With all the new allotment holders throughout the country, I am wondering if they will continue with their allotments after this very wet year.  The exotics like pumpkins, courgettes, sweet corn, peppers and aubergine have not done as well as they sometimes do.  Even tomatoes seemed to have done poorly this year.  Just as mine were coming into fruit they have got blight. 

The potatoes are also affected by blight but not as bad as last year.  I just got mine out in time. 

The more traditional vegetables are doing much better this year.  I have had loads of peas, beans, carrots and beetroot. 

Remarkably I am getting some big onions.  The measures I took to combat eelworm seem to have worked quite well.  The use of aspirin seems to have had an effect and with the prohibition of pyrethrum and derris this seems to be one of the few weapons we can use against pests and diseases.  Derris will be prohibited in UK from September. 

The use of companion planting has been effective as well although the annual flowers I have planted seem to have taken over the allotment.  I must remember not to get African marigolds and stick to French ones.  The African marigolds grow much too big and shade out other plants.  The dwalf French ones are just right although they get a lot of slug damage.  Next year I will get a good variety of seeds and plant them out with mychorrhizal fungi. 

Finally the use of mychorrhizal fungi seems to have had a very big effect on some of the vegetables.  Interestingly, peas and beans seem to have benefitted the most.  The potatoes did very well.  I was told that the potato Kestrel did not crop very heavily but they cropped better than Desiree did last year.  I did not feed them as much as the Desiree last year either. 

The carrots, lettuce, rocket and beetroot also benefited from the use of this fungus, companion planting and the use of aspirin. 

One of the major differences this year is getting the new half allotment.  It has enabled me to plant vegetables rows just that little bit further apart.  1ft 6 inches.  It is a much better distance than 1ft which I usually do.  Also, since giving up half my allotment, rotation has been very difficult.  With a whole allotment rotating is much easier.  If all the pesticides have been prohibited then rotation will be of major importance in the future. 

I cannot recommend the use of comfrey too much.  It is an excellent liquid fertiliser.  I am also going to use it as a green manure and dig in the leaves under my new strawberry patch.  It has certainly helped me to produce some great sweet peas.  I did not show any this year but I think they were up to exhibition standard.  Unfortunately, the sweetpeas have got the dreaded yellow leaf disease.  They are going over now but they have done me proud so I am not too bothered.  I really need to be taking them out because they are growing in the contaminated soil.  I will have to dismantle the supporting canes and move them onto another part of the allotment to keep up the rotation. 

I am going to use the comfrey leaves as green manure so that they are easy to move.  I will strip off the leaves and dig them in on the top allotment.  I will have to find somewhere to plant the roots over the winter because they are going to remove the soil where the comfrey plants are growing. 

The leeks are as big now as they got last year while there is still quite a few months of growing to go.  The winter cauliflowers, Brussel sprouts and broccoli all are growing big.  I have not fed them all summer but they are still doing very well.  I did not use mychorrhizal fungi  with the brassicas though because from the literature they do not form associations with it.  I also need to remove the supports for the peas.  I am not too sure where I am going to store them though.  I need a shed. 

So, overall, I think that I have had quite a successful year this year. 

I do hope that everyone continues to work their allotments and the novelty does not wear off.  They are hard work though.

It is that time of the year, Tone.  Lots of large beetroot are forming so I bought about 8 home.  They will be cooked and put into preserving vinegar.  Loads of carrots coming so I brought home a large bunch.  Runner beans cropping well.   I bought about 6-7lb of beans home.  I will top and tail them and then put them through the bean slicer.  Some I will eat and most I will freeze in old margarine tubs. 

Too many courgettes so I am leaving some to grow into marrows.  I took off some sweetcorn cobs but they were not properly formed yet.  I am just a little worried about the wet weather and whether they will be affected by it. 

I picked the last of the Early Onward peas.  They have cropped particularly well.  The Meteor peas have been hopeless.  I will leave them in but they are very disappointing. 

I am cropping quite a bit of broccolli now.  I am cutting it quite hard and this seems to encourage it to send up more buds. 

I sprayed the leeks and the onions with an aspirin and derris mixture.  I am hoping that this will keep the onion fly off them.

Overall, regardless of the weather, I think that I have had a quite successful year. 

Now to plan for next year. 

I will choose my sweet peas with a lot more care this year. �

This photograph is from the bottom end of the allotment in 1982 looking south.  Eric and I have not yet put in the path across the end of the allotment.  I found rhubarb under this grass and I have still got plants of it now. 

 

This is what the soil profile looked like in 1982.

This is a typical stagnogley soil with clay enriched subsoil.  This type of soil has reduced Iron II compounds because waterlogged soils do not let air flow through them very well. With oxygen from the air the iron compounds give the soil a brown colour.  So soils that are free draining, open and porous tend to be redish brown.  Iron II (Fe²⁺) compounds are grey or bluey grey in colour.  As this was a less permeable heavy clay and waterlogged soil  it is grey although there is some oxidation where air has managed to get into the soil and this is where it has a mottled reddish brown colour.  This soil profile is called a Bg horizon.

Needless to say, it does not look like that now.  Since adding loads of organic matter to the soil, draining it and double digging, I have about 4ft of dark brown topsoil - but still on clay.  It produces adequate vegetables but not as big or as healthy as I would like.  Looks like I will have to continue to work hard.

The bottom half allotment now has water on it after a very wet summer.  I will have to spend some time this winter draining and raising this area too. 

Now it has lost my blog! I still cannot make comments on my own blog site. 

If you want to see what the allotment is like it was in July you can click on allotment photographs either below this blog or to the right of it. 

I am cropping the allotment and removing plants when they have gone over so it looks quite untidy at the moment. 

I will put on more photographs when they start to remove the soil from the lower part of my allotment due to the benzo(a)pyrene.  I am going to use this as an opportunity to add some horse manure to this part of the allotment.Â

I have just found this photograph of my allotment in 1982 when I first started gardening.  It was the 2nd of February and very cold.  The grasses, nettles and other weeds had died down and it was relatively easy to dig when it was like this. 

Not very many of the allotments were being done in 1982.  Eric had taken on his next to mine but I had to clear the trackway to get the tractor down.  This is looking north. 

I was skim digging the whole width of the allotment.  I  double dug, ie dug down two spits (spade blades) and then buried the weed turf under the clay.  In order to do this, I took out some of the clay at the other end of the trench and put it in a pile on the trackway.  I filled the hole with turfs and then covered with the clay further along the trench.  This meant that the weeds were at least 3 spits down.  As you cannot skim off all the stolons of weed grasses like couch and nettles, there was some regeneration of weeds but not that much.  I worked along the trench filling the holes with weed turfs until  I reached the trackway and used the clay pile to cover the weeds in the last hole.

With this amount of digging you would think that I had drained the allotment really well.  However, at this time I did not know there was a spring on the allotment.  I had to put in two land drains and raise the allotment 18 inches in order to be able to work the soil.  I had forgotten how difficult it was to work the allotment in the early years.Â

Sometimes you just have to be very strict with yourself.  I had gone up the allotment just to dig out all the potatoes however, I was sorely tempted to go and pick beans and peas.  I stuck to my guns though and, apart from tying up some raspberry canes that I hadn’t yesterday, I got out all of the Kestrel and Sante potatoes. 

This is not an easy job.  I hate leaving any small potatoes in the soil because they will harbour pests and diseases.  They used to rot in the soil because of the cold but now we have warmer winters this does not happen so readily.  I meticulously picked out all the little ones and put them in the wheel barrow to dispose of with the tops.  Last year I bagged up the potato tops and took them to the tip.  This year I have just put them on the soil that they are going to take away in October.  They might as well take the rubbish as well. 

It rained a lot yesterday and the ground was still very wet today.  So lifting the potatoes involved moving a lot of wet soil.  When I had filled a tub with potatoes, I took the tub over to the tap and washed the soil off the potatoes. 

A lot of them had blight on them and others had slug damage.  I have filled four hundred weight sacs with really good ones so I am not really worried about the poorer ones.  I will try to eat as many of the poor ones before they go off.  You just have to cut out the diseased parts and the rest is really good. 

Last year the mice found my potatoes so this year I am trying to keep them off the floor of the shed.  I am putting them onto old plastic baskets at the moment but I can see them buckling in the future.  A more permanent structure is called for I think.

Some things that you do down the allotment come as such an automatic job that you fail to recognise that other people might not have a clue what you have to do; whether you do it or why you do it. 

So, here are some of the things that I do at this time of the year.

I  wash my potatoes down the allotment. I wash them in a very old Sainsbury plastic basket. This means that while I slosh them with water, water can drain out of the holes.  I do this for three reasons.
The first is because I have spent a long time developing my top soil and I don’t really want any of it to be washed down the drain at home. Dirty vegetables could help to block the drains as well.�
The second is because it will remove any slugs or other minibeasts that are on the surface of the spuds.
A third reason is that it helps me to check the spuds for disease and blemishes that will stop them storing so well. If there is soil on them then they are difficult to see.

The early summer fruiting raspberries have finished fruiting and the fruiting canes will now go brown and die.  They will not fruit again so it is not worth keeping them tied up.  I go along the line of raspberries cutting out the old fruiting canes with a secateur. I recognise the old canes because they are brown and woody.  They also have the old fruiting spurs on them.  I then tie in the new canes that have grown this year.  I can recognise them because they are usually green right down to the ground. Remember I am talking about summer  fruiting raspberries so don’t do this to your autumn raspberries - until they have fruited of course. 

My raspberries are a hotch potch of ones given to me 25 years ago.  They are not just one variety.  This suits me because it means that they don’t all come at once but fruit from June until the beginning of August.  I have a gap during August where I do not have any raspberries and then the autumn ones start to fruit.  Believe it or not the autumn raspberries have been given to me as well.

I am slowly moving my raspberry line because they are not fruiting as well as they used to.  After 25 years you can’t ask for much more.  I did buy 10 canes from Ashwood Nursery but only one of them grew.  This one is called Glen Prosen.  I don’t mind because they are very easy to propagate just by splitting off the canes with a little root on them. 

As so many of the new ones died I have done this with the old ones and made the row up. 

The Adrienne black berry is now beginning to send up long canes.  It will fruit really well next year.  I will tie in the canes to supports. 

The strawberries have long gone over and now are sending out runners.  These can be grown on and planted as new plants.  The ones that I have got now are Cambridge and I bought them over 15 years ago.  These last two years they seem to have been infected by a virus and unfortunately this has been and will be transferred to the sport via the runner.  I am going to give them another go next year but someone on the allotment site has given me 6 Marshmellow stawberry plants that look as though they are very healthy.  New strawberry plants should be planted now so that they have more potential to fruit next year.  I will dig in quite a few comfrey leaves into the area that I am going to plant them in.  This will add phosphate to the soil.  I will also plant them with mychorrhizal fungi.  I doubt if I will do anything else to the soil. 

I just went down to Heathrow Airport to collect my daughter and it was really misty all the way down.  It is truly the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. 

I got another 5lb of peas off the Early Onwards.  The Aintree runner beans are also cropping better than any others on the allotment.  I am getting about 5lb every other day so although the weather is cold and wet the beans and peas seem to like it. Last year I was only getting about 2lb of beans off so there is an improvement there. I top and tail them and put them through a traditional bean slicer and then freeze them. I would rather eat them fresh if I can but I could never eat this many fresh.

The pumpkins have now decided to fruit but they are only about football size at the moment so I do not think that I will have any giant ones.  I will leave them on until September to see if they get any bigger. 

The carrots and beetroot have done very well this year too.  I am pulling about 5 beetroot and 10 carrots each week.  We cannot eat any more than this. 

The sweetcorn is nearly ready to pick.  We will probably freeze this because there is no way we will eat it all straight away. 

The leeks are growing well but some of them have rust and still need tender loving care.  I will hoe them up a little bit more today.  The purple sprouting broccoli is coming well.  I am only getting a handful off them at the moment but that is more than enough to be eating at the moment. 

The Kestrel and Sante potatoes have gone over now and the tops are dying back.  I will get the rest of them out today.  I am putting them into Hessian sacs which are not very good but I have some ideas about how to exclude the light. Remarkably there are some potatoes with blight.  I am just going to take out these and only store the best.  There are not many with blight but I think that they were affected just as they died down. 

I have cut out all the raspberry canes that fruited earlier in the summer.  I have tied in the new canes that will fruit next year.  The autumn fruiting raspberries are already tied in and are just getting to the stage of fruiting now.  I am not sure whether any of them will reach home though because I will probably eat them straight from the canes.  There are quite a few bumble bees and other types of bee on the raspberry flowers but very few honey bees.  I am not sure whether I have seen a honey bee all summer. 

The onions continue to get bigger but I think that they would have benefited from a little more warmth than we have been getting.  The ridge cucumbers and the courgettes seem to be ok though. 

The plums and the apples are starting to come now.  I picked quite a few off yesterday.  Might make plum jam. 

I still have only had a very few tomatoes.  I think that this is very disappointing because I planted the seed very early this year. 

I need to plant some more rocket, lettuce and radish if I can this week. 

After the potatoes come out I will be planting the Caliente mustard.  I would have started before this but I keep forgetting to take the seed to the allotment.  I am not too worried because I want to double dig this area and put some lawn mowings and turf under this soil.  With the green manure mustard on the top I think that this is all the manuring I will do for this area.  It will have the onions on next year.�

If you go away and leave the allotment for a week there is a definite difference when you come back. 

I knew that the sweet peas would need layering because they were at the top of the canes.  The Kestrel potatoes also needed to come out because the tops were going over.  After checking all the vegetables on the allotment, I found that some of the beetroot and carrots needed pulling before they got too big.  I like them when they are small and sweet. 

Then I spent quite a while picking runner beans and peas.   The Early Onward peas have made some really big pods with big peas in them.  I really need to pick them today but it is pouring with rain.  I have had  three big cucumbers off the plants.

I do not ever weigh my vegetables because I cannot compete with intensively grown farm vegetables.  Although, I was thinking that I should not be comparing myself with these farmers but rather “organic” farmers’ prices.   However, I like to think that the benefits of growing, giving me fresh air and exercise, far outweigh any difference in the cost of producing my own naturally grown vegetables. 

Layering sweet peas involves untying them and laying them on the floor and retying on another cane near their growing tip.  I usually turn them up the cane about 50 cm.  After a week of being neglected a lot of the flowers have gone over and are now producing pods.   I want them to carry on flowering so I will take them off and maybe later leave some on so that I can collect the seed.  I am hoping the sweet peas will continue growing up the canes so that I can have sweet peas in August and September.  They do seem to be getting some mildew and many of the lower leaves of some varieties are going yellow.   One or two of the sweet peas are also showing signs of virus infection so they will have to come out.   You cannot really notice when I take sweet peas out because there are so many. 

The pumpkins are slowly taking over the allotment.  I keep moving the growing tips so that they are heading the way that I want them too.  They are not very big this year.  I do not think that it has been warm enough for them.  There has been too much rain as well. 

The leeks have got a little rust on them.  Rust is a redish fungi.  There is not very much you can do with rust but I may spray them with aspirin and liquid derris and see if that has any effect.  The liquid derris keeps the onion fly off them. 

The carrots are surviving after I took the enviromesh off them but there is a little sign that they are being attacked by carrot root fly. The foliage of some are becoming yellowy red.  This is always a sure sign of root fly. 

One of the allotment holders gave me some new strawberry plants.  I am in two minds whether to plant them or not.  The only place that I have to plant them is where they were last year.  I would rather plant them in an entirely new area.  Maybe I will just leave them in their pots until other things have finished.  I want to plant them with mychorrhizal fungi.  I could just plant them where I have taken out the old virus infected ones.  However they did not fruit very well this year in this ground so a new area might be favourite. 

The courgettes seemed to have changed into marrows although I am still treating them as courgettes.  They look like long trailing marrows.  I think that they might have mixed their seeds again.  The courgettes are notorious for crossing with squashes, pumpkins and marrows.  I have got something growing in the sweet peas that I thought was a courgette but it turns out to be a hybrid pumpkin. 

The sweet corn is making some good cobs now.  It has only grown about one and a half metres which is much shorter than last year.  Again, I think that it has been cooler this year. 

The early sprouting broccoli has started to flower.  I took some off yesterday.  One of the plants has actually flowered during last week and I had to throw the flowers away.  The rest of the brassicas are doing well.  I need to look and see if the cabbages are ready to be harvested. 

All the onions are starting to bulb up now.  The seed sown onions have caught up with the sets now and are beginning to overtake them in size. 

Overall it is looking like it is going to be a fairly good year this year.Â