Tag: planting out

Not entirely on the level!

These are the last two beds on the allotment to be prepped ready for planting up and I took the photo from this angle to show how – when people ask if we use raised beds – we have to say – “It depends which end you’re at”. The allotment is on a moderate slope and so over the years we’ve built up the soil at the southern end of each bed to terrace it. I’ve never done a calculation but at a guess we’ve used perhaps 10 cubic metres of cast off potting compost, home made compost and manure, mixed with bought-in topsoil. I hate to think how much it’s cost, but soil is precious and we never throw anything away.

The plan is to move the container potatoes on to the end plot, covered with a hoop cloche, and then tip them out to harvest them in a few weeks, leaving the soil behind and finally raising the soil level at the end. The weight of added earth had been distorting the retaining planks, and so we’ve also had to replace the short wooden pegs with sturdy posts to keep the earth in place. I was watering some new plants the other day and I was shocked to see how much topsoil was being washed away down a small gap in the planks. I think we’ll just about manage to move the potatoes in the green sacks, but although they’ve held up for five seasons, the stitching is getting rotten and so we’ve moved over to some chunky purpose built 35L buckets with handles. The limitations of space which I wrote about recently when I was thinking about rotations, means that one alternative is to grow potatoes, tomatoes etc; and carrots too in containers of fresh soil every year – keeping them under nets and therefore disease and pest free.

It was a hard day’s work, removing all the purple sprouting broccoli and reducing the stalks to shreds with a hand axe. The resulting foot of composting material we mixed with some straw and a couple of handfuls of fish, blood and bone fertilizer and gave it a good wet. Relying on the rain to keep the heap at the right level of moisture is hopeless, so we keep it covered and water it when necessary.

All this work is about getting ready to move the tender veg into the plots after the last frost, to make room for planting the tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, chillies, a melon and some and basil inside the polytunnel. The tunnel has been a blast, and we’ve feasted on early salad crops but sadly some will have to be removed before they’re quite ready. Next year we’ll have a lot more experience and we’ll get things in at more appropriate times.

In the back of our minds today was a palace coup by a divided local Lib Dem council who were elected on a radical plan to cut traffic and emissions but who have just been forced to withdraw planning permission for some ‘executive’ houses on a nature reserve in a unique habitat, and who have voted the leader out because they feared her radical commitment to the manifesto might endanger their chances of re-election. She made a brilliant speech yesterday when this all came out but for many of us this reverse has compromised their chances of keeping power altogether. The thought of having to ask the voters to leave their Range Rovers in the garage was too much for them to contemplate – not least because they seem to be planning to allow 48 tonne lorries through the centre of Bath in order to get government funds to mend the Cleveland Bridge. Our political system is completely broken, and once radical parties are squabbling over some mythical ‘centre ground’ in the forlorn hope that something will turn up to save us from ourselves. That’s called magical thinking. The Darwinian solution to this challenge is for the human race to drown in our own effluent and let the earth and its surviving life forms start all over again. The other solutions all involve doing without some stuff we don’t really need. I could go on but I won’t. Two things not on the level at once is enough!

The birds have flown

This could all go terribly wrong, and we know that because it’s gone terribly wrong before. However, the weather has been marvellous and the two week weather forecast is not predicting any cold snap and so, having hardened off most of our tender plants, IMG_20200424_160701yesterday we decided to go for bust and put them in the ground, in order to make room in the (tiny) greenhouse for the next wave of shrinking violets. Around half of the outdoor tomatoes are acclimatising in their pots under a fleece cloche, and the rest will join them today.  The gherkins are now in the hot bed where they’ll thrive in their warm and rich environment; French beans, borlotti beans and even the courgettes are out, taking their chance in the world of sun and rain.

But for me, the best bit of the day was prowling around the plot planting out sunflowers, marigolds and hollyhocks here and there – wherever I could find a suitable place. In the winter the allotment is so strongly structured around the beds that it can look very formal, and the structure we’ve come up with makes it possible to work in any weather – especially since we’ve abolished digging as each bed is worked up and as free of pernicious weeds as possible. However the rather austere formality of beds and rotations benefits from being broken up, not least because we want to attract insects and to do companion planting, but also because we want to create the feeling of a cottage garden.  So almost every bed has invited guests – nasturtium, marigolds, chamomile, lots of wallflowers. The little sheltered spot between shed and greenhouse is being invaded by a clematis and there are catmints and random patches of herbs like dill, sweet cicely, parsley, chervil and fennel creating height and texture along with a number of varieties of mint confined from rampaging in large containers. An allotment might well be dedicated to producing food, but it’s also a work of art and a mini nature reserve – that’s a lot of heft in a *ten rod (250 square metre) plot.

*At school, we were still using exercise books that were designed before the war and the back page always carried a full range of explanations of “imperial measure” – which included a measurement of length known as ‘rod pole or perch’.  The only term still in use at all is rod – as in ’10 rod plot’. A rod is about five and a half yards which, it’s said, was the distance between a ploughman and the front of a team of horses. The name is drilled into my memory because whenever the register was called in school I was always addressed as ‘rod pole or perch’ – by my beloved music teacher Austin Woodman who taught me how to listen.

Anyway, to get back to the point, as summer advances the geometry of the beds is softened – we hope – by the anarchy of yesterday’s sowings and plantings. The regular rows of cabbages are the marching band to the carnival that surrounds them.  This year, in the midst of the covid 19 pandemic, the allotment has taken on the entirely new role of representing what life is meant to be like for us.  Madame summed it up yesterday when she said that sometimes she wakes up shadowed by an indefinable sense of emptiness and loss; full of anxiety about a future whose shape we can’t begin to guess at. Sowing, planting and dreaming have become the only anchor in a world where the possibility of not hugging our children and grandchildren for eighteen months can be airily discussed by politicians and media commentators who have long disconnected from life outside Westminster. For me it’s more a sense of volcanic anger and despair which the allotment has the capacity to dim for a few hours each day. Those tiny seeds have a huge task in front of them.

The whole allotment site is now looking better than it’s ever been before.  One of our near neighbours has constructed the most wonderful greenhouse from bits of scrap timber, pallets and old shower doors. There’s another rather flimsy one covered with thin polythene. It’s taken on the purposeful air of a favela; self regulating somewhere beyond the reach of rules and officials but expressing the hopes and dreams of several hundred allotmenteers, most of whom live in flats.  I’m fascinated by the way regional and ethnic styles have appeared, along with new fruits and vegetables. Twenty or thirty years ago the last big burst of activity was fuelled by Italian restaurant workers who brought the vines that still function as fences on many plots, and the figs that grazers and browsers like to pass as they (we) navigate the narrow footpaths. Some of the Eastern European newcomers have brought their formidable skills to bear on poultry keeping as an annexe to the plots. I’m looking forward to the day that we first hear the muffled grunting of a hidden pig, gleefully and productively consuming food waste. Happy daze – as Mr Oliver might say!