Buzzy Bank Holiday

It's been a great weekend here in Warwickshire.

We managed to spend lots of time at the allotment sowing roots, spinach and chard and planting out the first of the peas as well as tackling the giant heap of soil-in-waiting that is Compost Mountain. This pile has been accumulating since we took on the plot over 5 years ago and now has come the time to use it to top up our beds and enrich our sandy soil. So Saturday saw him shovelling and me sieving and 7 or 8 barrows later we have tackled just about a third of the heap and both feel about twice our age :)

On the growing front, at last things are beginning to thrive - rhubarb, salad leaves and a multitude of herbs are all putting on enough growth to actually be able to harvest at last.

Lemon balm - great for teas and just sniffing!

Thyme - well you just have to..

Still it meant we'd earned our Sunday off. Ryton Gardens at Garden Organic came up trumps again - lots of interesting talks and beautiful gardens to stroll through.  We all know how vital bees and other pollinators are to our planet and to our food supply so it seems a nonsense that we don't do everything we can to help them through what seems to be a very rough patch for them. There are loads of resources out there explaining what can and should be done and the first talk we attended was by the wonderful, passionate bee campaigner Brigit Strawbridge explaining about the hundreds of varieties of bees that we share this country with and what we can do to try to reduce the impact of habitat decline (simple - plant flowers, lots of flowers of many shapes but that have single blooms and flourish throughout the year oh, and if in doubt, opt for the colour blue) and neonicotonoid pesticide use (simple- please don't use them, there are so many studies out there outlining their impact that even if our Government can't see the light we should be taking a stand).

Blue flowers, untidy corners and water all make for a wildlife friendly garden

The second talk we attended was from the folks of The Natural BeekeepingTrust about their philosophies around Bee Guardianship and their beautiful and intriguing Sunhive. Now some of the Trust's philosophies may be more about feelings and less about science and therefore not for everyone but this hive is designed around the natural shape of a honey-bees comb rather than the traditional square and is part of a whole concept of beekeeping that tries to reduce the amount of intervention in the process as well as severely restricting the amount of honey taken from the hives. After all honey is bee food and if one of the problems for bees is that they are starving over winter then it makes sense not to raid their larder too often for our benefit, doesn't it?  Oh and this isn't the only group of folk looking to change some of the practices around beekeeping - Phil Chandler at The Barefoot Beekeeper is another one worth looking at if you are thinking about taking on your own hives but aren't sure if it's for you.

Springing into action

Well folks that's what happens when the sun appears - suddenly it's all go in the garden and lotty and I forget to write about it!

The last couple of weeks have seen us planting out spuds, broad beans and strawberries up the lotty.

T'other half took this photo once the spuds went in :)

Pruning gooseberries - a bit late but well they have two choices and they're spiky little devils! Clearing and preparing beds for beans, roots and brassicas.

A bit Heath Robinson but this should support the broadies as they grow

We've been potting on tomatoes, lettuces, brussels and overwintered herbs plus sowing basil, rocket, courgettes, peas, winter squash and pumpkins. We've taken stock of the winter losses - several thymes in the garden and at least one of the lotty rosemaries have succumbed to the prolonged wet and cold so I'll be hunting down replacements and looking for ways to protect them next year.

And yesterday I watched as the blue tits twitted in and out of the bird box, a peacock butterfly warmed its wings and a bumblebee buzzed around the hellebores and the first cowslips. MMM Sunshine :)

Mea Culpa

I'm sorry - the fact that it's 4th April and we've got snowy hail in the Midlands, again, is all my fault. This week I'm on gardening leave - and no I didn't do anything dreadful at work - I thought I'd extend the Easter holiday and knock the lotty in to shape. After all, its April isn't it? You know mid-Spring, that wonderful month of yellow daffodils and fluffy white lambs and yes okay I'll accept showers, but of the lightly warm, gently watering the land sort not of the sharp, biting, cruel icy variety.  They belong to February or at a push early March.

So after a lovely long weekend catching up with family my plans for today have been adjusted slightly. March was a lot darker and colder than expected which means that despite a heated propagator most of our poor little tomato seedlings have keeled over and given up the ghost. Cue a morning of pot shuffling and re-sowing - Salt Spring Sunrise, Roma, Garden Pearl and Moneymaker popped in fresh pots with fresh compost and a lot of hope.

Whilst I had the compost - Vital Earth peat free of course - and pots to hand I also made a start on sowing my birthday flowers. Now we have trays full of Sweet Peas "Perfume Delight"; Sunflowers -"Earthwalker" & "Valentine"; Candytuft and Scabiosa " Tall Crown" all jockeying for space in the conservatory and on windowsills.  In a few months these are destined to be filling jugs and pots all round the house with sweet smelling home grown posies.

Dreaming of home-grown flowers

After a quick check on the wonderful Higgledygarden website I also popped my Cerinthe seeds in a little pot of tepid water to soak - evidently they have quite a hard shell and germinate better with a bit of softening so that's tomorrow's gardening sorted :)

I think the squashes better wait for a few more weeks, don't you?

And the wind doth blow!

Will it ever end? The Equinox has passed and next weekend sees the start of British Summer Time but Nature seems determined to keep us in Winter's icy grip for just that bit longer.

Frozen daffodils and buried violets

Not as bad round here as in other places across the country but it is frustratingly cold and dark. With snow and ice on the ground and hanging in icicles from the gutters working the soil, sieving the compost heaps, planting the spuds and anything else vaguely "seasonal" is just having to wait.

There are tulips and herbs under here somewhere

But gardeners need to do something and so we did what we could and embarked on some plant pot shuffling, potting on, tidying up oh, and plenty of label washing too.

One day these will be lunch!

Moving autumn sown sweet peas up a pot size, pricking out the lettuces and potting on the Sweet Banana peppers was just about as close to gardening as we managed, still it satisfied the need for dirt under the fingernails, if not for fresh air. And let's face it the air is very fresh out there!

Long pots for the sweet peas in case they have to stay in them for a while.

Next job was shunting propagators around the house chasing the light  - the poor little tomatoes we sowed a few weeks ago are looking decidedly leggy and not particularly healthy - just looking at them makes me feel guilty. Still there's time yet I suppose and worse comes to the worse we will re-sow but it's not what any gardener wants to see at this time of the year and makes me twitchy and fearful for the state of the Autumn store cupboard.

But for now we'll stay our hands and no more sowing for a few weeks in the hope that April will bring with it warmer days and longer evenings.

Fingers crossed eh?

Moving forward

With the move into March we have finally had chance to start preparing ground at the lottie.

We now have beds cleared of weeds, covered in cardboard and layered with composted bark mix ready to set the spuds into in a few weeks time. Last year we tried this no dig method for the first time and found the spuds easy to harvest and clean to pick. We garden on light sand at the lotty which means that when we used the trenches we both grew up with we'd end up losing spuds deep into the ground and find volunteers popping up in the same place years later which completely mucked up our rotation and held the door open for all kinds of bugs and diseases. So the future is beds mulched with compost and spuds sheltered by grass clippings.

sleeping beds waiting for seed potatoes

Weirdly snow and freezing hail returned today so after preparing the bed for these beauties yesterday our gardening endeavours were confined to indoors.

More patience required - too cold to put these out yet

So we set to sowing tomatoes - 4 different sorts - the ever-reliable Moneymaker; sweet little Garden Pearl; Heritage Seed Library variety Salt Spring Sunrise and the little plum shaped cooking tomato Roma - and after blight wrecked the crops again last year we'll just be growing in the conservatory and hoping for more success.

Broad Bean risotto in waiting

Other new starters this weekend - Pea Early Onward; Crimson-flowered Broad Bean; Leek King Richard; Oregano and the delicious orange scented thyme.

Orange Thyme - Bees love it and so do I.

All we need now is for a bit of sun and some warmth and then we can start potting things on and filling the rest of the windowsills. Can't wait :)

Pondering on Plastic

Friday was Transition Stratford's monthly Film Friday and this month we watched the wonderful Clean Bin Project about a Canadian couple who challenged each other to live for a year without producing any waste. This funny but thoughtful film provoked much discussion and gave me plenty to think about as I plan this month's shopping list. The stand out comment for me came when Grant was questioning the validity of what they were doing but Jen pointed out that so many of the current environmental problems - The Big Things - Global Warming; Peak Oil; Air Pollution; even I suspect Famine and World Hunger - would be sorted or at least reduced if only we could cut down on over consumption and by extension waste.

Plastic- What do you do with yours?

Underlining this was a feature mid-film about the plastic island in the middle of the Pacific and the alarming rate at which Albatrosses which nest on Midway Island are bringing it ashore - plastic floating in the water looks like food to an albatross and other sea life you see - and even more alarmingly they are feeding it to their young and killing them. If you want to know more about this and see some heart wrenching photos of plastic-choked skeletons then head over to the Chris Jordan website. To be honest even if you don't want to see the photos you really should try to look at them, but be warned they aren't pretty. Chris helped produce the Journey to Midway film which sought to highlight the problems being caused by human waste in an area about as far away from human habitation as you can get and still be on the planet.

For those of us in the UK wanting to know more about reducing the waste we generate by changing the way we shop the team over at The Rubbish Diet Blog have plenty of ideas. If you are up to it they have issued the Rubbish Diet Challenge and our own Transition group will be re-issuing the Plastic Challenge later in the year.

The overriding message for this weekend is that if we use it we need to take more responsibility for it and that brings me back to the old environmentalist mantra - Reduce, Reuse, Repair & Recycle - and whilst Recycle gets all the headlines the most important of these by far has to be Reduce.

So it looks like there is no hiding place for me - time to look at that bin and revisit the shopping list. Will you do the same?

Dreaming of Summer

One of the great things about gardening is feeling the seasons pass, being able to watch the subtle changes in the plants and wildlife that share our plot and planning meals to come. It slows you down, calms your thoughts and just makes you feel, well, better. But sometimes, usually around this time of year your fingers get twitchy, your mind gets restless and no matter your good intentions, the light just can't return fast enough.

So what to do? Stalk the snowdrops?

Harass the hellebores?

Chivvy the chillis?

Or plot, plan, scheme and dream of Summer & Strawberries

Sunshine and Sunflowers

Let the Season begin!

This weekend has, against the odds, been a great one for gardening. Now you may think I am mad - it's been wet, cold, dark and downright impossible to get onto the plot but m'dears we have gardened.

Saturday saw us dusting down the heated propagator, sieving the compost and sowing the first of this year's seeds. Chillis and sweet peppers both need heat and a long growing season so now is the time for us to get them started. This year we're growing jalapeno chillis plus sweet peppers from the Heritage Seed Library - Sweet Banana & Soror Sarek and the Real Seeds Catalogue - Kaibi Round #2. Soror Sarek and Kaibi are old favourites and indeed old seed so we've sown quite a few in case they struggle to germinate - if they all come good then we'll just have extra plants to give away at the Transition & Allotment Society Plant Swaps in the spring. Sweet Banana, however is new to us so it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Brussels 2007

We also got an early start with our brassicas - Bedford Winter Harvest Brussels Sprouts for him, I loathe them with a passion it has to be said but the Other Half loves them so each year we give them a go - and Snowball Cauliflowers. Cauliflowers are one crop we fail miserably with year after year but as I love cauliflower cheese I'm determined to give them one more try this year. Keep your fingers crossed folks

Finally we're trying our luck with an early sowing of lettuce and basil - both of which should be ok but it may be a little too dark and cold just now. We're sorely missing home-grown greens at the moment and that's only going to get worse so let's hope these little seeds make it for salads in late March.

Oh and remember those seed spuds from the potato day? - They're now safely chitting in the attic. Let's hope it stops raining long enough for us to prepare their beds before March.

Food for thought

Today our Transition group held a shared lunch before its quarterly members' meeting. We all took a plate of something and then sat and chatted about life, the universe and everything before the business of the day began.

Sitting there watching folk take a bit of this and that, compliment each other's food and swap recipes set me thinking about how few opportunities I now have to do this kind of thing and I realised that I kind of miss it. There is something very elemental & satisfying about preparing food for other people to share then trying things that they have taken the time and trouble to select or make for you. Now some of us are lucky and still have enough family around to gather together and share a meal once in a while or we may go out to a restaurant with loved ones or occasionally colleagues but I realised today how rarely I sit around with acquaintances and literally break bread with them. How focussed on me and my life I have become and how little time and trouble I now take to find out more about the people & community that surround me and what makes them tick.

So as the year turns, the days lengthen and we celebrate Imbolc with all its hope for new beginnings it feels like it's time for me to try to change that, to look outside my comfort zone a little and take more time to get involved.

Snowdrops - Heralds of the New Year

Spuds, seeds and sunshine

The start of this weekend saw snow still laying on the ground but thankfully the extra coating that had been threatened by  our much maligned forecasters didn't appear so t'other half and I actually managed a "Day Out". Now a "Day Out" in our lives deserves capitals because they are quite rare - usually we plan or express a possibility of doing something not connected to home or work only to have something go wrong and plans change. This weekend it didn't :)

Spuds, Glorious Spuds!

So off we went to the wonderful Garden Organic Potato Day - okay so connected to the lotty but it wasn't at the plot and it involved a little journey so definitely gets to count as a Day Out :) After a dip into the Seed Swap area - and yes we did come away with a few packets but our resolve held and we gave more than we took so felt quite virtuous-  we then explored the potato marquee.  This little treasure house was a revelation, dozens of varieties under one roof, many of which were completely new to us. Of course, we came away with a great selection of seed spuds - two first earlies - our usual suspects the Pentland Javelin and new to us Winston, second early Wilja which is a change from Kestrel for us and for maincrops, 2 different blight-resistant Sarpo varieties from the Sarvari Trust, Mira and Blue Danube. Now if you haven't heard about the work of the wonderful folk at Sarvari please follow the link - and if you grow maincrop potatoes please consider Sarpos - they are GM free, resistant to the dreaded blight and if the ones we tasted are anything to go by they are truly tasty spuds.  The team from Sarvari gave a really interesting talk about their work and deserve much more support than they currently get.

Once we 'd finished in the potato tent we explored the gardens - still covered in icy snow they gave us a useful peek at what thrived or at least survived the winter - the main one being Chard or Silverbeet as I've heard it called and also something called Portuguese Cabbage which will require some investigation. We'll certainly be looking to plant Silverbeet at our plot this coming year as our usual perpetual spinach and other brassicas really didn't like the super soggy summer & autumn we had followed closely by a freezing January and we've missed our greens this winter.

Sole Surviving Kale plant

So that's another allotment area planned and ideas for a few others gathered, all that remains is the work so here's hoping for some dry weekends to come as this one has given us a real feeling of a new season to look forward to.

Bringing back the colour

This week it snowed, and as is usual for this county a proper covering of the dreaded white stuff has closed schools & caused chaos across the country. More importantly it's buried my plants, frozen the pond and made any work up the plot impossible for the time-being. So as I looked out on to a snow covered garden over the weekend my thoughts have turned to the importance of flowers. I love flowers - in the garden, around the allotment and of course, in the house. They feed the pollinators, help drive away unwanted pests from our food crops and cheer the soul.

This is why over the last few years we have grown them in increasing numbers - not just the traditional companions of nasturtiums and calendula but also tulips and daffodils, sweet williams and cornflowers, penstemons and sweet peas, sunflowers and cosmos. A seasonal succession of colour and scent which not only brings untold numbers of bees and butterflies to the plot but also means that I don't have to rely on imported hot-house grown blooms to brighten my home or synthetic fragrances to scent it.

Now what to grow this year? This week was also my birthday and the OH has given me the gift of flower seeds for this year's garden, so to add to my saved seeds of Cosmos, Calendula, Blue Cornflowers and Sweet Williams we now have Candytuft, Sunflowers, Knautia, Black Cornflowers, Didiscus, Sweet Peas, Cerinthe and Scabious all chosen from the wonderful Higgledy Garden website. So it may be dark, cold and white outside but like Leo Lionni's little mouse Frederick  I'll dream and tell tales of colours until the light returns and we can begin sowing again.

Banishing the Winter Blues

After a December of flooding, flu and other obstacles we finally managed a trip to my £40-a-year therapist this morning. The skies were blue, the puddles frozen and the ground so hard it crunched beneath our feet but boy was it glorious :)

Now I'm a pretty sedentary creature by nature but one thing I have come to realise over the last few years is if I don't get outside and feel the sun on my face, the wind in my hair and get dirt under my finger nails on a regular basis then I become a lousy human being and a real misery to live with. The allotment has become my refuge, a plot that not only feeds the body but feeds the soul too. So this morning we began tending it in earnest. Whilst the buzzards keened overhead and the blue tits, blackbirds and robins supervised we pruned the apple trees. Beginning with removing the dead and diseased and moving on to the crossing and awkwardly positioned limbs, we then freed them from the encroaching brambles and nettles and checked them over ready for the new year's growing season.

Whilst the big cookers are now a bit smaller and this year will give a reduced crop hopefully they will be a bit healthier going into the future and the little cox-like eater will have a bit more room to breath. I know how it feels.

Planning in the dark

With the weather set to take a chilly turn this weekend and the days just too short to risk sowing anything yet most of our plotting will need to be of the mental kind for a while longer. So what do we have and what do we need?

We're exceptionally lucky and have an allotment plot that is about 150ft long by about 35ft wide giving us plenty of room for the standards plus a few experiments.

After five years we have a range of well-established fruit that was already on the plot when we took it on plus other varieties we've popped in.

Dreaming of Summer

 The old ladies include gooseberries - although I've no idea of the variety they make a wonderful pinky-amber coloured jam; blackcurrants - again these are mostly of unknown varieties but unsurprisingly they also make a lovely jam which is much loved by my mum-outlaw; 2 old cooking apples and 2 eaters including a pretty pink-tinged early variety that's quite sweet to taste and a little Cox-like tree that's a bit tarter on the the tongue; a crab apple that we tend to leave for the tweeters; a very decrepit greengage and a rather beaten up plum that we keep trying to rejuvenate without much luck but due to their age and sheer staying power deserve lots of respect plus some hedgerows filled with blackcurrants and bullaces that supplement the cultivated crops wonderfully.

Hubble Bubble.....wild plum (bullace) and apple jam

In addition we have a range of raspberries that always seem to thrive where we don't want them and struggle a tad where we do, an enormous bully of a whitecurrant that is more useful as a hedge than anything else, several hazels that have been acquired from friends and freecycle but have yet to produce any useful nuts (at least that we've managed to get to before the wildlife) and a couple of blueberries that haven't really thrived but we can't quite bring ourselves to give up on. Finally there are the strawberries but after the year we've just had they are all about ready to be replaced so there we are that's the first item on this year's shopping plan. Musing aloud- sorry carefully thought out planning -really does work :)

New beginnings

As we move beyond the shortest day my thoughts begin to turn to the new growing season and what it may bring. Last year had it's ups and downs, the beans thrived and we have enough in store to see us through the winter and on into spring but the roots, brassicae and squashes did next to nothing and for the first year since we began growing our own we had no pumpkins, winter squashes or greens to get us through the dark. The shock of buying both butternut squash and brussels sprouts for our celebrations emphasised just how much our plot usually saves us.Thanks to our wonderful little dehydrator we managed to save enough onions, leeks and garlic to continue creating stews, soups and pasta sauces until the new year harvests come in - left to their own devices the combined perils of leaf miner and rot would have confined them to the compost heap long before December. The tomatoes succumbed to the dreaded blight - great for the Garden Organic trial we were conducting not so good for the freezer stores. The potatoes were harvested before blight got them but they are starting to sprout now so will need to be used up soon.
So what to grow this year? Planning is half the fun of growing - the anticipation of that first broad bean risotto or pea snacked straight from the pod not to mention the delight of that first bunch of home grown flowers to brighten the house. Seed stores need to be sorted, varieties need to be chosen, new-to-us crops decided upon (last year we tried out wheat for the first time) and spaces cleared. Which brings me to the blog - a late starter but the aim is to record what we grow, how much we harvest and what we do with it, mostly for our own interest but maybe for others too.