Potatoes straight from the ground are beautiful. With a little freshly picked mint and sometimes with a little butter you will rarely taste anything more wonderful. If you can serve them up with a few carrots and freshly podded peas, you could want for nothing more.

As for breaking up the ground - potatoes don’t break up the ground - you do; digging in manure, digging trenches, and hoeing them up. However all this exercise produces some lovely vegetables.

I never water my potatoes and get some fairly big ones. The RHS did some research a few years back and found that watering vegetables did increase their weight and size. If you can I would water them at least twice a week, however this depends on how many you have. It would be impractical for me to water because I have so many. We cannot use hoses or sprinklers.

I have rubbed off all the eyes in past years and got a really good crop. I only do it if the shoots become drawn - I left my seed potatoes in the dark one year and they produced long white stems. I have also reduced the number of eyes to two or three in the past. I think that this helps to produce larger spuds but that might just be me whishfully thinking. I wouldn’t rub them off if they are the small,dark green ones.
I always put my late potatoes in before my earlies . That way they get a good long maturing period. I try to plant when there is less chance of frost. Early April maybe.

Well  this  is  interesting.  We  have not had  a winter  like  this for  years in  England.  When I started to  garden  seriously - when I was about eight years old,  winters were like this.  The soil was like iron  and water froze  solid  in the butts.

Well I cannot get the leeks or the parsnips out of the ground at the moment.   During the Christmas  break, however,  we had fresh  parsnips,  a few leeks, brussel sprouts, beetroot and  brocolli.  We also  used  frozen  peas, maize, beans,  carrots and stored  pumpkin,  onion and potatoes.    That  is twelve  vegetables for Christmas  lunch…

Some nutter has  been  pulling  out my winter cauliflowers  for  some reason  and  I  have  lost  about  a  row of them.   Not  to  worry because I  have another two  rows.

What  can  you say?

All  the winter digging has  stopped.

The  four large silver birch were taken down by friends in November.   There was a large amount of brushwood and branches which I took down to the allotment.  I also  took down  the  large 5-8 cm branches.  I  would  have taken the  trunks  as  well  but they wanted them for their  log fires.  I took  out a line of gooseberry bushes and buried them as  well.  They keep on getting American mildew and I want to buy some resistant ones.  I love gooseberries.  I took out several of the blackcurrents as well and buried them with the gooseberries.  They were very old varieties that I was given ages ago when I first got the allotment.  They were not really producing very many fruit so I have replaced them with cuttings I took  of the new varieties.

I dug pits three spits  down carefully making sure that the layers of soil were not mixed.  Now  you can believe this or  not  but  I still had  top soil at this depth.  The top spit was  exceptionally fine  and  friable because  I  had  sieved it  several times over the  years.   I put quite a layer of  brushwood,  leaves and  compost in the bottom of the  pit.  The  larger branches  at the very bottom and the finer  pieces  nearer the  surface.   My son had cut the smaller pieces into approximately  5cm pieces so  a  lot  would fit into a small  area. I replace  the soil carefully mixing each  layer using the conical pile method.  If you make a pile of soil into a cone  shape  then each time  you put another spade full of soil on the top of it, it  mixes down the sides.  This  is how I used to mix potting composts when I worked  in tomato glasshouses.  Each  layer  was  mixed  like  this when  I  put the soil back  into the pit.   I did not mix the layers though.

Now the conventional  wisdom  is that this  addition of high carbon to nitrogen material  will  deplete  the soil  of nutrients.  After doing this  for  many  years,  I  question whether  this  is true in  all circumstances.   My new stainless  steel  spade  has a blade about 12 inches which means  that I am  going down about 3 feet.  At this level would  decomposition cause nutrient loss?  Nitrogen  is used both by bacteria  and  fungi to make their bodies.  This  nitrogen must be  obtained  from the  soil  some how or other.

The bacteria  could only get the  nitrogen from  the decomposing  material  itself.  The  fungi on  the other  hand  could stretch out mycelium into  the surrounding soil in  search of nitrogen.  The most  likely  place  that  they would find  it is  in the top 6 inches of topsoil.  Would  this be  feasable for  fungi  to  grow  mycelium  this  long.  Well in  this  though experiment,  I  have to say there  is evidence that mycelium do  grow remarkably long and this would not be unusual.  So,  I  want  to  find  out  next  year if the onions  suffer  with  nitrogen  depletion - although  I  have been  given  some  free  blood,  fish  and  bone and have already put it on the winter  onions,  shallots  and  garlic.   I  don’t really think that burying brushwood this deep will affect the plants growing in the top soil significantly. I would like a harvest of onions that is  not affected by Napomyhza gymnostoma, the onion miner fly, which  is a much more pressing problem than  worrying about nutrient depletion.  To that end I will be covering the  winter onions  with enviromesh  as soon as the cold whether has gone.

The effect  of burying brush wood  like this is to raise the allotment soil up at least 6 inches or so.  The theory is  that the brushwood would keep the subsoil  open and porous to  excess water.   Where the soil has  not been able  to fall through the brushwood, there would be  voids which water could pass through with little obstruction.   This would cause  the ground to be  much better drained.   There has not really been a water problem on this part of the allotment since just after I took it over,  however I would like to make sure that  the  water that  is on the rest of the allotment has  an  easy route off, and this  route will also include this  area now.

Another  reason  I  think that this  is will be  advantagous  is  that the decomposition  will produce heat  and  warm  the soil.  This is the theory behind the  ridge  for  ridge  cucumbers.   I must admit that when I went up and tried to dig this  area at the start of  the very cold weather it was just as hard as any other part of the allotment.  Maybe the heat had not penetrated across to the area that I was digging in.   Maybe I need to wait until  the  spring  before the bacterial and fungi start doing their job.

I must admit that the  pumpkins  did  well  on the  manure pile (that  I  left because  it was contaminated  with  aminopyuralid herbicide) possibly because of  the heat the manure  generated .

Moreover, a layer  of decomposing organic  matter like this could also  help   to  prevent  water loss during  the  summer. Evaporation from the  top of  the  soil  would cause water to  rise during  periods  of hot  dry  weather due  to  capillary action.   A thick layer of  brush  like  this  would  slow this process  down with  any luck.  Whether  this  is  infact  what  will  happen  remains to  be  seen, although I  think  that  this  is  the  theory  behind  digging  a  bean  trench and  putting  lots  of compost at  the  bottom  of it.

I am  encouraged  by finding  out that the South American early civilisations used this as a method to make terraced fields and also to  drain  fields  around  lakes.  These  are the  peoples that bred  potatoes, beans, tomatoes, maize,  cucumber,  marrow,  squashes,  and many more  food  plants.  Respect…

As my back  has  improved a lot,  I  will probably be down at the allotment as soon as the  weather improves.  I really hope that this cold  weather will have seen off a lot  of  pests on the allotment.   With that  in mind the only reason that  I  want to  go  to  the allotment at the moment is to replenish  the bird feeders.

The sweet peas seem to be holding up in the greenhouse.  I would have liked to transplant them  into their opend ended  pots before  the cold weather  really set in but I  haven’t so we will just have  to  wait and hope they will  survive.   There is  no  heat  in the greenhouse.

I am looking  at catalogues and  websites at the moment because I will have  to order my seeds soon especially if I want the  varieties that work on the allotment.   I am going to go for kestrel and Sante potatoes again.  They worked fairly  well even though they had the contaminated horse manure on them.   They have decided to use aminopyuralid again after banning it last year.  I cannot see how they can keep it out of the manure.  Still I  will get some  horse manure  from  Tony in the next few weeks.  I have left a space on  the  allotment to pile it  on.  I will  put it under the potatoes again because  I  see little benefit  to  leaving  it  to  rot  down  for  a year on a pile.   I have  always dug in manure fresh  or not -  it  might as well rot down in the soil as on a heap.  By the time  I get around to planting the potatoes in this area the manure will have had  at least threee  or  four months to decompose.   I  never find that it is so hot that it  damages the  plants.  The only manure that I would be  very careful with is pigeon  because that can seriously damage  the  soil if  put on  neat.   Pigeon  manure  will  be  put onto the compost heap  as an accelerator - not that I  have a  compost heap for any lenght  of time.   I  like  to dig stuff in  straight  away if I have a space on the allotment.  I  dig  it in at least two  spits deep  so  that it  does not affect the top soil.

I will put most of  the compost that  I  have collected this year onto the bottom plot.   It still needs to be raised up a lot - it has still got running water on the surface.   With the very poor new soil that the council have given me, there is a big need for  organic matter to be incorporated into it.  It will be the area for the peas this year and this will give me the opportunity to add lots of manure and compost into the trenches before planting.  I doubt that I will get such good peas this year as  last.  We will  see…

Other jobs that I would be doing if the weather was a little more clement would be to move all the raspberries to their new home and to straighten the old path.  As the  allotment has been raised up, where I am going to straighen the path is about 2 feet below the soil surface.  I will have to dig away some of this bed,  move the  soil retaining  paving slabs across and  then replace the  soil.  There may be some soil  left over so I will use it to raise the  ground where I took the old greenhouse down.

I got down to the allotment on Sunday afternoon.  I took down the lawn cuttings and put them in the double digging trench.  Nearly the whole allotment site has taken down their runner beans now so I decided to do the same.  The tops went into the trench as well.  All the canes and the supports went into the greenhouse.  There were no more flowers on them and all that were left were the old beany beans that I had missed on previous picking.   The pumpkins were making a nuisance  of themselves because they had grown through the beans.  They are not very large ones, most being about the size of  a football, but there are one or two that have grown beach ball size.  Now all we have to do is eat them.  I might make pumpkin pie or soup with them and then freeze it.  It is always a good standby for the winter. 

I cleared the area where the radish, rocket and spinach had gone to seed.  Put them all in the trench.  The Florence fennel went to seed too so I put that in as well.  Double dug another trench and was just about to start filling this one with lawn cuttings and manure left near the bottom gate when it started raining. 

This time of year the allotment can be a little disheartening because the ravages of the summer are clearly evident.  Lots of the brassicas have been well and truly eaten.  The gooseberries have lost all their leaves.  Lots of the annual companion plants have gone over and need to be taken out.  So the poor old allotment really needs a good old tidy up.  I just wish that I had the energy and the time. 

The nights are drawing in now and by the time I have organised myself to get up the allotment after work it is beginning to get very dark.  I doubt that I will be able to do anything substantial except at the weekends. 

I have really cleared the bottom third of the lower allotment except for a few more comfrey plants.  I also need to take off about seven slabs which I had carefully levelled to put my shed on.  Never mind.  I have just stacked the other slabs on the path to keep them out of the way of the JCB digger.  I don’t know when they are coming to take the soil off the allotment but they did say that it would be the end of October because we would have harvested all our crops. 

The leeks need another spraying with derris to keep off the leek fly , Napomyza gymnostoma. The leeks have got some rust on them but they are still growing very well.  If the fly stays off them they will be really big around Christmas.  I am loath to take the companion plants out around them because they seem to be protecting the leeks.  Maybe it is just my wishful thinking.  I also hope that the wet year has deterred the fly as well. 

I am going to take out the old Granny Smith apple.  I don’t really want to but it is not producing many apples and the ones I do get are mangy and moth eaten.  The Victoria plum is also going over and needs to come out.  I might give them to the November the 5th people to put on their bonfire.  I am not too happy about burning things off the allotment but they came pleading for wood for the bonfire and this was all I had to offer them.  I will not be there so I don’t mind. 

I have some black grapes.  If they fatten up any more and ripen I might get some raisin sized grapes before the end of October.  It has not been a good year for grapes.  The new strawberries seem to be doing very well.  I will move the cambridge strawberries because they will be smothered by the potatoes next year when I put them in that bed.  Also I want that room to put several piles of horse manure.  I am not too sure where to put the strawberries but they cannot stay were they are now. 

The autumn raspberries are coming with great profusion now.  As is my want, I am eating them straight from the canes.  I don’t know if you agree but I do not find them as sweet as the summer ones but beggars can’t be choosers.  I still ate them for my mid afternoon break. 

Eventually it became too miserable in the rain and I decided to call it a day and come home.  I dug up five or six pounds of carrots, washed them carefully and put them in the car for people at work.  I told them that they were organic and that they would be a little moth eaten.  The consensus seemed to be that they did not mind so they have  got some to chew the bones out of. 

Today I am having tomatoes, cucumber, marrow, beetroot, carrots, red onion, potatoes, sweet corn and white onion for my evening meal.  I am making a vegetable curry with a salad on the side.  What could be better than that?  Maybe if I had brought home a few of those autumn raspberries?

Now that my daughter has returned from Hong Kong, I seem to have less and less time to go to the allotment.  She has just passed her driving test and, although I would rather she did not drive and add even more  CO₂  to the atmosphere, it does relieve me of taxi duty - or so I thought.  Now she wants me to accompany her when she goes on the Motorway.  So it looks like next Saturday cannot be spent down the allotment. 

I am not worried because lots of the allotment have been cropped and they are laying fallow.  The area where the potatoes were is now covered with mustard and I have cleared off the onions, pea plants, sweet corn and courgettes. 

I dug a trench two spits deep.  (A spit is the length of the side of the spade blade).  All the weeds and the plants that had gone over went into the trench.  This included the sweet pea plants.  I double dug putting the soil from the new trench on top of the previous one.  Now I have another big trench to fill.  I will clear off all the tagetes from the onion bed and the old rocket that has gone to seed and put them into this trench with some lawn cuttings left by the gate of the allotments.   I will also weed between the leeks and take out the companion planting because all the annuals have gone over now.  (gone over - died or going in that direction) .

I am not sure whether I am going to plant Japanese onions this back end (back end - autumn or, if you are from the USA, fall).  I have this blooming (blooming - a word I use instead of swearing) onion fly,  Napomyza gymnostoma, and despite the cold wet summer I am not sure whether planting overwintering onions is the best strategy.  It gives the fly an opportunity to survive the winter as grubs deep in the leeks or onions. 

The second problem is that I would like to plant some garlic towards Christmas time and I would like to think that the fly would not attack it.  Some hope!

What I will do is plant some winter greens.  This will include some lambs lettuce, rocket and winter lettuce.  I will start them in the greenhouse because I am a little late for this.  It looks like it is going to be a really good end of September so I may be lucky. 

I think that I have had the last  of the beans.  I only picked about 2lb on Sunday.  However, the Aintree runner beans have done me proud.  It may have been the dampish weather throughout the summer but it does not seem to have done the beans any harm. 

The carrots and beetroot are also cropping very well.  These are the best carrots I have had for years.  I will plant these fly away varieties again.  They are just as sweet as ordinary carrots and I cannot tell any differences. 

The brassicas have been well and truly eaten by cabbage white butterflies,  Pieris brassicae, catterpillars.  It has been a good year for cabbage white butterflies but that means it has been a bad year for cabbages, brussel sprouts, cauliflowers and broccoli. 

Never mind.  I have been cropping the broccoli for about a month now so I cannot complain too much.  I am not going to pick them off and spraying would not be any good at the moment.  I am hoping the birds will take most of them.   The brassicas will recover eventually and I don’t expect a big reduction in yield. 

So,  I am trying to put the allotment to bed for the winter. I will clear off and dig as much as I can.  I will also try to plant as much green manure as I can too.  Some of the allotment will be covered in horse manure and other parts will be covered in spent compost, lawn cuttings and straw.  The bottom 1/3 of the allotment soil is being removed so I thought that I would dig in as much greeny stuff, manure and leaves as I could get my hands on before they bring the new soil.  They are taking off and replacing 60cm of soil over quite a big area. 

I still haven’t moved the comfrey and I will have to do that sometime next weekend.  It is still growing though and, due to the weather, it continues to produce a great deal of valuable leaf.  Nevertheless, it will have to come out or be carted away by the council lorries. 

By the end of the winter I should have new soil, the new carpark and a new shed. 

Soon I will be planting sweet peas.

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. 

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.�

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 love June and I hate June.  It is the month when everything starts growing in earnest but it is also the time when the insects and other pests are at their greatest numbers. 

The gooseberries have got American mildew and it is slowly taking over.  I will spray with Bordeaux mixture today.  I will also put some on the potatoes.  I found some ominous black patches on two of my greenhouse tomatoes - could be blight but I hope not. 

The eelworm is having a good go at the onions but they are not as bad as the ones on other people’s plots.  Maybe some of the precautions I took are having some effect. 

The precautions against eelworm were.

• Mustard as a green manure.  It was not the Caliente mustard but I think I will use Caliente when the potatoes come out in the summer.  The potatoes are Kestrel and Sante and these are eelworm resistant.  I am hoping to starve the eelworm out.  The mustard is supposed to have some pesticide action in the soil but you have to chop it up to release the chemical. 

http://www.tozerseedsdirect.com/plant-solutions/P1278-calientemustard.php

• I have interplanted with tagetes.  Again this is supposed to have some pesticide action.  I have planted them about 6″ apart and 6″ from the onions.  If they have any companion plant properties then I should see the benefits when they are this close. 

http://www.yardener.com/SolutionsForPestNematodes.html 

http://ucdnema.ucdavis.edu/imagemap/nemmap/ENT156HTML/204NEM/IAMEND

• I planted all the onions and the garlic with mychorrhizal fungi.  I was hoping that the covering of mycelium around the roots would protect the plants a  little.  The eelworm do not enter the plant through the roots though.  They climb up the plant when it is wet and enter through the stomata. 

http://www.friendlyfungi.co.uk/rootgrowhome.php

• I have sprayed the plants with aspirin - Anadine tablets.  This seems to take about a week to kick in and have an effect on the plants.  I can see a difference in the plants and they do start to grow a little better.  Some of the winter onions drop down onto the soil but after spraying they pick themselves up.  I crush up two tablets and put them in 2 gallons or 9 litres of water.  Now I don’t know if this is particularly natural way of dealing with eelworm because I am spraying on a chemical and I am not sure of the effects both for the environment and its residual effects in the plant.  It is quite a clever idea though, that we can use the plants own immune system to combat pests and diseases.  I have decided to use aspirin very, very sparingly.

http://www.allotments-uk.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4904&SearchTerms=aspirin

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/04/1.15.04/take2aspirin_gene.html

• I am feeding them on comfrey liquid which they seem to like a great deal.

As I say this does seem to be having an effect on the plants but not as bigger one as I wanted. 

Later today I will go down to the allotment and tie up the sweet peas.  The varieties I have planted are.

Jilly- yellowy cream.  This is quite a vigorous plant and is already about 25cm tall.

Vera Lynn- pinkish. All these are coming well.

Blue Danube- darkish purple. Smaller than some of the varieties at the moment.

Royal Wedding- pure white. Good plants with large leaves.

Prima Donna- very light pink.  Very poor germination and did not like the cold weather in April. I have only got about five of these and they are quite small plants.

Cupani- crimson purple.  Very scented.  Good plants and growing well. 

Rosy Dawn- pink streaks on white. Another one that did not like the cold weather in April. 

Romeo- white edged by purple.  This is growing well.  Quite big plants and big green leaves. 

Oxford blue- bluish purple. Again growing well. 

Champagne bubbles- pink on cream.  This one did not like the cold weather and is struggling a bit.

Red Alert- pinky red.  Good plants and very healthy. 

Oklahoma growing very well.

I have planted this months lettuce and they are in a pot in the greenhouse.  They will be pricked out into 3″ pots now that I have planted everything out and have lots of pots to put them in. 

The mice have taken some of the pea seeds that I planted in the greenhouse.  I knew that I shouldn’t have left them on the floor.  They have taken quite a few but I am going to leave them for a week to see how many I have got.  They have not touched the ones on the staging.  Silly me.

Arrived at the allotment about 12 o’clock and had a look at the gooseberries. Lots of the new growth was covered in mildew so I decided to cut it all off.  Gooseberries fruit on the old wood so I was not too concerned about having to give them a hair cut. 

Side shooted and tendril removed the sweet peas, tying them up as I went.  One plant was going yellow and this disease spreads so it had to come out.  All the rest were very healthy.  Gave them a watering with dilute comfrey liquid and then hoed out my footprints.  Looks a treat now.  Tied up the runner beans that have unwound themselves again and gave them a good watering too. Guess what.  As soon as I did that it started to rain.  It was only a short shower so I went up and hoed between the sweet corn and the courgettes.  Afterwards, I did the same between the peas and red onions. 

I didn’t spray the gooseberries or the potatoes with Bordeaux mixture.  I might do that next time I go up to the allotment but that will not be until next weekend; I think.  I took home a big lettuce, some rocket and spinach.  Had them for dinner.�

The wind was particularly strong yesterday and it was blowing about the newly planted lettuce.  Lots of them had lost some of their leaves.  The wind has died down a little now so I am hoping the lettuce is coping a little better.Yesterday I pricked out 100 leeks into 3″pots and watered them in.  I have left them in the greenhouse to grow on a little more.  I will be planting these out in June for Christmas and January, February time.  The May sown lettuce is coming along and will need planting out fairly soon.  I put two cucumbers and 8 aubergines  in large pots to grow on in the greenhouse.  The others I will take down and either put into the allotment greenhouse or outside. I decided to take the pumpkins down to the allotment with some outdoor cucumbers and the left over aubergines.  I mixed up some more aspirin with hot water and put it straight into the sprayer.  I have one of these large 1 gallon sprayers which is now primarily used to spray aspirin and folia feeds. When I got to the allotment I sprayed the onions again then did other plants around the allotment.  I am trying to keep the American mildew off my gooseberries and it seems to be working.  There was a little but not so much as I usually get at this time of the year.  I also sprayed the plum which was showing signs of suffering from an aphid attack.  I might just cut out the branches that are affected - they are only the very small ones. 

Originally aspirin was extracted from the bark of the willow tree.  It must have been doing something there so they investigated it and found that it was a messenger chemical for the plants immune system.  It seems to trigger off the defence mechanism that plants have against insects.
This is the first year that I have tried it.  I needed something that would combat onion eelworm on the allotment.  Eelworm has built up because I didn’t realise what it was and its affect on plants.  There are several different remedies that I am trying this year and assessing how well they work.
  I just bought some ordinary aspirin not really understanding that it is not very soluble in water.  I very rarely take any medicine and would rather eat herbs as a remedy.  I crush two of these tablets up and put them in hot water to try and dissolve them and then make it up to two gallons in a watering can.  After that I put the resulting solution into a sprayer.  I would say that there has been a noticeable change in the onions.  The first being that I can grow them without them keeling over and rotting off.   They are also much bigger than I can usually grow them.  These are early days but I am optimistic. Finally I planted out the sweet corn and the courgettes.  This is later than last year but I don’t think the plants suffered.   They were not root bound in the pots so they would have been alright for another couple of weeks. The soil felt really warm when I was doing this but this may just have been the contrast between the soil and that clold north easterly wind.   I decided to plant a row of nigellia alongside them as a complanion plant. I am not sure whether they are good companion plants or not but they will attract things like bees and hoverflies that will benefit plants on the allotment. 

The Limanthes douglassi or poached egg plant has germinated well so that will be a good companion plant for the lettuces, rocket, lambs lettuce and radish. There is plenty of tagetes in the onion bed.  Californian poppy is going to be put in with the leeks.  If you want more and better information about companion planting have a look at digmyplots website.  It is well worthwhile.  (see my blogroll list).    I do not find planting peas out from these modula trays very pleasant.  I usually just dig a small trench, throw the peas in and cover.  Takes about 1/2 an hour at the most.  Planting hundreds of pea seedlings is like watching paint dry.  It sucks up time.  Still I did it but I still have 2 1/2 trays to plant.  I will put these in as soon as it stops raining.  By this time the cold northeasterly wind blowing at quite a rate was getting to my bones so I decided to call it a day and went home with a few radish, lettuce, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach leaves to make a fantastic salad. 

It is raining today so I will not be going down to the allotment today. The forecast is for this weather to continue tomorrow so I doubt if I will do anything tomorrow either.  I still need to plant out the red onions, tomatoes, tagetes, pumpkins, cucumbers and the aubergines.  I also need to weed the whole allotment, tie up the sweet peas and hoe up the potatoes a little more.  (The blackbirds keep scraping away the ridges looking for worms.)