After a successful start to the trading year, we only have a limited amount of seed potatoes left in stock now with many varieties having already sold out. In order to clear the remaining stock we have halved the price of the seed potatoes in the members’ shop down to 50p per Kg.
There’s still time (just) to get your seed potatoes, onions and shallots planted out so why not come to the members’ shop this Sunday (10am-12pm) to take advantage of the half price seed potatoes?
We’ve also reduced the price of the remaining onion sets by 50%, down to 20p per 200g.
If you’ve just taken on an allotment, now is a good time to prepare an area and plant some seed potatoes. It’s a good way to break up the soil AND enjoy a harvest this summer.
The members’ shop is open every Sunday 10am-12pm. Click here [Link removed] to see a full list of potatoes as well as more information about each variety.
Finally, winter is beginning to recede, we can now begin to sow seeds and plant outdoors. However, we must take in to consideration the weather we had last year. With the freezing temperatures and snow from the Beast from the East! Traditionally, March is a good time to plant out your first early potatoes that have been chitting away. It’s best to do this at the end of the month but check the ground is not too wet and take in to consideration anything Mother Nature has in store for us.
Chitting potatoes!
If you have bought some onions and shallots from the members’ shop, now is a good time to plant them out. Make sure that you cover them with netting to protect your onions and shallots from the birds. I have learnt the hard way! They love to pull them out of the ground! If the ground is too wet, it might be better to plant onions or shallots in small pots or seed trays with multi-purpose compost in a greenhouse or in a cold frame to get them started.
If you have not bought your onions or shallots sets yet, we still have some in stock that you can buy any Sunday 10am-12pm at the members’ shop. Click here to find out more information on our current stock.
If you have over wintering brassicas, it’s a good time to give them a feed of sulphate of ammonia. Sulphate of ammonia is a fast-acting nitrogen fertiliser which encourages leafy growth. This is particularly useful for the brassica family as well as lettuce, spinach, rhubarb, leeks and onions. I added one handful (45g) per square metre, mixed it in to the soil and watered it.
Sulphate of ammonia is available in the members’ shop for £0.80 per kg.
Seedlings can get quite leggy if there is not enough light at this time of the year. It’s good practice to wait until mid-March to start sowing your seeds, unless you have a grow light.
In March, you can sow the following seeds outdoors:
Broad beans and peas (available in the members’ shop)
Cabbages, sprouting broccoli, cauliflower and calabrese
Leeks, onions and spring onions
Lettuces and spinach
Parsnips
Sow undercover:
Beetroot and radishes
Carrots and turnips
Cucumbers
Lettuces, oriental leaves, rocket, salad leaves
Sow indoors
Aubergines
Chillies
Tomatoes
Cauliflower Aubergine
March is a good time to prune your roses. Roses can be pruned quite hard to promote vigorous growth. You can find some good advice on how to prune your roses here. Once you have pruned your roses, give them a feed with rose fertiliser to give them a head start. We sell rose fertiliser in the shop, click here to see more information.
As the start of the new growing season approaches, we thought we’d start a new monthly round up of jobs you can do on your plot; starting with suggestions from some of the seed companies.
Whilst it is always tempting to sow seeds because the seed packet tells you to, local knowledge and keeping an eye on what Mother Nature has in store, are much better barometers for knowing what to do and when.
We’ll start this month with Marshalls Seeds’ monthly update, which you can read here. Do bear in mind all the seeds companies are giving us advice…but also trying to sell us their products! However, you can usually pick up some useful tips…and a recipe or two!
Kings Seeds’ blog post for February includes several flower-based jobs including getting your dahlias ready for re-growing if you dug them up over the winter. While Thompson & Morgan’s post is nicely split into the various categories of gardening, including jobs for your fruit garden.
If you’re looking for a useful website with lots of monthly tips and recipes, you can’t go wrong with Allotments & Gardens. See their list of jobs for February here.
Most will agree though, that veg plants like chillies, peppers and tomatoes can be started now. All these need a good amount of heat to help the seeds germinate, so a warm room or heated propagator is what’s needed. I’m about to get mine started as soon as I’ve warmed up my seed compost which has been stored outside. However, I’ve also been lucky enough to overwinter a pepper plant which is already flowering and producing fruit!
Overwintered banana pepper
Whatever you are sowing, most companies recommend you sow your seeds in a seed compost rather than multi-purpose and we have two types in stock in the members’ shop – Clover Seed Compost and Levingtons F2 Seed Compost.
There hasn’t been too much going on down the allotment for the last couple of months …… even been too cold for weeds and just a bit too wet to work!
In the meantime I have been puzzling over no-dig potatoes. How does that work? My initial solution was to avoid the problem by not growing potatoes this year. However the gardening fraternity are a generous lot and by April I had been asked to grow a row of spuds for a friend.
Up in Weston, the farmers also use no-dig but on a far larger scale. As it happens they are trialling no-dig potatoes this season, so of course I wanted to know how they went about it.
Translated into allotment terms, we start with some levelled ground and place our chitted potatoes on the surface at the usual spacing.
Level ground for potatoes
Next comes a layer of manure or compost or both.
Add manure on top of chitted seed potatoes
On top of this is a layer of straw. This will benefit from a good soaking once it’s in place.
Add a layer of straw
The top layer is grass cuttings – obviously not from grass treated for weeds & moss & such like ! The grass will rot down, and whilst its doing that, it stops the straw blowing about. Thinking ahead to pigeons etc. picking through all those layers, I covered the whole lot with some pea-netting.
Cover with grass cuttings
Apparently this method will produce potatoes that are a better shape and more regular sized that traditional cultivation. It also avoids stabbing your crop with the garden fork, because you don’t dig them up to harvest and should mean that rogue tubers don’t get left behind in the soil.
It feels like it’s happened a lot on our plots this spring, maybe more so than usual, but quite a few rhubarb plants have sprouted flower stalks. Poor rhubarb, it’s only doing what comes naturally and that is to ensure it’s own propagation, but seeing a flower head sprout in your rhubarb patch is not something an allotment gardener wants to see.
Flower stalk emerging from the centre of a crown
There are several possible reasons for this. Firstly it is more like to occur in more mature rhubarb plants where the crowns are at least three years old.
Some traditional, old-fashioned varieties are more prone to bolting but if there’s one plant you are likely to inherit on an allotment, it’s a rhubarb and unless you plant a crown yourself, or grow one from seed, you are rarely likely to know the variety of the plant you have inherited.
As it is a spring vegetable (yes rhubarb is classed as a vegetable even though it’s most commonly eaten as a dessert), rhubarb does prefer cooler weather. This last winter has been cooler than some recent ones, particularly with the amount of snow we have had, but combine that with the warmer temperatures we’ve had this month, and it might just confuse a plant enough to think ‘Hey! I need to produce some seed!’
The main reason why allotment gardeners want to avoid their plants producing flower stalks is that in doing so all the plant’s energy is diverted towards producing that flower stalk and away from producing leaf stems. And when the only reason you are growing a plant is to harvest its leaf stems, that’s not what you want to happen. It will also weaken the crown as a result.
So what can you do if you find your rhubarb has bolted? The first thing is to cut out the flower stalk straightaway and do so as close to the base of the plant as possible. Use a knife as the stalk is thicker and harder to remove by twisting and pulling as you would do when harvesting the leaf stalks.
Ideally you want to remove those flower stalks as soon as you spot a seed pod forming. Again use a sharp knife to cut it.
Flower stalk and seed podSeed pod emerging
If your crown is a few years old, dividing it when it’s dormant over the winter will ‘reset’ the maturity clock and should ensure it doesn’t bolt again for a few years. In fact dividing your crown every five or six years is good practice anyway.
And if you’re too late and you have a lovely long flower stem? Cut the stalk out as before. Apparently rhubarb flowers last a long time and make an unusual flower arrangement!
It may seem strange to be writing a post about what to sow in April, when April has nearly been and gone. However, this year has been a classic example of allotment gardeners needing to be guided by the weather and not by what it says on the back of a seed packet.
Normally, you would be able to sow most things from the end of March and into April. Generally the ground has warmed up sufficiently for seeds to be sown outside on our plots if they are being sown direct. However, if you remember, mid March saw a blanket of snow here in Hertfordshire which put paid to any idea of getting the season started for several weeks. The weather has improved greatly since, to the extreme of having a mini heatwave a week ago.
So what can you do when the weather is so up and down? Fleece or mini polytunnels can be used to warm seed beds and areas where direct sowing is going to be taking place, and can also be employed if the overnight temperatures plummet.
Root crops such as beetroot, radish, early carrots and parsnips can be sown this month. Make a narrow drill and sow the seeds thinly, cover up, water and hope! I often feel my first sowings don’t take. Beetroot can be started off in modules if you prefer and then transplanted once they have put on a bit of growth. Some people sow radish and parsnips in the same row. Radish will germinate quickly and can often be harvested before the parsnips (which are particularly slow to germinate) get going. I like to sow my parsnips in groups of three. The seeds are quite large and relatively easy to handle and if you get a little cluster of similar looking ‘weeds’ growing, you know it’s the parsnips!
Brassicas can also be sown now either in a seed bed or in modules. Whilst they are quick to germinate, they can be a bit high maintenance after that and don’t like being moved too often and then there’s the constant battle against the dreaded cabbage white butterfly and white fly.
If you are growing flowers, many of these can be started now. Some require direct sowing whilst others prefer to be sown in modules.
Everyone loves sweet peas don’t they? A quintessential British summer scent that wafts in the air as you pass their blooms, they also make great cut flowers to bring that scent into your home.
There are two schools of thought as regards sowing sweet peas; they can be sown in the autumn and overwintered thereby allowing you to plant out stronger and bigger plants in the spring, or they can be sown later in spring itself either in pots, or if you are really late you can direct sow them in the ground as late as April.
If you are sowing them in the autumn, the growing tip will need to be pinched out to encourage secondary growth and to stop the plants getting too leggy.
As I forgot to sow mine in the autumn and with my sowing fingers starting to get a little twitchy, I have sown mine in mid January this year. I have a selection of colours and varieties. I’m pretty sure I had some lovely red ones too somewhere, but can I find them?
The seeds themselves are quite large and round and are easy to sow as a result. I filled some pots with compost the day before I needed them and brought them inside so the compost warmed up a bit. No one, not even a tiny seedling, wants to dip their toe or first shoot into cold compost!
Sweet pea seeds
I sow mine five seeds to a pot spread evenly over the surface, I then just push them in about a fingernail’s depth and then cover them. Water and place the pots somewhere fairly warm to help germination.
Hey presto! A week later the first seed has germinated!
Germination!
We’ll do an update in a month or two once the seedlings have got going a bit more.
Members may or may not have heard of this method of growing veg which has been espoused by Charles Dowding.
Clothall Road tenant, Annie, tells us more about it as we follow her on her ‘no dig’ journey.
‘I joined the library just before Christmas – I wanted learn more about pruning. What I found, was a book on compost. I like making compost. It’s very satisfying on so many levels. Perhaps that’s another diary thread for another time……but the compost book contained a chapter about no-dig gardening. How could that fail to catch the eye? That would be the best gardening revolution ever!
Several hours with Mr. Google followed, plus the chance arrival of an assortment of cardboard, and a few hours of free time over the Crimbo Limbo period. Fate decreed this was definitely worth a try.
Rather than try and convert the sceptics with technical persuasion (that can appear in later episodes), I shall just explain what I’ve done so far. Suffice it to say, ‘no-dig’ seems to mimic natural processes and therefore cannot be ‘wrong’.
One benefit of no-dig is to reduce weeding and the first step towards this is ‘sheet mulching’. I raked over a patch of ground (you can take out deep-rooted weeds if you like but this isn’t essential). Then I spread cardboard over the area. You can wet the cardboard but the ground right now is probably wet enough! Newspaper can be used instead of cardboard.
Raked earth is covered with cardboard
Then I covered the cardboard with a thick layer of compost (about 3 inches). I guess you could leave it at that, but in my garden the birds fling compost all over the place, so I covered the compost with whatever I could find – some bits of fleece, and old pea netting.
Cover the cardboard with mulch
You could use black plastic but that would also keep the rain off. Aims of this mulching are twofold, firstly the mulch prevents light getting to weeds thus eventually killing them and secondly mulch gradually decomposes and is drawn down into the soil by worm activity.
Next time I shall explain ‘the path dilemma’ and hopefully tell what my solution will be.’
Sadly, we have to report that allium leaf miner has reached deepest darkest Hertfordshire and has been spotted on both our sites here in Baldock. This pest first arrived in the UK back in 2002. It has come from mainland Europe and was confined for quite a time to southern and eastern counties but it has been gradually spreading since then.
And to make matters worse, allium leaf miner has two lifecycles each growing season and will attack all members of the allium family, particularly leeks and spring planted onions, shallots and garlic. There is no chemical protection available to allotment gardeners so the only thing that can be done is to cover crops with Enviromesh, and hope!
The adult flies appear in March or April, having overwintered in the soil. The females will feed on the leaves of your alliums before laying her eggs, usually near the base of the leaves of the plant. This can be spotted if you see lines of white dots on the leaves of your alliums.
Leaf Miner leaf damage
The eggs hatch and the resulting larvae, which are tiny white, head and legless maggots, feed on the leaves before tunnelling (hence the name leaf miner) into the leaves. At this point, fully fed, the maggots pupate within the stem of the plant.
Leaf Miner pupae
This second generation will hatch in September/October and again lay eggs at the base of the plant. It is this generation that will do the most damage to the now mature onion and leek plants. It will also overwinter in the soil ready to hatch the following spring.
It should be noted that most plants affected will tend to rot from a secondary infection from fungi or bacteria that develop in the damaged stems in the plant. The damage this fly can do is such that there can be no sign of your alliums being affected until the rotting is noticed.
So what can we do to protect our crops?
First off, employ a strict crop rotation policy. Do not grow alliums in the same area of your plot the following year.
Secondly, if your alliums do become infected, it is best to dig up the infected plants and burn them. As the pupae can survive over the winter, do not leave any infected plant debris on the soil.
Cover alliums with horticultural fleece, particularly when the flies are active in the spring and again in the autumn.
Plant out young plants after the danger of the first wave has passed and lift before the second generation is active. Whilst this may help with onions, leeks are in the ground for a long time so will not be ready for lifting in early autumn so covering them may be our only defence.
September is the month when you start to see bare patches on your allotment as you harvest and dig up this season’s plants. But worry not, there’s still things you can plant out during the autumn months and first up is autumn onion sets.
Onion sets are immature onions which have been lifted and dried to stop any further growth. You can buy several varieties from the members’ shop now. We have Radar, Shakespeare and Blood Red available.
Shakespeare onion sets
Blood Red onion sets
Plant them out now and water well and they will then resume growing over the winter months. Autumn sets are hardy so no need to worry about protecting them from frosts etc.
The sets can either be planted direct into the ground, just push them in root end first so just the tops are showing approx. 4″ – 6″ apart.
Or they can be started off in modules with compost and planted out once the top growth is a few inches high.
Either way, I like to protect mine from being pulled up by pigeons until they have established themselves by covering them with a mesh tunnel.
Autumn planted sets are usually ready for harvesting a short time before spring planted sets, so I find it’s a good way of spreading the harvesting season. Once harvested, onions store well. Just string them up and hang in a shed or bin store in my case.
