watervole | The allotment looms

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allotment

The allotment looms

I dropped into the parish office today to see how the allotment queue was going. When I added my name last year, they said it could be two to three years before I got one.

Today, I'm number 3 and that will very shortly go down to 2.

Eeep!

I need to start doing some serious reading.

All good advice seriously welcome. What things are easy and rewarding to grow? I've done plenty of gardening over the years, but mostly herbaceous flowers selected on the 'survivor' principle. If it survives, I grow it.

What do you do about slugs (if you're being organic)?

The other big problem is that they don't allow sheds on site, so you can't store much there.

I've grabbed a couple of books from the local library. Let's see if I have the stamina for all that digging...

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Slugs - nematodes. You can order them now for March delivery, according to the Guardian at the weekend, so you can get the little buggers before they really come out. I've been thinking about them, we get terrible slugs in our back garden. I've been using blue crystals, which are pet-safe but probably not organic. Otherwise, I wander round with a small trowel and a tupperware box full of salt, scoop them up and drop them in. But that requires a nightly wander, which isn't always possible with an allotment. Flynn used to kill them when he was a kitten, and eat the caviar, but he seems to have grown out of it.

Much depends on whether the plot you get is in reasonable nick, or has become overgrown.

Top tips: especially if overgrown

1) Only dig one bed at a time -- then plant that up so you have something growing. Keep beds narrow enough so you can reach anything growing in them (about 3 ft width suits us)

2) Cover over overgrown areas that you want to make into beds, eg with old carpet (if allowed on site), newspaper and flattened cardboard boxes weighed down with stones/bricks/clods of earth; or with black plastic (eg bought compost/manure bags cut open and spread out. This weakens or kills off weeds, leaving ground much easier to dig over.

3) If the soil is at all heavy and clayey, we recommend forking rather than shovelling. Much easier on the back. Take it gently, and give yourself breaks to walk around, say hello to whoever's about, borrow ideas and accept offers of seeds, spare plants etc.

4) Regard your initial layout as experimental, while you suss out what works on that plot: eg sun/shade, slope, differences in soil quality, etc.

5) A weed suppressing edge to beds really cuts the work down. We use wooden pallet planks as bed edgings, with foot-wide (or more) strips of carpet paving the paths between.

Not being allowed a shed is a bit of a bummer. Somewhere comfy to sit, and a thermos for cups of tea/coffee are absolute necessities for allotting.

Things to grow:
Potatoes are good for breaking in ground -- once they grow they shade out weeds. We dump our grass clippings over them rather than 'earthing them up': much easier, a Bob Flowerdew tip.

Spinach (chard, perpetual beet and relatives) are tough and reliable. So is rocket, and the dead trendy red orache. Both will self-seed. I can send you some seed if you email your snail mail to jehanna at gn dot apc dot org.

Tomatoes: definitely. Lots of fun heritage and coloured varieties available. Also worth growing Gardeners Delight as best tasting, most reliable cherry tom. Like a sunny spot.

Broad beans, sugar snap peas, and sweet corn all taste so much better home grown -- a revelation compared to shop-bought. Sugar snap and sweet corn (and other peas and french beans) best started in little pots at home. Broad beans are fine planted directly into allotment beds.

Pumpkins like a bag of compost or manure tipped into a heap in a sunny spot -- then grow sprawling all over the shop. Quite fun for the early days when you wonder how you are ever going to cope with the whole plot. Start in warmth at home.

Raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, currants etc: oh yes. All the bush / cane varieties make good boundary hedges to a plot.

Herbs are good too: pop them in at the corners of plot, or ends of beds, or as a central feature.

Good magazines available: Kitchen Garden, Grow Your Own, Organic Gardening.

Fingers crossed you get your plot soon -- in time for the spring planting (and weed) season.

My advice was going to be ask

headgardener but you got here before I did.

All of the above.

On slugs... I really didn't bother doing anything about them but I had the evil mare's tail to deal with. Definitely cover half of it over for the first year: I'd have given up in a few months if I'd tried to work the whole of my plot.

What do you do about slugs (if you're being organic)?

Depends, if you don't mind killing them then the best bet is beer pots. Large plastic pots that you would either throw away or recycle about the size of a Pot Noodle. Dig a hole deep enough to bury the pot up to its brim and half fill with beer. The slugs are apparently raving alcoholics and will throw themselves gladly into the liquid and drown. They die but they die happy. There are also the nematodes.
Encourage birds into your allotment , a small feeding station should do that, thrushes are very fond of slugs and snails.
The other way is barriers of one kind or another. First type are things that the slug would find unpleasant to crawl over. I understand broken egg shells are very good but bran doesn't work.
Second type is something they cant climb, which is very little. Gardeners World did a test on copper rings a few years ago. These supposedly gave the slugs a small electric shock when they tried to climb them but I can't remember if it worked or not. Have a look at the Gardeners World web site on the BBC. The presenter now is very keen on organic gardening you should find quite a few tips on organic pest control.

Isn't there something you're supposed to do to stop ground beetles drowning as well?

Not that I've ever known about, But I also don't remember seeing any in the pots. Either they hate beer and are repelled by the pots or there was something done that I never noticed. It was something both my father and grandfather used (both used jam jars rather than pots) but as a hater of gardening, but not gardens, I never really took notice.

Since slugs can climb glass and beetles probably can't perhaps they were only half buried.

Just been and checked my archive of Gardeners World magazines. May 2005 has an article on combating slugs and snails.

The beer trap makes no mention of ground beetles. They also suggest downturned orange and grapefruit halves. Apparently they like these and gather inside them. This is also the article that mentions copper rings. They seem to think they work.

Yes, don't sink the beer traps all the way into the ground. The slugs and snails will climb over the lip and into the beer, and most of the beetles won't. I have caught hundreds of slugs this way, and only the occasional insect.

WHere do you get your beer? I never drink the stuff. Do you buy it especially for the slugs?

In Belgium the slugs are spoilt for choice of course. I buy whatever is the cheapest in the supermarket for the slugs, and we drink something nicer.

I was browsing the news and became interested in the slug topic - of course these creatures get on my nerves! Ha, I like your suggestion about beer in a plastic bottle! THIS I have never tried - and as beer is EXTREMELY drunk here, the slugs may become addict and I would be able to keep them away from my beds...
I have tried everything including salt but still I usually go and pick them in a bucket But what then? I dumped all in the yard with lots of hens but they even ran away from it, stupid things ( and in all other cases they eat EVERYTHING else).
Also birds avoid them. Ble, it is such an ugly creature.
The only thing I am sure of is that the slugs can´t stand the sun...

They drown in the beer. After that, tip them on the compost heap.

Salt is bad for your soil, so you shouldn't use that.

My husband used to go out on damp evenings and cut them in half with a knife. That works pretty well. Dead half slugs can just be poked into the soil.

The only other sugGestion I can think of is a hedgehog. Many years ago I lived in a house With a walled garden and one day I found a hedge ho in it. It must have fallen in from the wild slope above one of the walls. I found it late at night so I put some food out for it and told myself I would put it back into the wild when it was light the next day, but then I couldn't find it. So that night I put more food out and it was gone next morning but no sign of the hedgehog, and so it went on. I also noticed that I did not have any snails or slugs in my garden so I stopped worrying about putting the hedgehog back in the wild and kept feeding it. About ten years later the slugs and snails came back and the food I put out was not eaten. My hedgehog had died of old age and I had to find a way to deaL with the problem myself.

Hahaha, my name translated into English is actually Hedgehog...just can´t help thinkíng of a proverbal DIY with the slugs!:-)

The hedgehog story is me. I am in work and using the public computers and forgot I had to log on to lj. I am logged in permanently at home

I'm going to be very naughty, and just rattle off my first thoughts without reading what everyone else has written.

Dig as little as possible, and using a fork. Use raised no-dig beds, and weed them with a hand-fork.

Things which love to grow on our allotment include Jerusalem artichokes (I can send you some tubers), broad beans (likewise, saved seeds), self-seeded parsnip and spinach (I think we have those saved too), nasturtiums, phaselia.

Tagetes are good at detering some pests, but slugs eat the French ones - we're going to grow African and Mexican this year.

Not much of a gardener, me, but I like my herbs. Parsley seems to be pretty hardy. Sage can vary. Basil tastes wonderful, but is very tricky, and the slugs and snails go straight for it.

My people have a saying(%D)Seven time for the devil once for man, when it comes to growing parsley from seed but it is pretty hardy when you do finally get it going. There is also another saying about parsley, it will never grow where the woman wears the trousers.

Sage needs a good sunny position and poor soil then it thrives.

My aunt and uncle have an allotment and they grow the most fantastic strawberries. I think I'd forgotten what strawberries are supposed to taste like before them because you can't buy anything like it in the supermarket and these are even better than pick your own!
I remember my aunt saying that they had been advised to only grow things they actually like to eat! (Otherwise you end up with a huge crop of something you are not fond of.)
Of course with the strawberries there have always been a flood of willing volunteers to take them off their hands!
Good Luck!

Fi
;)

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The allotment looms

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Congrats and welcome to plotting...

Re: Congrats and welcome to plotting...

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Just for starters

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