Green tomatoes

I have survived a short break in a bell tent with children and hubby only to come back to the plot and find not much has changed. The weather has cooled and so the growing of all but the weeds seems to be stunted by this abrupt end-of-summer feel.

The grass seed I sprinkled on fruit corner is still just that a week and a half later, still seed. Slowly being eaten by birds.

A week ago I picked some green tomatoes and left them on my window sill hoping when I got home they would have turned red only to be greeted by now shrivelled, withered green tomatoes.

Never mind, I thought as I remembered my uncle’s words about it only being a matter of days before the tomatoes still on the plant turn red. I optimistically walked to the plot and was greeted by the sight of an unruly, precarious looking jungle of still green tomatoes.

Oh well at least the thistles are thriving. I only uprooted about twenty last weekend and already there were twenty more in their place. And the pumpkins are still growing at an alarming rate.

But even this has a downside – it appears to be choking off my blueberry bush. I did a little internet research and realised it probably never stood a chance. Blueberry bushes love acidic soil apparently and our soil is many things – cloddy, clay like, water sodden in wet weather – but it certainly isn’t acidic. Not quite sure why I didn’t research this before buying and planting it.

My ailing blueberry bush being inched out by a pumpkin plant.

But all this is mere details. I was back at the plot, the sun was shining and I really didn’t care what was flourishing and what was was dying and how many chuffing thistles I had to dig up. Again. For this space is my precious escape. Spending four nights in a bell tent with a three and five year old determined to get high by drinking honey  tends to have that affect on me.

Fruit corner – the end for now!

I have been slowly working my way through an allotment to do list. This frequently gets added to as things crop up and the original plan gets forgotten. Fruit corner was meant to have been finished before the summer holidays. The plan was to have the whole area laid to lawn before the kids finished school so they had somewhere nice to play.

Fast forward three weeks into the summer holidays and when I arrived there this morning I realised everything else had to wait. I needed to un-peel some membrane and see what state the last little patch left untouched was like. For once I got a pleasant surprise, under the membrane lay some fairly flat and weed free soil. It took me about an hour to get it looking OK.

This of course had me lamenting that this really was a job I could have tackled weeks ago. Instead it has been sitting in my metaphorical in-tray for far too long, weighing down on my conscious, making me feel slightly guilty whenever I passed over sorting out fruit corner once and for all and instead opting for light weeding as I frequently have.

I saw my sister on Tuesday and she told me the latest thing in educational outdoor play is a mud kitchen. Once I got started on the final bit of fruit corner I realised a mud pit was exactly what I needed. The kids have pretty much outgrown the sandpit at home, what’s the point of having another one at the plot?

I hastily made a small circle out of the remaining bamboo bordering things I bought ages ago from the pound shop and made more of a mud pit than a kitchen. I then laid the rest to lawn and voila, the most pressing current thing to do at the allotment has finally been sorted meaning I can, for a few weeks at least, relax and stick to light weeding and harvesting.

Admittedly it looks a bit like a grave but  fruit corner is done!

The Arthur effect

I was going to use the title ‘The Arthur effect’ for my last post but then realised I needed to use my month long absence as a starting point because when you blog about allotment gardening anything that deviates from the relentless battle against weeds needs to be utilised for all its worth. Last time I was at the plot it hit me that most of the plants that are currently thriving are thanks to my uncle Arthur. He gave me the courgettes and tomatoes. Even the potato plants from his seed potatoes look healthier than the ones grown from my batch of seed potatoes I bought from a well known gardening shop. The brassicas are my own work – grown from pound shop seeds. Ditto the pepper seedlings – I had six originally but now they are down to two.

My pepper seedlings – slugs ate 4 of them

The flower border which I can now see for the first time in months is also courtesy of my uncle, it lines my now depleted and weary looking potato patch.

I can see my flower border once more.

There have been other self grown triumphs – I planted beetroot in the bit once known as the pond. The drainage job we did of chucking loads of sand in there has really worked, I had to water them from day one. The only problem was deciding how to use the beetroot as I have never been a huge fan and the only dish I use them in is a soup which right now it’s too hot to even contemplate. I picked some the other day and made a roasted beetroot and chickpea salad along with tomato couscous all flavoured with herbs from herb garden. I am now a convert to beetroot and wish I had planted more than seven.

It was yum!

And there has also been some lawn growing activity. Ken did a grand job of tidying up the grassy edges of the plot on Sunday. The grass hadn’t been cut for well over a month but in a couple of hours it looked respectable if not 100% tidy.

The whole freshly-trimmed plot.

Our plot doesn’t look quite as pristine as maybe we had hoped it would by now, everything has taken so much longer and life always gets in the way but we are seeing slow progress, it’s taking shape. Things are growing, a lot of which I’ve been given but some have also grown from my pound shop seeds. The only trouble is life once more gets in the way – the kids are off till September and the only way I can persuade them to accompany me to the plot is with promises of making a scarecrow or building a sand pit. Great summer holiday activities but as we play and get creative I expect to see the weeds take hold once more.

Fruit corner – a brief update

As always when I write a post during the afternoon I don’t have time to do this justice but with a busy weekend of meeting university friends in London and father’s day on Sunday I am unlikely to write anything for another week if I leave it. So here is a brief pictorial update.

I have been digging fruit corner as much as I can. We had visitors last weekend, my sister and her family. My brother-in-law is an expert in many things and this week he was on a quest for slow worms. Slow worms as I soon found out are actually a bit of a misnomer, as they are actually legless lizards. I don’t mean befuddled drunken lizards but literally lizards with no legs.

I had no idea what a slow worm looked like or how you might go about finding them but my brother-in-law managed to track down on a whole family after only being at the allotment thirty minutes. Every time I pass the pallet under which they were nesting my youngest now demands to ‘see the snakes’!

A magnificent beastie!

Since then the only other highlight has been rearranging the shed. Now that it has a shelf unit I can actually walk into the shed and pretty much grab whatever it is I need rather than having to take on a forty minute expedition which involved balancing everything precariously on a sack of bark chip.

I do like a bit of order out of the chaos!

Since that heady half hour of putting things on shelves I have been hard at it, clearing more weeds from fruit corner, levelling, sprinkling manure until voila, today I had a section ready to be grass seeded, only to find my grass seed supplies are running low. It doesn’t matter, I’m getting there and this weekend I am giving my poor little hands a much needed rest.

  

Even if you can’t notice the difference, just pretend that you can!

Fruit corner: the big push

Things always pop up to distract from the task in hand, especially when that task is weeding. Fruit corner has long been our main priority, getting it sorted so the kids can have an area where they can roam free. At first I thought I would bark chip the whole lot but then I realised

1. That’s going to involve an awful lot of very heavy sacks of bark chip.
2. Which will involve an awful lot of money
3. And an awful lot of using a wheel barrow which we don’t have
4. And a packet of grass seed is so much lighter and cheaper.

So grass it shall be. This was months ago but in between there has been herb garden to sort out and then I got a bit fixated with making a path. There are still several paths to dig and membrane over and then if we can be bothered be covered with more bark chip but for the time being at least fruit corner has again become priority number one.

It gets a tad frustrating that I go to the plot day after and day and don’t plant anything, I don’t harvest anything. The closest I get to a pleasurable gardener’s moment is watering. Watering keeps me going , it breaks up the monotony and gives the illusion you are nurturing something. There has been ill advised bouts of watering like when I kept watering my potatoes and encouraged the huge jungle of weeds that now presides over my potato patch. Or the time I kept watering a solitary plant on an upturned pallet and accidentally triggered yet another jungle of weeds beneath it. Like I don’t have enough of the things already to uproot.

A month or so ago me and my youngest sprinkled some grass seeds on the weed free strip in fruit corner and already it’s growing. This has encouraged me to believe even I can cultivate a lawn and so I want to get the rest laid to lawn as they say in gardener’s speak.

Fruit corner complete with weedy bark chip and recently planted grass.

So the arduous task continues interrupted only by a chat with a plot neighbour or a cup of  flask tea. Weeding seems to be the only thing I have a bit of perfectionist zeal for, I get caught up in the underground world of thistle roots, chasing them along, determined to pull out the sometimes two foot roots before I catch myself and think sod it, you can’t get all of them.

Today’s session ended as it frequently does with me covering more of the plot with black covering – this time recycled compost sacks as they are only temporary, to protect a currently weed free area from getting inundated next time I turn my back.

More of the black stuff!

I picked some beautiful purple wild flowers and then forgot to bring them home before my final task of checking on my ailing courgettes, healthy seedlings my uncle gave me that now seem on their last legs. I gave them some plant food on Tuesday so I thought I should chart their progress to know whether plant food works or not in the interests of science!

Are my courgettes done for?

Tomorrow the kids have an eye appointment which means no school in the morning which in turn means no trip to the allotment for me. I’ll miss being there on such a sunny day but I don’t think I’ll miss the weeding.

Making pathways

I have been digging a path during my last few visits to the allotment.  As mentioned before, a lot of the work on the allotment is tedious and repetitive – I often have weeds imprinted on my mind’s eye akin to when I went on student forays into fruit picking, at night all I could see was strawberries. A mental image of strawberries is definitely preferable to the gnarly roots of decade old perennial weeds for that much I can vouch.

What the path looked like this morning – halfway there.

As one project takes over everything else gets shoved to the edges. I have been wanting to plant the seedlings I have grown myself but haven’t yet got around to it. Ditto the healthy robust looking ones my uncle gave me. The weather has been so erratic it may not be such a bad thing, delaying their debut into the actual earth by a few more weeks may save them from frost but still, I haven’t planted anything for at least a week and that makes me impatient and slightly bored with the whole hand weeding malarkey.

Brussels sprouts and lettuce plants I have grown from seed!

Often after a visit to the plot I am lost for what to write about. There was that lost opportunity last week when I came face to face with a majestic fox but didn’t get a photo of her. I have seen a few urban foxes in my time and compared to her mangy town cousins this was a proper fox, healthy fur, bushy tail, dazzlingly red. I didn’t want to startle her by taking pictures so I just watched and lamented what a great post it might have made.

Today I finished digging and weeding the pathway that will divide the raised beds from the potato bed. The path is so wide I may even plant some flowers as an artistic and rather unnecessary flourish. I wouldn’t write anything daft like all I need to do now is level it off but I am almost ready to cover it over and move onto another untamed part of the plot, good old fruit corner which has been much neglected for weeks. Neglect on the allotment is foolish, any area left for too long will fall under yet another assault from those ever tenacious weeds.

Spot the difference? Two hours later the path is almost ready.

This afternoon as I juggled giving my youngest his lunch and coordinating a grocery delivery the phone rang. It was my eldest’s teacher saying she had been sick and needed picking up. The teacher cheerfully told me my eldest was number 14 from the foundation stage to be sent home with this contagious bug. As I walked the all too familiar path to the school it hit me with a jolt that 48 hours off school for my daughter equals no allotment time for me tomorrow. When this thought made me sigh rather than feel mild relief as it would’ve done a few months ago, I knew I had succumbed to a contagion myself, perhaps I’ll call it an allotment bug.

All it needs is leveling…

If ever there was a careless throw away phrase not to use about an allotment perhaps ‘all it needs is leveling’ would be it. I thought yesterday was the day of hard graft, the day when I broke the back of getting our herb garden, as it might one day be, ready for covering and planting but no. It didn’t quite work like that.

I spent last night flicking through a book Ken’s work mates had got him for his birthday present – ‘The practical allotment’. You couldn’t buy a better book because it’s basically outdoors DIY with ambitious projects such as fixing a solar panel to your shed. As I tried to reign him in with muttered platitudes of maybe next year I did notice a few handy tips hidden in a book of big projects. Tips like using old newspaper for mulch.

I of course then adapted this tip thinking I could perhaps fill all the gaps in herb garden with scrunched up bits of newspaper to level it off. Ken looked dubious, he knows one of my botchy plans when he sees it. Undeterred this morning I went with a bag of old newspapers prepared to do battle and get leveling because this is, after all, the ‘by any means possible’ school of gardening.

There was the usual stuff to do when I arrived – watering, looking for propagator lids that have blown away in the strong winds. My bird scarers had also vanished in the wind, I realised whenever I leave the place I don’t know what I will come back to. As a plot neighbour told me brassicas (gardeners speak for broccoli et al) attract birds I set about replacing them straight away.

Tin foil dishes on canes to (hopefully) scare off birds.

Once I started tackling herb garden I soon realised short of having about three tons of newspapers this was not the magic solution I hoped for. There was no avoiding the dutch hoe, the big digging fork, the small hand fork and my stinking rubber gloves today.

I watered the ground again, chiseled and forked and hoe’d and basically spent two hours trying to break up the huge clay like clods from yesterday and make the ground  look vaguely flat. I don’t get it, the people next door on all sides have earth that looks like it has been ironed, sitting perfectly flat under membrane waiting to be used. How do they do it?

Herb garden covered but still bumpy!

I got it as flat as I could in the allotted time and then tried my filling-the-gaps- with-newspaper experiment before covering the whole thing with membrane.  I walked across it to test out it’s flatness and nearly tumbled over, it was still potted with holes and lumps. All that effort and this tiny corner of our plot is still uneven.

I headed back home slightly dejected and passed an elderly man serenely pushing a petrol rotavator, sorting out and leveling a huge strip of land in what looked like an effortless flourish. He’d probably finished the whole strip before I even got home. So that’s how they all do it then – rotavators. Slightly torn between hiring one immediately or indignantly shouting ‘light weights’ at the entire allotment community!

 

 

Herb garden update

I don’t really have time to do a post justice, my youngest is yapping at my heels and I have promised him a trip to the local stay and play but anyway I felt compelled to do a small blog boast. Today when I went to the allotment I thought you know what I have had it with going through the weeds with a small fork and doing a square foot in three hours. Today, I thought, I am going to move things along a bit.

Herb garden about a month ago.

Part of the reason I have been using a hand fork to sort out herb garden is because the earth is so dry I cannot penetrate the caked earth with the big fork. So I soaked the whole patch with a watering can and was soon able to turn it over, in two hours I got so much done. It just needs leveling off before being covered in membrane and then sorting out containers to grow herbs in – a short cut to weed free patches on the plot, we have decided, is the only way to go.

What it looks like now!

The art of weeding

The biggest challenge of this blog is how to keep coming up with readable angles to what we are doing. Essentially I go to the  plot, spend two and half hours doubled over pulling out weeds and then I walk home again. It is slow and gruelling work and it really isn’t that comment worthy!

Spraying a couple of parts of the plot with weed killer provided a nice change of angle but it also induced the first repetitive strain injury I have endured since starting the plot. I also got a bit zealous with my overstretch on Friday as I weeded by hand and so by Friday night I felt a bit tired and a bit sore. Couple with that a massive temper tantrum from both of my kids at school pick up over the fact some other child nearby had a lolly and I (heartless cruel mother that I am) didn’t have a pocketful of lollies meant that come 7pm Friday night it was most definitely wine o’clock.

I was still aching yesterday and so a day off from the plot seemed long overdue. I escaped to London as I do every few weeks to meet up with one friend or another. Yesterday it was my old friend who is currently slogging through an Open University degree and had been writing about Benin art – let’s go and see it at the British Museum, she said. So we did and much catching up took place between the beautiful brass sculptures.

The Brits pilfered these from Benin in the 18th century

Today back at the plot there was more spraying of weed killer as it’s a dry day and – I am learning – it’s good to do these things on dry days. My wrists groaned as I gave them more strain. I don’t think I would have been quite so zealous but I had my favourite in-law staying and so suddenly, even though he is lovely, the house felt small and I needed to escape. Perhaps that is another plus point of having an allotment – there will always be a good excuse to get out of the house, like having a dog to walk but without the messy business of a pooper scoop.

Could I notice the difference from Thursday to now on the weed killer soaked patch? It’s definitely looking more yellow  and I am guessing yellow is a good stage on the path to no weeds.

Signs of yellowing weeds.

The battle of the weed field

The highs of the weekend have been swiftly replaced with a  heavy dose of reality. My friend’s tomato seedlings I diligently planted withered and died on day two. The bark chip path is sprouting more weeds than I thought possible and my garlic patch that I weeded so carefully only a week or so ago is now covered in more weeds.

They just won’t go away!

One surprising thing I learnt recently in all the Thatcher furore was that it’s almost 28 years since the battle of the bean field.  While I cannot claim my own battle against weeds is anywhere near as epic or news worthy I do feel that calling it a battle is not an exaggeration. I have mentioned before – they come back. When I mentioned this to plot neighbours several explained to me how some of the weeds I am battling against actually work.

This is useful because in war it’s always good to know your enemy. What I didn’t know is that some of the bushy grassy like weeds send out underground shooters that then pop up in your freshly cleared vegetable plot. No wonder it’s felt like such an uphill struggle. No sooner have we cleared an area, turn our backs for three days and they are back. They have underground pathways we knew nothing about. When I lamented this to another plot neighbour he said ‘If I were you’ and to be fair an awful lot of sentences start like that down on the allotment, ‘I’d just spray the whole lot with round up and have done with it.’

If there’s anyone out there who has been with this blog from the start they will know that ‘to round up or not round up’ was our first allotment ethical dilemma when we had weeds four foot high. We’ve opted not to again and again because I wanted an organic plot more than anything else back then.

So it’s with a fairly weighty heart that I report today I spent my time buying and spraying weed killer. I got one that bio degrades and is safe to plant on in forty days. We are using it only on the bit that will become a herb garden and on the third still un-dug bed which currently is pushing up the membrane with untameable weeds and sending out underground shooters to all our semi weed free beds. We have no plans to plant anything on that bed for a year so I figured it has to be done as there just is not enough time to do it all by hand and those weeds just keep coming back.

The area  that will one day become a herb garden, before being sprayed with the dreaded weed killer!

The bark chip didn’t work as a weed suppressant, ditto membrane on the un-dug section – it’s still so uneven the light can get in, nurturing the weeds and keeping them alive. According to plot neighbours there is an annual plot inspection in six weeks time in which letters of warnings maybe issued at the merest hint of a weed on your patch. So for time impoverished people like us this felt like the only realistic solution.

Of course as I sprayed part of me thought this is so typical us, doing it once things have been planted, hoping the wind doesn’t carry it onto my veg patch so it kills stuff I actually want to grow. Had I known we would end up doing this I would have just done it last year but then this is a voyage of discovery and I knew nothing last year, I know only a little bit more now. And will it actually work after all this dilemma-ing? As always with the allotment: time will tell.