My friends came down and inspected the allotment and were suitably impressed.  We sat by the sweet peas, drank wine and ate nibbles in a very civilised way. 

They went home and I continued to cut sweet pea flowers and put them into the bucket.  Got another bucket off them and they are now being put around the house.  I have been gleaning the rest of the peas from the Kelvedon Wonder row.  They will need to come out soon because they are very weedy and the weeds are going to seed.  It is very easy to hoe the whole area and rake off weeds and pea tops.  This leaves the roots in the soil and the root nodules may continue to fix nitrogen for a while. 

I will have to find somewhere to put the chicken wire that holds the peas up because there is nowhere on the allotment I can store it.  I still can’t get a shed up because the council will be removing the soil from the area where I want my shed.  This will not happen until October.  I will be shedless until then.  I might just take it home.  I need a good shed.

Loads of carrots coming and still no sign of carrot root fly - yet. 

Got several pounds of beans off the runner beans during the week.  More today. 

The Kestrel potatoes are coming out tomorrow.  A mixture of caliente mustard and tares is going to be sown on this area as a green manure.  It will be dug in in October and the winter onions put there. 

Still some blackfly on the runner beans.  I am still blasting them with water from the big sprayer I have.  I also sprayed the beans with aspirin and there seems to be less blackfly because of this.  If they are still on at the weekend I might spray them with liquid derris. 

Both the onions and the leeks perked up a lot after I sprayed them with aspirin and derris. They were also watered with diluted comfrey liquid so they can’t complain.  I will give them a bit more at the weekend. 

The April sown lettuce has gone to seed now and needs to be taken out.  The May sown lettuce is coming on but needs to be eaten. 

I am going on a week’s Sunship Earth course next week so I will not be gardening.  I will have a rest instead.

Some friends of mine are going to come down and see the allotment.  I have been telling them about it for quite some time and it is only now that they seem to be interested.  I think that it is merely the media interest in allotments that has encouraged them to make the effort. 

Interested or not, I wanted the allotment to look as good as it can do.  It is a working allotment and never looks pretty so tidying it up is the most that can be done to make it look presentable.  At least the tagetes and other annuals I have planted have begun to flower in earnest. 

 I tied up all the sweet peas and took off all the flowers that were open.  There are a lot of buds and these will come during the week.  Got a couple of pounds of runner beans off the plants and then went along the row taking out any growing points that had strayed above the canes.  I do this for several reasons.  The main one is to encourage side shoots to develop lower down the plant.  The second reason is because the plant may get top heavy if you allow the growing points to carry on growing and flopping about.  More and more growth develops at the top of the canes and the whole structure becomes  unstable.  This means that the least bit of wind will topple the canes over.   The final reason is that it is a bit of a stretch to get the beans at the top of the canes. 

I watered both the beans and the sweet peas with comfrey liquid. 

I sprayed the leeks with both liquid derris and aspirin against the leek fly.  I weeded them and hoed them up. Pulling a ridge of soil  up to them means that more of the stem will be white. 

 I have taken the enviromesh off the carrots.  Now I know that this is foolhardy and they will be infected by carrot root fly, but I am getting really irritated when I have to take off the mesh to crop the carrots and to weed. 

I took out a few of the carrots and several of the beetroot.  I washed them and took off their tops.  I see no point in taking the leaves home if you are not going to use them. 

I dug up some of the Kestrel potatoes.  There are some really big ones so I was quite pleased with that.  The potatoes are going over now and the tops are slowly turning yellow.  I will get the whole crop of Kestrel out this week.  I like to wash them before I store them.  So they will all get a quick wash before I put them into the Hessian bags. 

 There were several gooseberries still on the bushes so I stripped them off too.  I picked some lettuce, radish and rocket for salad.  A couple of the courgettes had developed so I took them home too. 

The raspberries have continued to fruit and I took home a couple of pound.  These will probably be frozen but I do enjoy eating them with yoghurt or ice cream.  The strawberries have finished now and sending out runners.  I will keep some of the runners for next year but I really need to get some more virus free plants. 

There are still no red tomatoes.  I put this down to the cold wet weather we have been having this summer.  It is a typical British weather and while the courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes have suffered it has been great for the carrots, lettuce, peas and beans.  I don’t mind the wet weather but I think that it is time for us to have a little more sunshine and warmth. 

Lots of plants have put on phenomenal growth this past week.  The beans have covered the canes now and the plants are really bushing up.  The sweet peas have reached the top of the canes and will have to be layered soon.  The peas have overtopped their supports and the brassicas are getting enormous.�

I really think that with intelligent planning and use of natural resources, you should be able to grow without any man made chemicals at all. 

To start with most pests and diseases can be ameliorated with a battery of different natural methods. 

Aspirin is one of the main ones that I think could be good in protecting plants from disease and pests.   It certainly seems to protect roses and fruit trees against common ones.   It needs to be used sparingly but should be a part of any natural remedy chest. 

Criticism has come from the fact that aspirin is now artificially made and not extracted from the bark of the willow.  I don’t mind.  I would rather use something that has evolved in the environment for millions of years, than something that has been developed recently and not had the test of time. 

Caliente mustard must be another good natural remedy against soil pests and diseases.  It suppresses a number of soil diseases including Verticillium wilt, Pythium, Rhizoctonia, Sclerotinia, Fusarium and others. 

It also suppresses a range of soil pests like wireworm and nematodes. 

Companion planting was something that I was a little sceptical about but having used it this year I am really impressed how it has worked with some of the vegetables on the plot.  I think that you have to be careful what you plant with what then you just leave them to get on with growing. 

I think that mychorrhizal fungi are a really exciting way of increasing the health of vegetables and flowers.   They have certainly helped the peas.  I am still cropping the Kelvedon Wonder but the line that has gone over had roots covered with mychorrhiza.  I am hoping that these fungi have migrated to the apple tree.  

Nematode worms are an expensive way to control slugs and snails.  Beer traps might not be as effective but they certainly are cheaper.  The nematodes did clear the allotment of snails and slugs for about three months.  However you really need to keep applying if you want to get rid of most of them.  

Together with a few nets, meshes and fleece as a physical barrior, keeping the allotment very tidy and clean helps to keep the allotment disease free.  

If you grow vegetables that are resistant to diseases in some way then this helps a lot.  I am using disease resistant flyaway carrots, Kestrel potatoes, and Sapo potatoes because I know that, although they are relatively poorer croppers, they will produce vegetables that are pest free.    

I will be getting some more mildew resistant gooseberries.  Know your local area and the soil you are working with.  Choose varieties that will not struggle in the allotment.  Use green manure to improve the soil fertility; add nutrients; improve aeration of the soil; improve the water holding capacity of the soil and increase the growth of beneficial soil microbes.

Overuse of fertiliser only means that the surplus will leach out into water courses.  The use of cow and horse muck will need a lot of time for it to rot down and give the nutrients back to the soil.  This allows for a build up of more beneficial micro organisms.  Plants do not need a great deal of fertiliser.  The amount of NPK that they need could be supplied with comfrey liquid.  

It might be wrong – in what I say

But I keep wondering anyway.

For my 100th post I thought that I would put some photographs of the allotment on here.  Yesterday I got my first handful of beans off the Aintree runner beans.  I got a couple of buckets of sweet peas off as well.  That is why there are not many on them.   The weather is very overcast but not cold.  22^oC in the shade - not that there is much sun today.   

As you can see the allotment is beginning to become very green and there has been a lot of growth.  This lower half allotment is new this year.  I had to clear quite a lot of weed off it before I started to plant.  I double dug it all right up to the Onward peas. 

Comfrey growing well in the foreground and beans and sweet peas in the background.  You can’t see the pumpkins between the beans and the comfrey.  This is number 26. Number 25 starts by the shed. 

Carrots are under the enviromesh, beetroot next then two rows of annual flowers as companion planting. 

Then there are 10 lines of leeks interspersed with companion planting. 

You can just see the pumpkin in the foreground. 

Courgettes are big but not producing yet.  Lots of flowers but no courgettes.  Kelvedon Wonder peas are nearly finished now but you can see the Early Onward in the background starting to fruit.  Running alongside the sweet corn is a row of nigelia as a companion plant.  The shed is on Eric’s allotment not mine.  The plum tree is mine though. 

Sweet is corn growing well.

Please note that the weeds are on a public path between allotment 25 and 26.  Number 25 is my old allotment.  Behind the rhubarb there is a new blackberry plant and along the supports are a new line of raspberries.  If you look at the post that you can see going into the ground, there are two grape cuttings that are growing really well.   In the background you can see Florence fennel, radish, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach.  There is also poached egg plant.  Not much yellow on these flowers though.   There are quite a few apples on the Granny Smith.  You can see how much I have raised the allotment using concrete slabs.  In the far background there are the brassicas.

And here they are winter cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, cabbage and broccoli.   I have left the nets over them to keep the cabbage white caterpillars off them.  I will have to drag some more soil around the stems at the weekend because they are getting quite big now and might start falling over.  I don’t really want to stake them because I have used all my stakes for the peas. 

The Sapo and Sante potatoes.  There are some Kestrel potatoes in the foreground and these are starting to go over now.  The tops look good but this is no indication of how big the potatoes are. 

The Kestrel potatoes are just going over.  I will have to start to harvest them next week.  I will plant Caliente mustard here after they have been taken out.  In the background you can just make out the blackcurrent bushes.  They have cropped very well this year. 

In the foreground are the Meteor peas that replaced the winter onions.  In the background are the onions interspersed with tagetes and a row of chamomile as companion planting. 

 

The onions are growing much better now but there is still some distortion in the foliage.  You can see two lines of parsnips in the background.  Not many weeds at the moment. 

This is what you can do with double digging, horse manure, chicken manure and comfrey liquid. 

I will be raising the new allotment up as high as the old one.  I will use turf, leaves and lawn mowings initially but will also continue to use horse and cow muck.�

Someone has made a right cockup with the seeds of one of my sweet peas.  I have pink on cream Oxford Blue sweetpeas.  I don’t think that is quite right.  Mr Unwin sells all the right sweet pea seeds but not necessarily in the right packet.  Still I have a 1961 first edition of Mr Chas Unwin’s “Amature Gardening Handbook No 36 Sweet Pea” which I recieved on my 10th birthday and has been my sweet pea bible ever since.  So they cannot be that bad.  Also I have been growing Unwin’s sweet peas most years since then. 

I knew that there would be a lot of sweet peas because I had not cut any during the weed.  Well I filled a bucket with them.  I am getting exhibition standard blooms now but I doubt if I will show them.  I just like the fun of growing them.  They certainly smell wonderful.  The scent is everywhere in the house.  Well,  they have filled four vases. 

I took out the first row of Kelvedon Wonder peas completely.  I took the chicken wire off them last week and put it around the Meteor peas.  I gleaned the rest of the peas on this row and pulled out the plants.  The roots were all covered in nitrogen fixing nodules so I think that they have done a good job.  They have added nitrogen to the soil and I think that I have got quite a few pounds of peas off just this one row.  I have another four rows coming on well.   The rain has helped them to grow this year.  Several of the roots had mychorrhizal fungi on them so adding them to the soil seems to have done the trick.  Also I planted them directly under a small apple tree and they still did very well. 

I sprayed the onions and leeks with derris and aspirin.  They are still suffering with leek miner fly.   Tomatoes are fruiting but they are still very small.  They are in the greenhouse too so I think it is the rainy weather that is not letting them grow quickly. 

Courgettes are flowering well but the only courgette that they produced rotted. 

Several people on the allotments are taking out their early potatoes.  I was thinking of having a look at a root of Kestrel.  The tops are still very green so I think that they are still growing.  There is no sign of blight this year thank heavens.  I got a crop last year but I would not say that it was good.  Still it did last us quite a while. 

The beans are coming very well.  It will be the earliest that I have ever had runner beans.  The wet weather is to their liking I think. 

Some of the companion planting I put in is flowering now.  It looks quite good.  The convolvulus, poached egg plant and tagetes are making quite a show. 

Took a look at the grapes in the allotment greenhouse today.  There are some grapes on the black one but nothing on the white grape.  I doubt if they will ripen properly with all this rain we have been having. 

Most of the March lettuces have either been eaten or have gone to seed.  I have just started eating the April ones.  I will have to clear the seeding ones away and leave the ground to the winter cauliflowers. 

Not many plums on the plumb tree and not many apples on the apple tree.  Maybe Granny Smith was not a good choice for my allotment but Victoria plums have been very good in the past. 

The strawberries have finished more or less. However, the raspberries are certainly still producing prodigious amounts of fruit. 

Good job too because I eat so many straight off the canes.�

I went down to the allotment after work primarily to pick the strawberries before they rotted in the ground due to the continuous rain we have been having. 

There were plenty of raspberries so I started to pick and eat them.  I did manage to take a couple of pound back home. 

The peas have filled out really well due to the rain.  I have podded (taken the peas out of the pods) some of them already.  I think that I will sit infront of the tv and pod the rest.  It is still raining and quite cold and dark outside. 

Most people complain about the British weather but I don’t.  I like it when I can grow easily.  No need for watering at the moment.  The runner beans are beginning fruit now and there are several about 14 - 15 cms long.  After washing off the blackfly aphid at the weekend, I thought that I was going to be free of them at least for a while.  However, they are back again.  I will have to spray them again with water to get them off the leaves and flowers. 

As you might expect, the sweet peas have shot up.  I took all the open flowers off at the weekend and put them in a vase at home.  Their scent is amazing.  It fills the house.  The plants are flowering again but still only three blooms on a stem at the moment and they are nearly at the top of their canes. I would really like to have all of them producing four or possibly 5 flowers on each stem. 

Picked some more radish and rocket and then went home.  �

If you have read any of my other blogs then you will know that part of my new allotment is contaminated with benzo (a) pyrene.  It is a chemical that does not easily enter the food chain and I am being allowed to continue to grow on this area.  Most of this it is given over to sweet peas but I do have runner beans and pumpkins there as well.  It is a carcinogen so  I have been advised to make sure I wash my hands after working in this area. The dosages in the hot spots are worrying enough to cause the authorities to replace the soil to a depth of 60cm on this part of the allotment. 

How this chemical came to be on the allotments is a mystery.  It could have been there for years because it does not dissolve easily and is not washed away.   I am happy with the reassurances I have been given and I am carrying on growing.   It is not the ideal though. 

Now this colours my opinion of the new weed killer aminopyralid.  This weed killer is sprayed onto pasture and while it kills weeds, it does not kill grass.  Cows eat it and what goes in comes out the other end and eventually can land up on someones allotment as manure.  Aminopyralid can stay active for up to two years which means that the manure could affect allotment vegetables.  It seems from the allotment.uk forum that this is what is happening throughout the UK.   Now I thought I was safe because I only use horse manure from horses that live on a pristine field.  I would like to believe that their manure is uncontaminated.  However, chemicals like these have a way of squeezing themselves into the most unlikely of places. 

I am more of a biochemist than a chemist which means that I look at man made chemicals in a slightly different way.  Biochemists like to mash things up because they deal with very small quantities of naturally occurring chemicals.  They also deal in cascades - which means one very small amount of a chemical causes production of another small amount of chemical which then may go on to cause the production of a relatively big amount of a further chemical - or several different chemicals.  So in biology a small amount of a particular chemical can produce quite a big effect.  It only takes one molecule of a chemical or one photon of sunlight to cause cancer.  The only thing that higher concentrations do is make it more likely. 

We have been cheerfully spraying and dousing the environment with man made chemicals for years.  I did it myself.  In the 1960s lots of new pesticides and herbicides came onto the market.  However, it did not take long before a lot of gardeners started to question what effect these chemicals were having on our health.  I remember saying to myself what is happening to the soil animals?  With tiny amounts of chemicals having a relatively large affect on individual animals what effect did it have on the whole ecosystem?  Then came: “The Silent Spring”.     

I stopped using them and since then I have been trying to garden intelligently; using nature rather than fighting it. 

Now aminopyralid seems to be a wonder chemical that has absolutely no effect on the environment at all. Have a look at

 www.epa.gov/opprd001/factsheets/aminopyralid.pdf

Yet it is still effective in allotment manure after passing through a cow.  I would worry about it spreading throughout the environment. 

Are we going to have a “Flowerless Spring”.  It seems that we have not moved on very much from Rachel Carson.

There is something very thereputic about shelling peas.  I like to shell mine outside on my wooden seat but today it was raining when I came home from the allotment.  So, I had to shell inside.  I have an old arm chair in the conservatory that looks out onto the garden and I used this today.  I have got a few pound off this first serious harvest.  I did not take up the pea plants like I usually do.  I have left the small ones on the plants and I will be picking them through the week.  I do need the chicken wire supports though because I planted some new rows of Meteor pea where the winter onions have come out. 

This was another case of: ‘I can’t do this before I do that’.  The winter onions tops had fallen over, which meant that they would not get any bigger. I made an exective decision to harvest them all and store them on the staging in the home greenhouse.   They are not too bad but they are affected by the leek miner grub.  This meant that I could plant the Meteor peas. 

Checked to see if there were any more gooseberries ready to pick.  I got another couple of handfulls off them.  Then I remembered that the blackcurrents were ready to be picked in earnest.  It is amazing how much time it takes to strip blackcurrent bushes.  I have now ended up with bright pink fingers.  There were more strawberries and more raspberries. 

I am getting a little fed up of eating these so I might start freezing them. 

I took the enviromesh off the carrots and weeded them.  I pulled several of them for salads, finally I put the enviromensh back by burying the skirt in the soil.   Picked some of the rocket for salad.  We have got plenty of lettuce so I did not bother getting one of them.  I had a look at the March sown lettuce and it is going to seed now.  I will pull them all up tomorrow and go onto the April sown lettuce. 

I did general watering and weeding and finally put in the Meteor peas.  They got a dose of mychorrhizal fungi.  I really think that the jury is out on whether this makes any difference to the peas, however it guaranteed to do nothing in the packet. 

I gave away a big bunch of sweetpeas.  It is amazing the goodwill a gift like this generates.  I was just glad I could get shot of them.

And the weather people got it wrong, it was windy but not raining.  Every time I put pea plants in it is windy.�

I went down to the allotment for five minutes and as usual spent 3 hours there.  I only realised the time when I started to feel hungry.  How it got to 8′o clock I don’t know. 

I started by  picking the strawberries, then the raspberries, continued with the gooseberries and ended up picking salad veg.  I didn’t have time to pick the peas which are more than ready at the moment.  I watered the peas and sweet corn with comfrey liquid fertiliser.  I will pick the peas tomorrow if the weather stays clement. 

Finally, as usual, I went down to the sweet peas and removed side shoots and tendrils while tying them up. 

Two of the old lags of the allotment wandered down to my allotment.  They looked at my veg and were very approving.  It is good when people admit that my allotment is the best on the site.  :-))  If you believe that, you will belive anything. 

So, tomorrow I will pick the peas.  I will probably take out all the plants of the first lot of peas I put in and move the supports to the winter onion plot.  I will harvest all the winter onions so that I can put another row of peas here.  They might need some fertiliser so I will get some chicken manure from the garden centre.  The peas are growing away merrily in the allotment greenhouse.  I will plant them out tomorrow depending on the weather. 

I did not plant my customary pot of lettuce on the 1st of the month so I will have to do it tomorrow.  I have some more potting compost now and I think that I will plant another set of peas too.  I may put these where the potatoes come out.  I will tuck them to one side because I really want to put some mustard green manure in this plot.

I might plant my sweet cicely seeds tomorrow as well.

Happy independence day to our former colonies in North America.