Wellies, washouts and wormeries!

It's been a mixed month for weather. I booked the last few days of June off work, intending to get some time in at the plot and was very fortunate with some of the hottest days this year falling in the first days of July and the tail end of my holiday. I actually returned to work with an impressive tan. I of course didn't wish to gloat so wore my whitest shirt on the first back and spent several hours with my sleeves rolled up and working near light fabrics!

But that was the opening week of this month. Since then the much lauded barbecue summer has been, at best, intermittent.

We were warned earlier this decade that global warming would bring extreme weather. Most of us, myself included, thought the emphasis would be on the warming part. Garden gurus advised on desert plants and water conservation, medical experts warned against skin cancer and that nice Scottish chap on tv tried to sell us solar panels along with triple glazing. Sadly we are having the extreme weather across all forms. Flooding followed by record breaking heatwaves, snowfalls that bring the country grinding to a halt and, more recently, mini tornadoes or funnel clouds along the south west and welsh coasts.

The desert planting schemes will have been as relevant as a bog garden or an alpine scree bed, which is why many of this year’s winning designs at Chelsea and other garden shows have been strong on hard landscaping, the bricks and mortar or paving and arbors that provide the skeleton of the garden rather than the actual plants. Without being able to determine the growing conditions to come in the following months, it is difficult to be specific with a planting scheme. Better perhaps to design a colour theme and find varieties to fit your palette nearer to the day.

The combination of a nature friendly policy and a wet but warm summer has devastated parts of my allotment with slugs rampaging over my salads and greens, decapitating new shoots and seedlings and with caterpillars settling in their thousands amongst the brassicas. I fear my attempts to keep the pigeons off my cabbages has meant all feathered predators have given the plot a fly past and allowed the juicy bugs free reign. I netted my soft fruits and have reported bumper crops but I may have been protecting the currants and strawberries against an enemy that had decided to look elsewhere much early in the season. The raspberries, tayberries and blackberries have been left uncovered with no noticeable losses.

Every year has its losses and its champions and this year is looking good for fruit and alliums despite last year’s white onion rot problem. There have been reports of potato blight from around the site and online but my new potato crop barely registered an appearance so I have to wait to see whether there will be enough of a main crop to differentiate.

The hot weather and regular downpours have produced perfect conditions for accelerated growth and created lots of sappy weak stems for the slugs and snails and other pests to gorge on. The weeds have grown tall and thick in these conditions too but they must taste like Brussels sprouts to a school boy because the bugs don't seem to have left a mark on them!

The compost heap has always been seen as the engine room of the garden or allotment but recently there has been a noticeable move towards a more advanced form of composting, the wormery.

All compost heaps contain or should contain plenty of worms. They convert the vegetation, paper and other ingredients into friable healthy nutrient rich compost but wormeries work more intensively as a breeding and feeding ground for worms. The waste is added as a bedding and food source for the nursery that holds thousands of young worms. These beds of worm youngsters are stacked like a beehive set on its side. This allows smaller pieces of food and liquid to pass through each layer until only the finest compost and the richest liquid reaches the bottom tray, where the liquid can be taken off via a tap and the compost removed by a slide out tray.

The concept has been a great production line for worm cast compost and many small holdings run profitable businesses selling worm compost to discerning gardeners but the idea first came to my attention when I started growing pumpkins many years ago. I had a friend whose father had a wormery. I visited them at home one day and was offered this gallon container of evil smelling brown liquid to use as a plant feed for my plants. I started by diluting the murky satanic juice with water but as the beasts grew to huge proportions, I diluted less and less until they were getting two or three feeds a day of neat worm wee!

The effect was phenomenal but I have yet to start my own worm farm!

Fruitfulness

It is raining again. That favoured sentence that we love to say almost as much as we dislike hearing. We talk about the weather more than any other subject in the U.K. and as such grumble about the weather more than celebrating it.

So, while the wet conditions may keep me from the plot, it doesn’t keep us from wanting to do something with all these crops the surplus water is creating. All those juicy fruits and tasty vegetables need to be used or stored so rather than just mull about getting bored; here are some tips and recipes.

Tomato and Basil Tart

Ingredients:

Short crust pastry made with 175g (6oz) flour and 75g (3oz) fat

300g (10 1/2 oz) tomatoes halved, small-medium sized (own grown preferably)

100g (4oz) Feta or hard goat’s cheese

A large handful of torn Basil leaves (from the garden?)

Good Olive Oil

Balsamic Vinegar

Ground Black Pepper

Method:

Roll out and line a greased shallow flan dish with pastry.

Prick the bottom with a fork and bake for 10 minutes at 220 C/425 F/Gas mark 7.

Halve tomatoes and arrange over the base in a single layer, cut side down.

Season with pepper and a drizzle of vinegar.

Back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

Crumble the cheese over the tomatoes, sprinkle over the basil leaves and olive oil then pop back in the oven again for the last 20-25 minutes.

After allowing to cool, if you can wait that long, you’ll have slightly soggy but delicious pastry and a dish that will serve 3-4 people.

Tip: Like all Legumes (pea/bean family) pea roots will have tiny nodules along the hair roots which store nitrogen. If you leave the roots to decompose down in the soil after harvesting the last of your crop, they will release that store of plant food back into the soil.

Nitrogen is good for leaf growth so following peas with a leafy crop such as a brassica (cabbages, Swede, radish etc) that will benefit from the extra boost is a good idea.

Bees are having a rough time this year with record numbers of hives suffering losses and bees themselves fighting off disease problems so you may find pollination is low on some of your squash or bean plants. Tomatoes, butternuts and courgettes can all be given a hand with a soft artists brush. Brush pollen on the anthers as near to midday as possible and then spray with clean water in the evening when it’s cooler to help set the fruits. Just remember to avoid the cucumbers. Pollination makes cucumbers bitter

Carrot fly is the arch nemesis of the orange root lover so confuse the culprit with a low hedge of onion smelling chives. Chives are always good to have around just for the flowers even if you don’t want the leaves for the kitchen and carrot flies hate strong onion smells and can’t fly high enough to go over either!

Mono cultures are not natural playgrounds for beneficial insects so try growing some colourful salads amongst the flower borders where nectar rich daisy like flowers will draw the predatory insects that will protect your food and confuse the pests.

You should be harvesting peas, salads and the last of the early potatoes now along with soft fruits and cane fruits.

Soft fruits are, as the name implies, the softer fruits such as strawberries. Top fruits are simply fruits that grow on higher plants such as Apples, Pears and Cherries. Cane fruits, yes, grow on canes. Think Blackcurrant, Red or even White currants, Gooseberries, Jostaberries and others. Raspberries can be grouped with Blackberries and the hybrids under the heading Brambles, as they have a unique way of fruiting on stems that need to be wound over a support rather than being thick enough to stand alone like the Canes.

You may read the name Drupe, referring to some top fruits. This comes from the botanical description of a fleshy fruit with a single stone centre containing one seed and coming from a single flower. These are more commonly called stone fruits and will include Cherries, Plums and the related Damsons, Nectarines and Peaches.

Well, if the weather breaks for long enough, I will be back out and reporting on what I’m doing in the garden and on the plot but until then, I’ll be working hard sampling the products of the kitchen. It’s a dirty job but....

The plot received special visitors this week in the form of Westonsupermum and the subject of her regular blogs, little Celeste. The pair of them had been for a visit and a cup of shed tea once before, to discover chickens, snails and all the wonders that an only innocent child can imagine. The weather on both occasions threatened to foil any plans but changed for the better at the eleventh hour.
The visit this time coincided with the ripening fruits on the plots and meant I could send them away with lots of lovely fresh produce. That is to say, what was left after a sticky juice covered little angel had successfully tasted everything. All except the new potatoes got the thumbs up and finding and bagging up the potatoes became a favourite game once we discovered lots of wiggly worms in the potato bed!
One thing about allotment gardening that most non-growers fail to understand is that we don't grow as a means to an end. We don't grow purely to supply a demand from the home kitchen, we also grow for the pleasure of growing. Seeing someone enjoying the by products of our hobby is a major bonus. I love to give away my produce, it let's me know I'm getting it right and my biased opinion isn't that wrong!

Time for a leek

It's just past NPT (New Potato Time) so tradition dictates that the next crop to follow and utilise the freshly broken soil should be the flat cap wearing old timer of the Allium family, the Leek.
The whole system of raising this little welsh favourite is against most widely held horticultural practice. From sowing indoors, then planting out before being replanted, to the idea of dropping into a hole and NOT back filling, it all feels against the grain to a new gardener. Despite this, it works as it has for centuries. Leeks are grown from tiny black seeds like most onion family members. Sown in a slightly light soil and in bunches, they are best started indoors then transferred to the great outdoors to harden before heeling in. They are planted out by a method rarely used for any other vegetable.

You finally find a use for that broken spade/fork handle you've kept at the back of the shed and, by rounding off the broken shaft, make a dibber. Utilising your new tool, after lightly treading the soil surface to consolidate it, make a straight hole approximately eight to ten inches deep. (Metric holes are available through other blogs). Drop your neatly trimmed seedling, pencil thick, into said prepared orifice. Now, this is where something important happens: we don't fill with soil and firm as we would normally when planting or transplanting something. What happens is , we water directly into the hole, allowing the water to draw the loose soil in.
This allows the soil to surround the stem, blanching the green leaves to a white barrel. No other plant is treated like this. Celery is frequently blanched but usually with a covering collar and a bank of soil above ground level. Witloof chicory is blanched to make it edible but, again, by exclusion of light above ground.

Now, why the trimming? When the seedlings are transplanted, they suffer a major shock and can lose a lot of water through transpiration, that's sweating through the leaves in layman's terms. The roots are trimmed because, apart from stopping the excessive new growth when transplanted , they fit into the hole without dragging soil down as you drop them in. As pointed out earlier, Celery is also blanched and I have been trying out an old method for my crop this month.The old gardeners used a tall collar of corrugated cardboard to wrap around the bunched stems and to protect against the soil rotting the centre. Whilst a great method of blanching, this method is not without it's problems, mainly that it provides slugs and snails with a sheltered feast, so I have had to use organic pellets to deter them from my precious crop. Around the collared stems I have drawn up banks of soil, to hold the Celery firmly upright and to back up the light exclusion. I also imagine there is an element of benefit from the additional heat of the surrounding soil. The leeks utilise the food left in the soil from the potato crop, which itself is a root crop. Now although thought of as a root, the leek is in fact a stem comprising of bundled leaf sheaths, therefore utilising foods that the potato leaves would not have maximised. This is one of the main advantages of crop rotation: using crops that don't share a common food requirement. An alternative crop to follow potatoes is sometimes one of the Legume family, peas or beans. They require flower and fruit feed so again, don't suffer from the lack of root food that the potato has caused. The mass of humus and compost that was heaped upon the potato during it's planting and growth has been broken down during the growing season by bacteria and earthworms and still, to some extend ,remains available to follow on crops. Any plant that is transplanted here or is grown from a reasonably large seed, such as peas or beans, will do better than fine seeds as the soil structure is still quite rough and not ready to be broken down to a seed bed.
Root crops such as carrots or parsnips, the tap roots, would be a disaster here, as the soil is still quite rich in nutrients and there for would encourage split roots, or forking as it is known. Fruit could be planted to follow but timing is the problem and there are some questions over disease complications.
On the subject of fruit, I am finding this year to be a bumper time for soft fruits. My strawberries have been long fruiting and very plump with it, giving good sized fruits in abundance over a three week period from three year old plants. My Tayberries(a blackberry/raspberry hybrid) have fruited well in only their second year on site and the massive Black Butte Blackberry is on course to produce many a crumble over the next few days since I decided to weave the stems horizontally across and old bed frame, encouraging bud production. That's this blogs top tip: To produce more fruiting buds on any fruit bush or tree, bend or tie the new stem over to as near an arch as safely possible. The sap will grow upwards and search for an outlet, finding no leading stem means it will force the plant to produce buds, which because of the location along the stem, will generally become fruit buds. Victorian fruit cages generally had at least one plum espalier with tips tied down to ground pegs for just this purpose.