the parsnips – also umbellifers – are lush. Best I've ever had.
I have a row of Autumn King coming along, but I'm not expecting much. 2007: Annus horribilis for carrots.
It's glut time. Everything's coming at once and I'm loving it.
Even the dismal fennel has picked up. The one in the basket is a runt that I pulled to make room for the better specimens.
The only disappointment is the carrots. I grew Amsterdam Forcing as an early crop, and they're crap. Erratic germination and tiny, tasteless carrots. Should have stuck with Early Nantes, my old favourite.
Warning: more cauliflower pictures. I know I shouldn't. Vainglorious pride is a terrible thing in a middle-aged suburban man.
But you know, they're so utterly gorgeous. And I'm cock-a-hoop.
It's midsummer – you can tell from the weather. So I thought I should post some 'state of the union' pictures of the allotment. Just about every inch is now planted up or sown:
There are some salads at the front, too, but they're still very small. This is the view further back:
Behind the asparagus are the peas and onions:
There's a row of celeriac behind the onions. Leeks will soon replace the First Early spuds. And my winter brassicas will go in the gap left by the onions. Which I'll probably have to harvest soon, because downy mildew is knackering them.
The glut would start any minute... if the sun came out. But I'm beginning to suspect – aren't you? – that we're in for a traditional, old fashioned British summer.
In other words, an utterly shit one.
It's only nine days since we took the last asparagus cut of the season. But already the ferns are two feet high.
This appears to contradict one of my cherished gardening dictums. It was told me originally by a grizzled old allotmenteer when I asked him how to discern seedling vegetables from weeds.
"If it grows like a weed," he scowled, "then it is a f*****g weed."
Memorable. But apparently inaccurate.
In other news, my celeriac is coming along well. Wish I could say the same for the garlic, which is suffering from serious rust. That crazy April weather did for it. I dug up a few plants and the bulbs are still tragically small.
What a beautiful weekend it was. Mrs Soilman and I profited from the sunshine to enjoy one of the few perks of living in the UK's south east: the RHS gardens at Wisley. It's not the same as being there, but here's a picture:
It's pissing with rain and I'm livid.
I know: there's no pleasing some people. Last week I'd have given a kidney for this weather. Now I'm gutted because I can't get out on the plot. And there's SO much needs doing.
Got lucky yesterday – we had a two-hour dry window in the afternoon, so I planted out the peas. Their toe-hold on existence is a bit precarious when you first slide them out of the gutters, but given a few days they'll 'take'. Slugs and pea weevil permitting.
I also thinned my carrots and covered them with Enviromesh – an essential hereabouts. Without it, the carrot fly runs amok. I'm not a fan of slimy larval corpse with my boiled carrot. Any gardeners out there not suffering from carrot fly? Wherever you are, I want to move in with you.
OK, so it's not wildly exciting. But at least these onions have rooted and are thriving. I'm beginning to feel a bit jinxed this year. The sweetcorn I sowed before I went on holiday also failed to germinate. Curses.
*howls impotently*
Still, at least I managed to get the celeriac out. Here it is planted out in final position. Though I say so myself, and bearing in mind the dangers of hubris (see above), I'm pretty good at celeriac. Grew some monsters last year. 'Monarch' is a great variety. Tastes good and is easier to peel than others.
And yes, those ARE slug pellets you see. I'm not terribly proud of it, but nor am I a moron. Celeriac's a prime slug target. Don't tell me I can keep them off with sand, or crushed eggshells, or slug collars, or incantations, or the blood of a virgin spilled on Walpurgis night. Tried them all (the virgin was a bugger to find in my area). They don't work.
Today's challenge is to help me weed my parsnip seedlings. To help you out, for reference, here's a parsnip seedling:
So far, so good. Here's where it gets tricky. Check out this pic of parsnip seedlings amidst a bunch of weed seedlings:
See the problem? I swear you get weeds growing in the parsnip rows that you never see anywhere else. They morph into parsnip-like flora before your eyes. I am reduced to shuffling about on all fours, squinting at the ground like a truffle hound. And I still pull out more parsnips that weeds. I reckon the way forward is 'spot the parsnip' competitions – you know, instead of 'spot the ball'. Prizes for the sadsters who can correctly distinguish the edible from the inedible.
Apologies for yesterday's off-message rant. Today, rest assured, I've got a grip. It's back to the business in hand.
Here are the celeriac seedlings I sowed in early February. As usual I got impatient and sowed them far too early. Now they're all leggy and busting out all over.
They'll be fine, of course, once I get them out on the plot. Trouble is, I can't. It's too early – late season frosts will severely set them back, maybe even kill them. And I can't keep them in pots much longer. Reckon I'll have to resort to the usual solution to such problems: shut the door on the room they're in and think of something else.
Out of sight, out of mind. Well, it works for me.
Ludicrously warm in central London today. It's freakish. As well as being a vegetable fanatic, I also have a thing about lilies. Here's one of the 14 different varieties I grow. It's a oriental/trumpet cross (often known as an 'orienpet') which I got from a fabulous nursery in the States.Normally this would just be breaking the surface in early April. Look at it here. Crazy.
Having flunked out of sowing the carrots and beetroot last weekend (too bloody cold), I'm doing it over the Easter break. Here are the varieties I'm sowing:
Bolthardy is a no-brainer, but I fear the Burpees Golden won't work. They failed to germinate last time I tried them, two years ago. Will follow up their progress in due course.
