It’s been a while since our last Allotment Diary. The year gets away from you and it’s hard to keep taking photos and writing something when you’re in the middle of harvesting, weeding, watering and everything else in between. It’s also nice to just enjoy something for what it is and make a point of leaving anything with a computer chip inside of it at home, and just getting on with what needs doing in peace and quiet.
Last year was definitely more hit than miss. Overall we have to be really pleased with what we managed to grow. We hope you enjoyed some of the food we bought to some classes, mainly Kale & Courgettes which we had plenty of.
No Surprises This Year…
There are no surprises this year with the plots, we know where we’re at (unless we’re given yet another one to look after!) it’s just been more a matter of planning what’s going where.
After four years it also feels like the first year we’re actually able get into some kind of crop rotation, which we can now hopefully stick to as we move the beds down each year, this should make deciding what to grow where a lot easier and keep the soil nice and healthy, especially for Brassicas. We’ll also be trying to fit the right kind of cover crops between planting vegetables to keep building up the soil.
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Cover Crops
We’d planted lots of cover crops last year to dig in roughly four to five weeks before planting out this year. We grew Phacelia, Mustards, Clovers, Fields Beans, Peas and various grasses. We’d had success with most of them and a few failures with others but overall mostly successes. Cover crops can draw, hold or fix nitrogen and some are really bulky when “killed” to break back down into the soil, they also attract lots of insects that can be of benefit to your plants for many different reasons.
Mustard
We didn’t take any photos of our mustard (the photo below is a stock image but if you squat down low and squint, it’s not far off how it looked on the plot!) but it grew really well, we planted it in a while ago now, after harvesting our Potatoes and Broad Beans. It grew to about three to four foot tall and was covered in thousands of yellow flowers which attracted all kinds of critters.
We dug this in after three months and let it rot down which took about a month. We tried to sow a grazing rye to “over winter” after this but it never really germinated. We’re not sure if it was too soon after the mustard or too late in the year - the grazing rye is there, but a bit “patchy”. We didn’t have much luck with the grazing rye anywhere we sowed it.
We’ll be planting most of our root vegetables in this bed so we’ll see how it goes… We tried Mustard in some other places to see how it did over Winter and while it did make it past December the January frosts finished it off which we sort of expected but at least we know for next time.
Field Beans
Elsewhere we had really good results with our Field Bean cover crop. These were planted during October and survived over the winter really well and we’ve only just dug them in (about a month before putting our potatoes out). We planted them about nine inches apart, and they are full of nitrogen which you can see in the photos below. The nitrogen will stay in the soil for the next crop to draw on…
We’ve also put Field Beans in where we’re planting our Brassicas this year (Roots, Legumes, Brassicas in the rotation) but these won’t be dug in yet so it will be interesting to see how much more they grow over the next couple of months. With a bit of luck we’ll be able to harvest the pods from them to use for this winters cover crops to save a bit of money but we’ll see…
We did try another legume cover crop which was Forage Pea but I don’t think they had a good enough run up before the cold weather. They are there but are clearly not going to do anything so we’ve put manure down over this now seeing as there’s what seems to be some of the best manure we’ve had for years. We’ll definitely try them again though but hopefully a bit sooner so they’ve at least got a chance.
Grasses
The best cover crop results though have definitely come from the grasses we’ve sown. The beds with the grasses have grown beautifully thick, and have put down some pretty deep roots which should keep the soil nice and aerated. This will be left in places until about a month before we put in our courgettes and squashes. We’ll cut it down, and leave it on top to slowly rot down, while we plug in our squashes and courgettes. It should work as a superb mulch for these thirsty plants - well, that’s the plan anyway…
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Digging It All In
In truth I was dreading digging in some of the cover crops (especially after having hurt my back recently) but in all honesty, it’s been easier than I was expecting as the roots keep the soil from compacting. The beds with an Alfalfa cover crop in particular seemed like the roots really did aerate the soil.
The grass was cut down first and then roughly dug over (not that deep) just to leave rot down before planting in our potatoes. In a few cases where we’ve used grass this won’t be dug into the soil, just left to rot down, it will just depend on what is being panted in. We’ve tried as best we can to make sure the cover crops fit in with a rotation order.
Manure To The Rescue
Whilst for the most part we’re really pleased with how the cover crops did, a few beds were complete failures and haven’t really had anything added back into the soil over winter. We missed out on manure last year (as we were experimenting with cover crops ) and it’s not always guaranteed to come in but fortunately two huge great piles came in in early March (it’s apparently the best in years). It’s a bit “fresh” but we’ve decided to put a thin layer on some beds, and keep raking it in once a week or so.
Seeds
We started planting our seeds the last couple of weeks. The slow burners like Aubergines, Peppers, Chilli’s and Leeks are germinating on our bedroom windowsill, the Aubergines in particular are doing really well and have already been potted on!
Broad Beans have been directly sown outside too, hopefully the mice won’t run off with them all! We did sow these in the greenhouse last year but they took up too much space. We’re expecting more collateral damage this way though!
All of our Cabbages, Kale, Broccoli, Kohlrabi, Chard & Celery have been sown into cells with Courgettes, Squashes, Tomatoes and Sweetcorn to follow over the next couple of weeks (actually, some of these have already germinated within a few days on the windowsill!).
We’ve also multi-sown more Beetroot again as they did really well this way last year; if it wasn’t for the multi-sown Beetroot, we would have struggled as we had to re-sow them a few times and it ended up taking up a lot of time. They weren’t ready to harvest until late in the year - we notice they have an “earthier” taste if they’re sown later in the season and just don’t have the same flavour.
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Garlic & Onions
We planted these in October last year, and they’ve been growing steadily ever since. Last year we didn’t put them in until much later and while we did get some small cloves, they didn’t do great at all. We still haven’t had to buy Garlic all year though so we’ve not done too bad. Hopefully this year they’ll do much better.
Our onions are doing well too but they did take a long time to starting showing themselves but they’re well on their way now.
It’s About To Go Hollywood…
Spring is just around the corner, which means lighter evenings for classes but it also means it’s about to get busy at the allotment! In truth though, after four years we feel we really are on top of everything (growing wise), even to the point that we were questioning whether we were starting things too late, if anything, we could have left things a little later, as last year quite a few plants were ready to go out but it was still a bit too cold for much of it and you know what they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results…
Anyway, that’s it for now. We’ll take lots of photos over the coming months. Hopefully it’ll make those of you that are so inclined try a few things in your garden, or maybe dig a vegetable patch like people used to do years ago - maybe you’ll even put your name down for an allotment! The councils are itching to turn them into blocks of flats… Oh, and remember, if it says more than “carrot” on the packet, don’t eat it!