Two things worth remembering by every allotmenteer who is thinking of taking five days away on however worthy a cause. Firstly the weather doesn’t read the forecast and secondly, the allotment doesn’t care about your diary. So when we got back from the Lost Gardens – (it’s a rather chunky title, I think I’ll just refer to them as ‘Heligan’ in future) – so when we got back from Heligan, the allotment had seen the first touch of frost almost a month early. There was no real damage done, just a few damaged leaves on the french beans but a warning nonetheless. Continue reading “Autumn jobs for the cupboard”
So what would the “take home” message from Heligan be. I’m not sure that I care for the impression the expression gives – as if all the love and care and experience we encountered in our five days there could be pre-digested and regurgitated into a sentence like philosophical bird vomit. But we definitely found things we wanted to remember and try for ourselves when we got back to the allotments, and here are some of them: 
There’s a reason for changing the usual name of these gardens. We’ve just got back from 5 days in Cornwall which we spent entirely in exploring the gardens – they’re that good. We first visited in the summer with some of our family including the three grandchildren. They raced around having fun and doing what happy children do and we would not begrudge them a single moment of that mad ecstatic reception of a new place -in truth I wish we could all recover it for ourselves. But there was much more than novelty and ‘visitor experience’ going on there, and that was what we spent last week exploring. So this posting may well turn into several as I turn the days over in my mind. 
I thought about replacing this photo with one that was correctly exposed, but then I thought it had a rather Winslow Homer look about it that suited the topic quite well. I especially liked the newspaper background – I mean – just how wholesome can you get in a small first floor flat in the center of a city? But don’t worry I’m pretty normal most of the time!
I can’t remember when I ate my first wild mushroom – it was probably as a child, when we ate at my grandparents’ cottage, or rather smallholding, in the Chilterns. Because of her childhood my mother knew and talked about wild mushrooms but so far as I remember never picked any. The first I’m ever sure I picked were on the playing field at Beechfield House, then part of Bath Academy of Art. It was nearly 50 years ago and I blagged a job as assistant groundsman during the summer vacation. 
I confess I was a bit disappointed when it came to straining the grape skins out of the must. There, down in the garage was our lovely new press, courtesy of Nick and Kate who now own a gigantic hydraulic number, and there was me in the kitchen making the most desperate mess and squirting wine and grape skins all over the place, trying to extract the fermenting must a ladleful at a time through an old bag left over from my beer making days. It didn’t take long to work out that without using the press we’d waste most of the fruits of our labours, however Madame had been implacably opposed to using the press in our flat for fear of wine running across the floor and dripping out of our downstairs neighbour’s light fittings. 
Meanwhile the propagator has been brought back into the kitchen and filled with coir pellets sown with winter lettuce, chard and spinach. The coir pellets have been a great success and have enabled us to avoid peat based sowing composts. They’re less messy and even beetroot seems to develop naturally from them. My only misgiving is the material used for the fine netting that surrounds them – is it biodegradable or are we in danger of loading yet more plastic into the earth. A bit of research on the internet suggests that the peat industry is sponsoring a fightback through so-called independent websites, suggesting that the netting surrounding Jiffy 7 pellets doesn’t degrade. There’s a lot of confusion about degradability in any case. The ‘degradable’ bin liners we all use don’t degrade in normal domestic compost heaps but only in commercial high temperature industrial composters and so the many that I’ve used in our heap seem undiminished even when the heap reaches 40C. It’s a fraud on the gullible who hope to save the world by buying something different and the manufacturers are getting away with it. Then there’s a distinction between biodegradable and photo degradable plastics. If the Jiffy 7 netting is only photodegradable it’s never going to decompose while it’s under the soil surface. Coir pellets only need to to be contained until the seedlings are planted out – so maybe five or six weeks maximum – and then they can biodegrade as quickly as possible. Don’t we have any suitable materials to to this? and could we not use a form of woven cotton to achieve the end we all want. The problem I suspect is that the highly compressed pellet (light, robust and cheap to transport} doubles or trebles in size when it’s soaked prior to sowing and so the coating fabric needs to be able to expand accordingly. Some form of extra fine cotton crepe or sheeps’ wool might do it but would probably need developing. As ever it’s cheaper to use weasel words on the packet than to do the research and development. I think this is calling for an experiment. It would cost more than a penny to bury a few pellets and to expose some more to sunlight and weather, and I could find out for myself.
The cucumbers did amazingly well this year. Last year we planted them amongst the tomatoes and they got swamped. I think we had a very few and so the question of preserving them never came up. But this year we ran the propagator and grew nearly everything from seed, under lights in the kitchen. For several months the whole flat looked like an overfurnished greenhouse but it resulted in many more young plants than we’ve ever grown before. In the end we gave many of them away but we still planted out half a dozen plants and they generated a surplus that just cried out to be preserved in some way. 
