Judith's and Joseph's Allotment -- Exercise and Tasty Food, 2003

Readers of my LiveJournal will already know something of our allotment; relatives and others who are coming to this page for the first time should go there to learn more about it, particularly its location, its soil structure (terrible), and the local foxes who live on it. This page is set up principally for pictures of the stuff we grow, with occasional shots of us doing things to, with or for it.

Generally speaking, the allotment is used for crops (potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, sweetcorn, broccoli, pumpkins, strawberries, raspberries) which would otherwise take up a lot of room in our small suburban garden and/or crops which don't need much attention (most of the foregoing) -- unless you're retired or unemployed, you'll be spending less time at the allotment than in the garden, so there's no room for crops which need fussing over. (Nor is an allotment particularly suited for crops which require frequent picking to stop them going to seed when they come into season -- so french beans and lettuce are grown in the garden.) To start things off, however, here's a plan (not to scale) of the plot's layout. It's roughly 19 metres long and 9 metres broad; south is at the top. Note that although the beds are permanent (edged with boards from broken-up fork-lift pallets and the paths between them laid with carpet to suppress weed growth), what's grown in them will vary both from year to year (crop rotation) and from season to season (for example, autumn brassicas succeeding spring broad beans). (Obviously, crop rotation doesn't apply to the raspberry canes and the blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes.) The crops shown on this plan therefore represent only the position as at mid-July 2003:

If you think this looks like it entails a lot of work, it does -- but it required even more work before we got the paths between the beds fully carpeted and thus got permanently on top of the weed growth. Perhaps that's why it took us six years to bring the plot fully under cultivation -- indeed, for the first few years after we'd acquired it in 1996, there were some areas (chiefly those between the pond and the blackcurrant bushes) which we didn't touch at all, because it was all we could do to stay on top of the bits we were cultivating. A better bottom line, perhaps, is to say that when we took over the plot, the beds didn't even exist.

But enough whinging. Here's some pictures of what we're growing this year -- starting with some pictures of the potato crop, illustrating how we earth them up with grass cuttings rather than soil, because it both saves a lot of digging and and adds valuable organic matter to the soil. The first two photographs below, showing how the process works, were taken on 3 May; the third, showing me in the act of applying grass -- and incidentally illustrating the truth of Alan Titchmarsh's observation that three-quarters of all gardening is done with your bottom in the air -- was taken on 25 May.

And then the summer drought kicked in, and weekend (and some evening) watering wasn't enough to prevent some of the crop dying back, giving us early potatoes about a month before they were actually due. (Poot.) What does that say about allotment crops not needing much attention, eh? Bloody temperamental vegetables!

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Before one can start moaning about the lush growth of early summer being cruelly curtailed by the parched days which follow, one has first to surrender one's lovingly tended seedlings to the cold unyielding soils of spring (add poetic imagery to taste -- although March and April were actually quite pleasant this year). Below is a photograph of Judith planting out brassica seedlings on 21 April -- followed by one taken on 15 July, showing those same brassicas awaiting translocation to a larger bed where they won't be so crowded. (The white object in the first photograph is an enviro-fleece cloche for protecting the seedlings, which the local foxes subsequently ripped apart. Blast them.)

These two photographs are followed by two showing (some of) the transplanted brassicas, with a close-up of a red cabbage variety we're trying, Marner Langerot.

Some more "before-and-after" photographs now, this time of sweetcorn. When planted in the spring, each seedling is given its own mini-cloche of a cut-down soft-drink bottle (with a capful of slug pellets poured in through the top), giving the impression that you're trying to grow plastic bottles instead; then, after some weeks of apparent inactivity, the plants are thrusting the bottles aside with the vigour of their growth. (And despite this summer's drought, they're very vigorous indeed.) The two photographs below were taken on 31 May and 15 July; the purple flower heads in the second are those of leeks which have been allowed to go to seed.

Pumpkins and squashes are another crop doing well this summer. We've had variable success with them in previous years, but like to keep trying different varieties. Here's a photograph of one of our vines (in the foreground; that in the background is on the neighbouring plot), followed by close-ups of three of the varieties we're growing this year: Pompeon, Potimarron and one called Sunburst. (The pumpkins in the first two photographs are approximately 10cm in diameter, and should at least double in size before they're ready for picking. The Sunburst squash, however, was harvested mere moments after its picture was taken.)

We don't grow flowers at the allotment -- not deliberately, anyway. Poppies, on the other hand, self-seed all over the place, and the leaves and flowers of nasturtiums make an interesting salad garnish.

But then again, some flowers are planted deliberately. These red sunflowers, for example, the seeds of which are supposed to distract the birds from everything else and so prevent them from pecking the crops to pieces. (Last year, we tried stringing lines of rejected CD-ROMs -- at last! a use for all those free AOL sign-up disks! -- through the crops, but that failed dismally. The wood pigeons were not deterred for a moment by all that silvery plastic flashing in the breeze, and massacred most of our brassica seedlings. Suddenly, I have a strange hankering for the taste of wood pigeon pie....)

As you'd expect, we run our allotment on organic principles -- no artificial fertilisers or other so-called "aids" (other than the slug pellets, but they're organic, too). Composting is therefore very important. Everything cut down or dug up and not eaten by us goes into the bins for later recycling -- augmented by garden cuttings from home. Below, Judith mixes compost from the collapsible pale green bin into one of the black ones (which absorb more heat and thus accelerate rotting down). The stakes and carboard behind her are part of a chicken-wire bin used for composting woodier material -- typically, this is emptied only once every three or four years.

(Yes, we have five compost bins. Thus we decisively beat Michael Palin's Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson into a cocked wheelbarrow.)

But the allotment is not all work-work-work. There's time in between the planting, weeding and composting to either think great thoughts while watering everything or just sit down with a nice cup of tea and be counted.

And if there's nothing else to do, the shed usually requires some reorganisation. The general aim is to prevent the clutter that accumulates throughout the year from taking over all the floor space; this year, we finally installed the shelves we've been talking about for the previous two or three. But rather than go to the expense of actually buying anything we, er, "appropriated" what appear to be a pair of shelves from a supermarket chiller cabinet, found inexplicably dumped on the pavement amongst ordinary household rubbish on one of the streets we take to reach the allotment from home. The photograph below left shows the contents of the shed spread out on the path beside it; and that below right shows (almost) everything put back in again. Tidiness, oh yes!

Our Wonderful Collection of Junk (6 July)

Victory to Shelf-Stackers Everywhere (6 July)

Let's finish with pictures of the pond and its inhabitants. An unusual thing to have on an allotment, this was dug in sort-of compensation for the smallness of the garden pond, and because we thought that it might provide a home (and a place to breed) for the mollusc-controlling frog and toad allies we'd like to have. As it's turned out, toads are conspicuous by their absence, and we have to do all the mollusc-controlling ourselves because the frogs seem not to eat them. But the common frog Rana temporaria is not as common as it once was, and needs all the help it can get -- below, on the left, is a view of the pond with a log-pile beyond it (to provide somewhere for the frogs to over-winter); and on the right, one of the frogs hanging out in the water cress (although the allotment frogs are actually rarely seen, since they're not as habituated to humans as the ones in our garden and tend to react to our presence by plunging out of sight).

Web page created 16-20 July 2003 (and amended 20 August 2003) by Joseph Nicholas.
Text, graphic and photographs copyright 2003 by Joseph Nicholas.

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