ALLOTMENT LIVING

ALLOTMENT LIVING

The popularity of having an allotment increases every year with demand from urban dwellers without access to a decent sized garden. An allotment provides an outdoor activity, fresh air, exercise and if you get the growing sorted out fresh organically grown fruit and vegetables. People have a lot more spare time today than in the past and as urban development expands the countryside seems further away. Most foodstuffs are cheap and available from supermarkets, so fewer and fewer people see how crops are grown. Berry picking and tattie howking are distant memories of the older generation as machines now do most of this work. The allotment today is now the means of getting back to nature, learning how things are grown then appreciating new found tastes when you learn how to use and cook your home grown produce.

 In my childhood most new housing estates built in the fifties had gardens as people needed to grow some food to keep the household bills down. Everyone had a wee patch of ground to grow their potatoes, peas, swedes, cabbages, onions and every garden had some rhubarb.  Knowledge of gardening was passed on from one person to another.

Today few people want a garden, and the kids are happier at home with a computer, television and the mobile phone or other modern gadget. Nobody plays outdoors any more. Kids are growing up with very little knowledge of outdoor life.

However as most people have more leisure time there is a move back into getting involved with nature. Allotments are now seen as a place for stress busting activities with hands on experience sorting out the land to grow some organic fruit and vegetables. It provides us with plenty exercise and fresh air, plus the benefits of very healthy produce all year round once you come up with a growing plan.

Most allotment sites have a healthy waiting list which continually grows, but turnover can be quite brisk as some newcomers with romantic notions of outdoor living get quite a fright when the weeds grow faster than they can dig them out. Then there is fence, shed and greenhouse repairs every year as nothing is permanent. When one season ends in late autumn the ground will need digging. In spring it will need raking, cultivating and sowing and planting. Then just when all the land is planted up and you think about relaxing those weeds appear and are determined to take over, so out comes the hoe. This can be more exercise than you will get in the gym and an awful lot cheaper.

Once the crops mature and you taste fresh grown produce grown from your own efforts you will reap the rewards and realise no supermarket produce can compare for flavour and freshness. Your crops are all very healthy as they are all organically grown apart from a wee bit of growmore fertiliser. There is no need for chemicals to improve their shelf life and it does not matter if the size is uneven or the lettuce has a couple of slugs in it.

Most allotments today will have a small patio area to relax in once the work is complete. To cut back on the workload ground under continual cultivation can be reduced as permanent fruit bushes are planted with a ten year life or so.

Growing some flowers is now part of the modern allotment to create an attractive garden and provide cut flowers for the home.

Plant of the week

 

Potentilla fruticosa Elizabeth is a yellow flowering deciduous shrub frequently used in urban landscaping as it is easy to grow, covers the ground to keep weeds down and is in flower from early summer till autumn. It will grow up to four feet tall and is happy on most soils but flowers better on moist soils that are well drained. It is easy to propagate from cuttings taken in summer.

END

THE SUMMER HARVEST BEGINS

THE SUMMER HARVEST BEGINS

The allotment garden is now fully planted and providing an embarrassing amount of produce. We eat as much as possible, find some friend to pass on our surplus and still have plenty to pack into the freezer. A glut of courgettes and beetroot is quickly converted into delicious soups some for immediate consumption over the next three days and the rest goes into the freezer. The leaves and stems of the beetroot are also used in the soup. We waste nothing as the foliage and stems are packed with goodness.

Salads that started under a low polythene tunnel in April are still giving us spring onions and beetroot. Lettuce and radish are now into their third sowing.

Pea Kelvedon Wonder and broad bean Exhibition Long Pod have been picked, cooked and frozen. At this time of year with plenty of warm sunshine and just enough moisture they have been very tender and full of flavour. I have another three sowings of Pea Hurst Green Shaft planted at different times to give a succession of cropping over a few months.

The broad beans really grew very tall and the cropping has been huge, so this will give us very nutritious soup over winter.

My Purple Top Milan turnip all ran to seed so this crop was a complete failure, but my Golden Ball turnips were just fine and quickly replaced them.

First early potato Lady Christl suffered some blackleg so I dug up a few shaws. The potatoes were brilliant, with a good shape and colour and a lot of spuds. This potato has an excellent flavour and is also great in salads. I lost a few spuds from the blackleg, but the rest have been fine. There is a fair bit of potato blight around our allotments as we have suffered a few days of heavy rainfall with warm weather so I will keep an eye on the foliage and may have to lift earlier than planned if the blight gets serious.

Fruit crops

Strawberries are now just about finished as are the summer rasps, but autumn rasps will come later. We have been eating fresh strawberries from a range of varieties for two months, and still had plenty for the freezer for jam, compote and summer puddings.

On checking out last years soft fruit picking dates 2014 is running three weeks ahead of 2013.

The mild frost free winter allowed most of the young fruit buds on our outdoor fig to survive the winter so we now look forward to this huge crop ripening up. The Brown Turkey fig size is quite large and the first ripe ones are ready for picking at the end of this month.

Blackcurrants, redcurrants and saskatoons are all giving great crops, but gooseberries are unbelievable. Every shoot is bowed down to the ground with the weight of berries. However there is some losses as the very hot sunshine in the middle of July cooked many berries, which swelled up and did not taste good. The crop is so huge that I can afford to lose a few and still have plenty left over for stewing, compote and wine making. This is one of my favourite wines and I should get about six or more demijohns of wine from my two bushes.

Last year I gave my Ben Connan blackcurrants a severe pruning. There may be a slight reduction in weight of crop, but berry size is now enormous. They were even bigger than my new Big Ben blackcurrants, though they are still young and will have their day next year.

Saskatoon bushes are all under nets, but good growth has taken them up to six feet and pushes up my fruit cage net. The birds sit on the top of the net and get a fair bit of my crop, but it has been such a good year for soft fruit that there is still plenty left for me.

Anna has made a brilliant Saskatoon jam by adding in some rhubarb to add some acidity and help setting.

Only disappointment this year has been the top fruit. There were plenty of flowers on apples, plums, pears, cherries and peach, but there were no bees around to pollinate them. I hand pollinated the peach but it was not successful as only one peach remains. The pear has one pear on it and the cherry only had about six cherries which the blackie got before they ripened up.

The apples and plums have just a light crop, but they are still growing.

Plant of the week

 

Crocosmia Lucifer makes a bright splash of colour with its vivid red flower spikes in mid summer. It is an herbaceous clump forming plant which grows about four feet tall. It is easy to grow on most soils but preferring moist rich well drained soils in full sun or partial shade.

END

A ROSE FOR EVERY OCCASION

A ROSE FOR EVERY OCCASION

Dawn Chorus

Roses have always had pride of place in my garden. As a young trainee gardener in the sixties education was very important to produce first class gardeners who would maintain Dundee’s parks and open spaces to a very high standard. To achieve this we had a five year apprenticeship with day release classes and to get a wide experience all apprentices were shifted from one park to another  including a spell in the greenhouses and nursery and even a few months in the office to see how landscape planning and design were done. You met a lot of very knowledgeable and experienced gardeners who all had different gardening interests. There were carnation growers, tuberous begonia exhibitors, rock garden specialists, vegetable growers and fruit growers, but it was the rose growers that earned my deepest respect. There was always something very romantic about roses and it was a time when there popularity was never greater. There were numerous specialist rose growers all over the country. We had Crolls in Dundee and the nursery in Camperdown grew them by the thousand to meet the demand as our Parks Director wanted to spread colour and beauty all over the town.

Mme Alfred Carriere

Our training included a summer spell in the rose fields budding roses for weeks at a time. Those moments stayed with me all my life and I frequently bought in rose briar to bud my own roses as I travelled all over the UK.

When I went to College at Writtle near Chelmsford in 1968 I took on a special project to grow a rose pot plant using softwood cuttings of the scented hybrid tea rose Wendy Cussons. One pot took three rooted cuttings and I kept them dwarf with a growth retardant. It worked brilliantly and I new this could be worth pursuing, but my future destiny lay in another direction, so I left this task for others to follow and perfect.

Roses have always been a must in my garden in beds, borders, along fences and

E H Morse

clothing walls no matter which way they faced.

I keep some on my allotment for cutting for the house so a scented rose with a well shaped head is important. Rose growing for cut flowers is a major industry and breeders have worked very hard to find a range of roses that last long in a vase after cutting. Just a pity they never found one that was also scented. We recently received a gorgeous bouquet of roses and lilies that lasted a good fortnight. The roses still looked good after all the lilies had gone over, but it was the lilies that had the outstanding scent.

Graham Thomas

Today even those with the smallest garden can still plant a rose as patio roses have become very popular.

Boundary fences are a perfect location for numerous climbers and ramblers and if you have ample border space shrub roses will make great specimens if allowed to grow with the minimum of pruning.

Always check out the nature of the rose bush before you buy them as there is a massive varience in growth from one to another. My climber Mme Alfred Carrier is easily over ten feet tall and showing no signs of slowing down. My other climber Dublin bay on a south facing wall has had to be stopped at about 18 feet tall as it has reached the roof.

This has been a great year for the roses as it has been relatively dry and black spot has not yet been too serious. They have really been brilliant as our hot summer continues.

Plant of the week

Yucca filamentosa known as the needle palm is a broad leaved exotic evergreen growing in clumps with the flower spikes of cream coloured flowers up to ten feet tall in summer. Although very hardy it prefers a sheltered spot with well drained soil. It has a distinct architectural form that looks great beside walls, courtyards and buildings.

END

SUMMER STRAWBERRIES

SUMMER STRAWBERRIES

Once you pick your first completely ripe strawberry from your own strawberry patch you can taste a wee bit of heaven and you know summer has arrived. We all strive to get them as early as possible but they must be allowed to ripen fully on the plant as once picked the ripening process stops. They do not improve with storing.

The earliest variety I grow is Mae and I usually grow two rows, one of which I protect with a low polythene tunnel to enhance ripening by a couple of weeks. This also protects them from rain splashing on the fruit and keeps blackbirds from pecking at them. However I also lay fresh straw along the rows to give complete protection from rain splashes. Strawberries under tunnels will need irrigation during any dry spells so the straw is quite essential. Once flowering starts the fruit will need pollinating from bees so lift up the polythene six inches or so on all sunny days.

The row of Mae not under a tunnel will give me a succession of fruit before my other main crops start. This row will need to be protected from birds by netting, though I have noticed that on our allotment site where there is ample food for birds this are not a big problem. Several plot holders do not bother to net and do not get much damage from the local blackbirds. Last year I did not net my strawberries and only lost a few from birds.

I picked my first few berries from my tunnelled row on 30^th May this year, and hope to continue to pick fresh fruit from a range of varieties well into October. This is possible with perpetual varieties such as Flamenco. This perpetual variety is not a heavy cropper, but you get a continual supply of berries from mid summer till autumn. Flamenco has a great flavour but some fruits are often misshapen. They will continue to fruit into November even after a few frosts. They look great and very tempting but lack of warmth and sunshine produces a large berry with the texture and taste of a wee bright red turnip.

There are numerous varieties of strawberry available from nurseries and garden centres all over UK, but as they are grown in so many different localities you need to try several varieties to find the best ones to suit your area and soil conditions. Over the years breeders have improved varieties by creating disease resistance from red thread, then botrytis grey mould. Now varieties are bred to be more successful under polythene tunnel production and demand from supermarkets require strawberries to be available over a long period. We have excellent main crop varieties such as Elsanta, then for the earliest fruit Mae, Honeoye and Elvira. The main season can be extended with later varieties such as Rhapsody, Symphony and Florence.

There are several perpetual varieties to try, but some are very shy to produce runners so it is very difficult to increase your stock if you find a good variety. Flamenco does not have this problem.

To keep the strawberry bed in good form to crop it for three years, cut off all the old leaves immediately after fruiting has finished and remove the straw. This can all go onto the compost heap. New leaves will soon appear to feed the crown for initiating fruit buds for the following year.

Autumn is a great time to plant up new rows with freshly dug runners. Make sure they go into soil that is weed free and well cultivated adding in plenty of organic matter as the bed will be down for several years. Plant in rows three feet apart with the plants spaced a foot apart along the row. At times with some varieties having plenty of runners I double up my spacing along the row to get a bigger crop in the first year.

If land is not available till spring then order cold stored runners to plant from March onwards.

During the growing season you can remove all the runners so the crowns produce the biggest fruit, or allow some to grow to form a matted row. This gives a heavier crop but sometimes with smaller fruit in the second and third years.

Plant of the week

Shrub rose Ispahan is a pink highly scented old fashioned Damask rose growing up to eight feet tall. The leaves are quite tough so it does not suffer much from the normal range of rose diseases.

It is a very old rose introduced from the Middle East in the 13^th century during the Crusades. It can still be found growing in the wild in Iran.

It is one of the first shrub roses to flower and although it has its main flush in summer it will continue to flower till the autumn.

END