Yes, it’s that time of year again! The annual judging for Best Kept Competition will be taking place in June. A small panel of committee members from each site will judge all plots and select the best 10 plots from each site. These selected plots will then be put forward for final judging by independent judges in mid-July who will determine the best plot on each site. Each site winner will receive a prize of £25 voucher to be spent at the Members’ Shop. Of these two, the plot gaining the most points will be declared the overall winner and the tenant awarded the Basil Byrant Cup.
In addition, a separate independently judged competition will select two Best Newcomers. One from North Road and one from Clothall Road. These awards are for new tenants that started from 1 May 2022 – 30 April 2023. Each Best Newcomer will receive a prize of £25 voucher to be spent at the Members’ Shop. The winner of the Clothall Road site will be awarded the Frank Conway cup and the winner of the North Road site will be awarded the John Gray cup.
Take some inspiration from the previous plot winners in the pictures below.
Watering helps to keep our plants alive but not necessarily to thrive as they would with decent rains. Water use on both sites has increased considerably but I remind of you on some steps that can help ‘stem the flow’.
Ideally water early morning or late evening
Concentrate on crops that really need water – those newly sown or planted and top up when needed.
Mulch around plants to help prevent evaporation
Dig a hole a spade’s width and depth, fill with manure or other organic matter, place a little soil on top and water well before planting out tomatoes, courgettes etc., similarly a trench for beans etc., leaving a shallow depression around plants to keep the water where it is needed.
Overwatering can be counterproductive. Plants can become lazy spreading their roots near the surface where watering supplies them rather down to find moisture to make a stronger root system and plant.
When watering is necessary, better to give a soaking once a week rather than a dribble each day.
Did you know you can register with a website called Blightwatch and it will send you alerts when weather conditions increase the chance of blight on your crops? You can choose up to ten postcode areas to cover the surrounding areas and registration is free.
BALGA received an email alert this morning advising that a Hutton Period Alert was affecting a nearby postcode. Visit the Blightwatch website for more information.
Yes, it’s that time of year again! The annual judging for the Best Kept Allotment Competition will be taking place towards the end of this month. A small panel of committee members from each site will judge all the plots and select the best 10 plots from each site.
Plots are judged and scored as follows:
Overall condition of plot – 20 points
Good workmanship – 20 points
Quality and variety of crops grown – 30 points
Ingenuity used to improve growing conditions – 15 points
Originality of layout and planting arrangements – 15 points
The shortlisted plots will then be put forward for final judging by an independent judge in mid July and they will determine the best plot on each site.
Each site winner will receive a prize of a £25 voucher to be spent at the members’ shop. Of these two, the plot gaining the most points will be declared the overall winner and the tenant awarded the Basil Bryant Cup.
In addition a separate independently judged competition will select the Best Newcomer for a new tenant in their first year of cultivation. All those tenants taking on their plot after 1 May 2018 are eligible for this competition. The winner will receive the Frank Conway Cup.
Have a look at the winner of Basil Bryant Cup last year and his plot. I’m sure this will give you some inspiration.
The 2018 Best Kept Allotment winner receiving his prize from Chairman, Mick Camp (left)Wonderful display on the Best Kept Allotment 2018
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.
BALGA are delighted to announce we’ve managed to secure grant funding to replace the allotment signs at both sites.
You can read more here. [Link removed at NHDC January 2021]
The grant money will be used to purchase new noticeboards which are used for BALGA members and members of the public alike, as well as updating the old NHDC noticeboards to reflect the fact that the sites are self-managed.
BALGA would like to thank both the Baldock and District Committee of NHDC and Cllr Michael Muir for their continued support.
Sadly it is a fact of life that allotments all over the country are easy targets for both vandalism and theft because of the nature and location of allotment sites and often the summer months are the more likely time when such attacks occur due to the long light evenings. Security has been improved at our North Road site since last summer, not only with the addition of a higher (padlocked) gate at the main entrance but also with the repairs to the rear fencing on the site, including the addition of barbed wire.
There are two schools of thought on how best to keep any property you keep on your plot safe and secure.
Of course, not keeping any tools or items of value, particularly power tools, on your allotment is the most secure way of ensuring they are safe. If kept at your home address they are covered by your home insurance. Unfortunately, your home insurance cover does not extend to covering your tools on your allotment. If you do keep tools on your allotment, it is always a good idea to get them marked with your postcode; tool marking is something the local police offer at various events throughout the year, including our Open Day during National Allotments Week.
The first school of thought, if you have a shed on your plot, is to not lock it with a padlock thereby hoping less damage will be done to the shed if someone is trying to break in. However, that may also encourage trespassers to get in anyway.
The second school of thought is to secure your shed with a padlock or other lockable device. This may well protect the contents of your shed more but may result in more damage being done if a break in is attempted.
The golden rule in all cases of crime on allotments, be it criminal damage, theft or just nuisance damage, is to report it to the police. Without these crimes being reported, the police are unaware there is a problem. If they are aware of repeated attacks or damage, they can increase patrols in an allotment area.
Any cases of vandalism or theft can be reported by telephoning the police on the non-emergency number 101. They can also be reported online via the Herts Police website here.
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.
