Be your own gardening expert

Here is another gem of a book from my childhood of the 1950's. I remember buying this, in a garden shop in the middle of Ashford in Kent on my way home from school. It cost me the princely sum of One shilling and Sixpence old money, or 7.5 new pence!

Look at the conventional 1950's family on the cover; the man in charge, smoking his pipe, the lady doing the more genteel garden chores, and the two children, a boy and a girl, being brought up to help in the garden!

I remember rushing home with the book, with its "Free soil tester inside!" and testing my own soil. I can't recall the result, but the small piece of litmus paper is still in its little envelope stuck within the inside cover, with my neat handwritten note telling me to mix one teaspoon of tap water with one teaspoon of soil in a saucer!

Most interesting now, in addition to the quaint presentation of ideas, is the prominent use of DDT amongst the remedies for pests. It seems that spraying DDT freely on fruit and vegetables was a widely recommended practice. Fortunately I could not afford such chemicals so my gardening was by necessity fairly organic. I have often felt that the free use of such chemicals has been the cause of many cancers since.

Rachel Carson also saw the dangers of using so many chemicals without understanding their longer term effects, and following her book, Silent Spring, and the public outcries which followed, DDT was banned in the USA in 1972. It later became the subject of a world wide ban in agricultural following the Stockholm Convention. This ban is credited with bringing the Bald Eagle, the national bird of the USA, from the brink of extinction.

I used to read avidly any gardening books I could get hold of which must explain my wide general knowledge on all matters horticultural to this day!

Hosepipe ban

Today the North West of Britain has a hosepipe ban introduced. This means the inhabitants can fill their swimming pools and ponds with a hose, but cannot water the garden with sprinklers and the like.

Here in the South East of England we have no ban as yet, but all my garden water butts, and I have quite a few, are all empty or nearly so. I have resorted to lugging my bath water downstairs to water the flower gardens. I wonder if my flowers appreciate the "stress reliever" bubble bath, the "pamper and nourish your skin" bubble bath or the "aching muscle relief" bubble bath - the last named has been used rather a lot lately! I only use these on flower beds and my home made compost only goes back on those beds, so I do not worry about the possible tainting with chemicals that may ensue.

I have always resisted watering on the allotment, apart from when plants are establishing themselves. I have been of the view that there is plenty of water deep in the soil and that the plants should be left to their own devices to find it and not encouraged to be lazy! But clearly this cannot apply to shallow rooted plants, such as radish, and other roots, including particularly celeriac, which is notoriously difficult to grow well in a dry summer.

This year all my best principles have gone out of the window. The strawberry plants have wilted, the potato crop is threatened, the lettuces are slow getting going, the celeriac are standing still and not growing at all, in short most of the crops desperately need more water. So every other day or so I give them all a jolly good soak. This is far more satisfactory than giving everything a dribble every day. And after watering, the straw in the farmyard and stable manure, spread around the plants, is acting as a jolly good mulch, helping to conserve the water for the plants rather than letting it evaporate and go to waste.

PS Note the organic slug pellets. I will never use non organic pellets on the allotment.

In the beginning...

Here begins the story of my vegetable plot.
Three years ago, in winter 2007/2008, I became the proud lessee of a patch of ground in the middle of a grassy and oh so stony field. I had walked over the field earlier in 2007, when negotiations were progressing between the potential landlord and our allotment association, and it felt like I was walking over a kind of gloopy sinking mud, and that any moment this awful stuff was going to part me from my wellington boots.

There were no worms to be seen in the soil, and no birds in the air above us. It seemed a pretty barren field. But most of us were undaunted by such an unpromising start!

Our wonderful committee not only marked out our plots but gave them all a very rough dig with a rotavator. We were also lucky to have an unlimited supply of cow manure from a local dairy farmer. So that first winter the wise amongst us put that manure to good use and covered our plots with it - barrow load after barrow load of this stuff was carted across the field to our plots, and spread thickly, to be left to rot down over the winter months.


....and what a difference this thick winter manure dressing made! Those few who for whatever reason had not heeded the advice of our chairman and had not taken advantage of the freely available mulch found that, come the spring of 2008, their plot resembled a badly overgrown lawn - thick matted weeds and grass - well let's face it, an arable field. Not so much of a surprise there, but some budding gardeners never really caught up after that, and appear to still struggle to keep their weeds at bay.

As the old saying goes, one year's seeding is seven years' weeding. How very true.


Whereas those of us who had worked so hard in the winter cold that first year were handsomely rewarded. Sorry if I sound smug:

I even planted a few flowers - primulas - in the muddy cold clay - as a harbinger of that first spring that held so much promise for us all.

And the all important compost bin had high priority - seen in the distance. I made mine rather inexpertly from wooden pallets and string (!), but later we shall see, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it did not survive for very long.

I cannot remember why I covered part of the ground with fleece at that stage. Obviously I wanted to warm the ground for something, but goodness knows what!

My allotment had got off to a promising start.

In later posts I shall chart progress - how I marked out the plot, and why, the mistakes I made and the triumphs, the tears and the fun of it all, the camaraderie and the bleaker moments when thieves broke in. There is so much to tell.

And the rewards are huge. This last few weeks I have picked 50 or 60 pounds or more of the most delicious strawberries - they have been frozen, made into crumble with rhubarb, consumed fresh in vast quantities at every possible opportunity, and given away to all and sundry. And they have seen no nasty chemical pesticides to taint them. They are pure and as far as possible organic. And that is a huge bonus!