I've been browsing through the catalogue for Poyntzfield Herb Nursery which is on the Black Isle in Scotland. They specialise in the cultivation of herb plants and seeds using organic and biodynamic techniques and have an amazing selection of over 400 varieties. They stock all the traditional favourites as well of loads of real rarities - well worth a look.
In this country you hardly ever see pumpkins or winter squash except for the awful orange monstrosities that appear in the shops for a week or two around Halloween that taste terrible and nobody eats anyway. Despite their lack of popularity they are a great vegetable to grow partly because they come with such a brilliant natural packaging. These ones were picked in October last year and are still waiting to be eaten in my kitchen - as long as you don't cut the stalk too short and give them a couple of weeks in the sun to dry out properly they'll last right through the winter. They do take up an awful lot of space on the allotment but if you grow a little one like Golden Apple, which is the one at the front of the picture, they'll be perfectly happy growing up a trelis. As a rule summer squash have a softer skin and need to be eaten as soon as they are picked but winter squash and pumpkins will keep all winter in a cool but frost free place.
The ones in the picture are Lady Godiva which is grown for its seeds that are perfect for eating - they have no husk and a fabulous almondy taste. The tiny ones are Golden Apple which are amazingly productive plants but feel so rock hard that you think you'll never be able to eat them. If you start them off whole in a very hot oven they get soft enough to cut the top off and mix something tasty in with the flesh before finishing it off in the oven for about ten minutes more - my favourite is rice, mushrooms and cheese. Their skin never gets soft enough to eat but that's great because it cuts down on washing up makes it a great bio-degradable bowl.
I love tomatoes because, even when they're as tiny as these ones, you get that fabulous fresh tomato smell as soon as you touch the leaves. I think that's the main reason that I never buy horrible, bland supermarket tomatoes which smell of nothing and are almost totally tasteless.
These seedlings were planted almost two weeks ago and are nearly big enough to re-potted. They'll probably need at least another month in the house until it's warm enough to move them into the greenhouse - it isn't heated you see.
I'm trying 5 different varieties this year:
Totem is a great cherry tomato which is a bush variety so perfect to take home in a pot for the patio, or to give to other aspiring vegetable growers who are lacking space.
San Marzano is a traditional Italian plum tomato which I grew last year but had no real luck with due to blossom end rot - this is when the end of the tomato goes brown and rotten normally because the soil that it's standing in has dried out too much. This would make sense as it was virtually impossible to keep grow bags moist last summer because the greenhouse was getting so hot. I'm hoping for betetr luck this year and will be growing in pots instead of grow bags which should be easier to keep moist - but not too wet or the tomatoes will be big but tasteless.
Alicante is a really popular salad tomato which is supposed to be a great cropper. I've never grown it before but lots of my allotment neighbours seemed to have real success with it last year so I'm going to give it a try.
Chadwick Cherry is a cherry tomato which I grew last year and it was the most successful one I tried. Funnily enough though, not a single seed has germinated in this planting so I'll have to try some more this weekend.
Principe Borghese are another that I'm trying for the first time this year. They're an Italian variety which is supposed to be very productive and perfect to eat with mozzarella or in salads. It's also meant to be great for sun drying and I've got an Antonio Carluccio recipe for doing them in the oven which I'd really like to try so I hope I have some luck with them.
I'll pot them up into their own pots this weekend then they'll be moved into their big pots in the greenhouse (the biggest I can get) when they're between 20cm and 30cm. Tomatoes have got the reputation of being a real fiddle to grow, and if you're after prize winners I'm sure they are, but with just enough water and sun you can't go wrong.
When I got my allotment this time last year I inherited an old greenhouse from the last plot holder - it's nothing fancy and is still perfectly functional for seedlings and tasty salady things in the summer. It did have a few little holes in where some of the glass had slipped over the years, which was never a problem until we had the terribly stormy weather in January and seven panes got blown out and smashed. If I'm really honest I thought it was going to be much worse than this and felt quite lucky as some people's greenhouses were smashed up totally. It was quite a strange, Wizard of Oz-type experience though, to find that panes of glass had blown upto 15 metres through the air!
Anyway, the result of this was that the greenhouse needed fixing which was the job of my ever-helpful boyfriend last weekend, and what a job it was. As it's such an old greenhouse the windows are held in with putty and not clips and because of this my poor boyfriend spent Sunday afternoon on struggling with large pieces of glass up a ladder. It's not quite finished yet but should be all spick and span ready for seedlings in the next couple of weeks. I'd never had a greenhouse before but it's the kind of thing that once you've had one you can't imagine living without it.
Friends of the Earth have a new online bookshop packed with a great selection of environmental books. The section on food and cookery is particularly good with lovely recipe books and books about seasonal produce. They've got a competition at the moment where you can win £150 of books if you fill in a short survey about the site - Book Shop
We've had real problems with parsnip canker this year - as illustrated in the rather "Prime Suspect" / forensic style picture. It's actually not as bad as it looks but it makes storing the parsnips impossible - you have to cut out the cankered area as soon as possible or it spreads throughout the root. Apart from that though, they're perfectly edible. It's just such a disappointment when you pull a seemingly perfect parsnip out of the ground and turn it round to see a monstrosity like this.
Canker is a fungi which gets into the crown when it is cracked or damaged by pests. Apparently it's most likely to occur in drought and highly fertile soil and this would make sense as it was so horribly dry last summer. In areas where canker is common it's recommended to use resistant cultivars or make later sowings. I'm going to try growing Turga again next year which is what I grew this year, as it looks such a lovely parsnip, but I'm also going to try a shorter root as short rooted, smaller parsnips are supposed to be more resistant.
It seems quite common on my allotments that certain diseases are virtually impossible to avoid, especially where people haven't done any kind of crop rotation on their plot. I'm hoping that as we rotate our crops over the next couple of years it should start to reduce some of the nasties that are hanging around in the soil. Fingers crossed.
The Observer newspaper now has its own allotment which will be charted over the next twelve months in their Sunday Magazine as well as through its very own blog. It's only just started but I'm sure it'll shape up to contain loads of interesting allotment information.
I've nearly had my allotment for a full year now and recently I've been feeling the urge to share my obsession with other people. So, why have I chosen a blog to do this? Well, my first twelve months have been pretty successful - largely due to the globally warmed and dampened weather that we've been having - but also through all the tips and advice that I've managed to beg, steal and borrow on my horticultural trawls of the world wide web. I hope that I'll be able to share some of the enjoyment that I get from my plot, and that I may also be able to offer some advice to other people who are starting out with an allotment or vegetable garden.
My organic allotment is a large (ish) plot in North Manchester. I grow the veg that I love to eat and mainly concentrate on the cultivars that you never see in the shops. I've also got an apple tree, a few rows of raspberry canes and some black currant bushes. This year I'm also planning to use more space to grow cut flowers to bring the allotment into the house when I can't be out on the allotment.
It's all looking a little windswept at the moment with a few hardy brassicas still standing - it does amaze me the abuse that they'll take - and a bed of leeks and parsnips. But Spring is just round the corner and I can hardly wait to start growing again!
