John's Plot

Inspiration…

2010-03-16T23:01:00.001Z

The allotment has been dug over and we’ve laid out our first furrows for potatoes. Our early variety (Home Guard) had been chitting on the window-sill for 6 weeks and is now planted! 2010 has officially begun!

However I was watching Raymond Blanc’s Kitchen Secrets last night and he made beetroot look like the most rustic, wonderful vegetable I've ever seen.

I’ll certainly be making this in the coming year. I might try my first ever intercropping and put rows of these between the leeks and parsnips. (must remember to get the swedes out early too!).

I’ve also brought a thong of Horseradish as well. Apparently it’ll grow fine in a hedgerow,so i can grow that at home rather than the plot. And then, put some dill in a plant pot (and bosh!), I'm just some crème fraîche and some salmon away of converting my wife from her lifelong irrational hatred of beetroot!

It’ll probably cost a few quid getting 2-3 packets of beetroot varieties (it looks one of them has to be Bull’s Blood for the leaf garnish), but it’ll be worth it to see if it can be incorporated into the general kitchen ingredient list. I could eat boiled beetroot (with a mayo dip) on it’s own as a meal.

Poles, Perches, Rods and the rood to ruin.

2010-02-27T00:11:00.001Z

I mentioned in my last post that my plot is ‘5 poles’. A pole is an old imperial measurement that is also known as a rod or a perch. Another way of describing the plot size could be too say, “it’s 5 square perch”. A standardized square perch being 16.5 square feet, or ~25.4 square meters. Which means if my plot is 5 pole, it should really be 127sq meters!

Maybe I should ask for a rebate! So to revise me previous post, my plot, is actually just over 3 square pole in size.

Plot sizes do seem to vary hugely in size from allotment to allotment, and the quarter i have seems to be not far off some other sites half plots.

The whole 5 poles

2010-02-26T00:04:00.001Z

2010 started in earnest today! The digging began. I also measured the size of the plot.

It’s a Quarter plot, or 5 poles. Specific dimensions are 6.7m wide by 12.0m long. That’s just over 80sq.m of growing space.

Here is the plot after winter, a few wilting cabbages remain under the Enviromesh, but they will soon be compost fodder. I’ve put on a bit of manure during the last couple of months, nothing much through. You see some plots half a foot deep in the stuff!

According to the digging manual, you first need to dig a trench and then take that dirt to where you will be ending up. Here is my trench!

And for the next couple of hours it was dig dig dig! There is still a ton of debris in the soil, i don’t know how i missed some of it last year. 1/2 house-hold bricks! According to the guys a few plots down, this will carry on for a few years yet.

And … ta-da! Half way dug. 40sq m in about 2.5 hours, and hands full of blisters.

Back at home the potatoes are chitting. For the early variety this year, I've gone for “Home Guard”. This was one of the varieties I had last year and it was delish! At the time we didn't know it was an early variety, which answers a lot of questions now to be honest! They did seem to mature before everyone else’s!

Here they are chilling out in my son’s room. (he’s only 9 weeks old and wont be moving in to this room until the potatoes have long since left!)

2009 ... and the winner is ....

2010-02-25T23:16:00.010Z

Lot of lessons learnt from 2009. However it did have it's highlights:

Losers

Almost any Brassica The sprouts 'blew', the calabrese yields were paltry, and the cabbage withered. I'd tried a series of increasingly elaborate cane-based netting structure during the year. They ended up as trampolines for the pigeons.

Carrots Had a nice first crop, plenty of carrot joy, but lost the second crop to carrot fly. Gutted. When pulled and with a healthy sheen of dirt, they looked OK, but as soon as I took them home and washed them the damage was evident. Riddled with small holes in the outer 1/2 inch of root.

Swede Planted far to late and never had to chance to get ready for winter.

Winners

Pickled Onions These boys went down a bomb! Pickled to perfection and for most branches of the family were the condiment of choice for many a cheese platter over the Christmas period.

Cauliflower They had a rough start, but out of 10 plants we got 7-8 pure white, great tasting cauliflowers. I almost felt i'd come of age when my father-in-law said he'd never seen anyone manage to grow one on an allotment before!

Leeks and Parsnips The winter staples. Plentiful yields, and so easy to cook and store.

And now ... Lets take a look at this years winners!

A lifetime waiting!

2009-08-11T20:38:00.005+01:00

Reading this "40 years waiting list for allotments" makes me very, very grateful that we got an allotment so soon!

Waiting 40 years? It's unimaginable! Mind you, that's not bad as far as council run services go I suppose!

But it has kicked off some debate. With a growing population how can we cater for everyone who wants to grow veg? Should all plots now be 5 poles instead of 10 or 20?

Should cash strapped councils have the right to sell off allotments land for housing developments in areas where there is a real lack of housing?

Talking about the allotment. My Brassicas are an unrivalled failure. What has not been choked by totally resistant white-fly has been pilfered by Pigeons!

There is still time to re-plant some winter cabbage, but the most part is a write off for this year.

'Losing the plot'!

2009-08-09T16:46:00.005+01:00

I thought I'd give a little bit more background into what this blog is all about.

Earlier in the year, due to a growing family, we moved home to somewhere with a garden and space for the kids to run and play. As part of this we wanted to pursue a long standing desire of our's to do some gardening; we had lived for the previous 10 years in flats, so lawns and flowers and all things green were realtively unknown to us.

We signed up to an allotment society when we moved in early March, and duly expected to wait a few years for a plot to become available; this being south-west london after all!

In the end we had to wait 3 weeks! Praise be to the heavens! The site we are based at had for some years previously been a wasteland of brambles and bushes, and in a bid to stop the land being repurposed the allotment soceity managed to get the land raised and created lots of new plots (all of them almost exclusively quarter and half plots).

Having never had a garden before, let alone an allotment, we went for a quarter plot.

And here it is!

It goes back as far as the shed and is the width of the two path on either side of the photo (I'm walking on the right hand side).

So it's not much, but it's a start.

There are two things i want to achieve from this humble plot of land:

To get vegetables all year round in quantities that will help save money on the
food bills.
To learn how to grow, store not just basic vegetables, but some of the more exotic fun items.

So pretty much everything i'm doing is with these 2 points in mind. To be honest, this year is a write-off, we got the plot much sooner than we expected and I 'lost the plot' almost straight away! I was planting just to fill space without thinking about

rotation, or even wether or not we'd eat the stuff!

But I've learned some valuable lessons so far, and next year all will be done with a purpose!

2 poppadoms each please!

2009-08-08T20:26:00.005+01:00

The chutney is made!

It was nice to be picking the beans for a reason, we dont have a lot of call for them otherwise. Rach is the main cook and was put off them as a child, so they dont find there way into many meals. However, I was able to pick, trim (with one of those new potato peelers), and chop about 1.2 kg of runner beans!

I was following the recipe from my previous post, which didnt seem to daunting, but cooking for me is like allotment gardening. I'm new to it and will willfully follow the instructions, but have no idea if what i'm doing what was intended!

There was a little bit of prep on this, extracting the cardamom seeds was fiddly, grinding the cumin (had no pre-ground) chopping and crushing onion and garlic, and of course, one first had to find out exactly what a fenugreek seed was first.

But it all seem to go quite nicely. Rach was on hand to point me in the right direction, and what was in the beginning looking like runner bean soup, was soon turning into a thich and rich mush of runner beans.

Et Voila! Runner Bean Chutney!

This is the close up shot.

I got 5 medium sized bowls of the stuff for my 1.2kg of beans. Not bad, and plenty more beans to come. Not sure how long this stuff will keep for, I think it's meant to go into air tight jars, but I'm hoping it will be good for a couple of weeks in the fridge.

It's all go!

2009-08-03T21:48:00.004+01:00

How do you make this stuff last a year? I'm glad the family don't depend on this stuff for sustenance.

At the moment, in terms of a sustainable supply, i can say i have reached suffciency in Pickled Onions. The plot manager smiled knowingly when he saw my 6 x 6' rows of shallots in early April. "Will I get many from them do you think?" I asked inquisitvely. "I should imagine so!"

It took an evening to peel the first third of them! This filled about 4 litres worth of jar. Still the other 8litres to go!

Going to pickle some beetroot as well soon. Going to need a lot of jars.

There has also been a strange contender in the pickling department. The runner bean. This recipe might produce something wonderful to go with the winter popadoms! Quite a few spices in there, and it'll be hard to not act like Jamie Oliver while cooking it.

This then has led to the next major decision, Le Parfait or Kilner jars for the chutney? I had until now thought i could get away with old dolmio jars, but it sounds like there is more science to it that that.

And the back garden too!

2009-06-28T21:48:00.005+01:00

As well as the allotment, we also have some fair in the back garden. We cut a 6'x6' patch at the far end of the lawn before we knew we had the allotment. We also have some tubs and planters at the foot of the back wall that have some herbs.

We initially had the rear lawn patch as being the salad garden. We planted some mixed leaves, but we left them to long and they bolted and turned sour.

We now have some broccoli (some spare plants from the main allotment), a few suck-it-and-see tomato plants. And, courgettes!

How these triffids have thrived!

Courgettes

Planted in late march, here is the result we had when we returned from holiday.

It looks like the larger one hit the side of the bed and went off on a dog leg. The smaller one seems to have eaten something!

The fork is for scale. These were all smaller than normal courgette size before we left for holiday, they grew that much in just 7 days.

We'll be having them for tea soon.

John goes on the pull!

2009-06-27T23:20:00.001+01:00

Your own vegetables all the year round.... if you DIG for victory NOW!

And what a nice idea that is; no food miles, produce that is grown for optimum of taste rather than yield, the opportunity to indulge in vociferous smug self satisfaction ... count me in!

This blog is to document my continuing adventures trying to maintain a regular source of vegetables for the family, on a budget.

The starting point isn't the best, the plot is some 4 months old now, but is in horticultural terms, starting to get interesting!

In the interests of keeping each post brief, I'll do the back story in later posts.

For, I'll just quickly mention my first home grown veggies!

New Potatoes!

The first item pulled is a unknown variety of new potato. The label for them is in the shed, but at 10pm in the evening I can't get at it without waking everyone up! I hadn't planned on pulling them so early, but some of the plants had a touch of blackleg (otherwise known as soft rot) which meant the plants looked like they were on their way out.

During the digging, I had the help of Chris who did a lovely job with the garden fork, whilst me and a fellow plotter watched on!

The following pictures show the output from about 12 plants (minus Chris's tithe, and a couple of dinners). What is also interesting about this,

is that the pictures shown are about 10 days after they were dug. Which includes a weeks heatwave whilst we were on holiday. They don't seem to have spoiled at all, an event, depending on the source of my advice, I had expected to occur from a few days to a few months.

Still have about 8 plants in the ground, which hopefully will product a crop of potatoes that are more consistent in size. There are a few pea sized spuds in the bottom, which should still be nice.

Carrots

I'm very proud of these little beauties! They are my most successful sown-from-seed life forms!

They look like carrots, have those great feathery fronds and are almost all long and straight (a good sign of a fine well dug soil).

Going to have these for tea tomorrow and cant wait. I have a lot more of these to come as well, these are really just thinnings to make room for some of the other carrots.

However, i did sow all 4 rows at the same time, so will probably have a glut of these soon. My first classic mistake was thinking that only a few of the seeds in the packet would germinate. I sowed three packets in four 6' roots. Almost all of them came through! I had quite an emotionally half hour thinning out the thousands of unnecessary seedlings.