That Chelsea Chop - and Red Hot Pokers

I visited a beautiful garden yesterday and saw these wonderful Red Hot Pokers.







And this is what happens to Sedum plants when they are not given the Chelsea chop!!

old garden artefacts

It's been far too cold, wet and windy the last couple of days to do anything serious in the garden or at the allotment, so I thought I would reminisce on some things that caught my eye in other people's gardens this summer.
I particularly like the cold-frame on wheels!

Sunflowers in the Dordogne

Driving through the Dordogne in South West France on holiday recently we saw field after field of sunflowers. Of course in June they are beautiful - bright yellow in the sunshine, all turned towards its warmth and light. But now the flowers have gone and instead the seed heads are dry and ready for harvesting. I assume that these are for food, whether for human or animal I am not sure. This was about the biggest sunflower head we saw.

Whilst in the region we went to the Monbazillac vineyards. The views from the terrace of the chateaux were wonderful and the wine was pretty good too!

















Most fascinating of all were the fields of wildflowers - we saw these in several places as we toured around. It looked for all the world as if the landowners had all bought the same wildflower seed mix!

The effect was certainly very pretty.

Tomorrow I shall be back on the allotment after the well earned break and shall get this blog back on track!

Fuschias and Sedum

I love Fuschias. To me they always appear to be perfect wax models, and they come I so many shapes, sizes, colours. And many are hardy. My really tough ones (the red ones below) even survived last winter and this year's drought. I have several bushes that are just in front of my kitchen window so they make a magnificent display at this time of year. And the bees also love them.



And they are really so easy to look after. Every spring I simply cut them down quite hard, as the flowers all appear on the year's new branches, so it is very easy to keep them as compact and shapely as you want.

There are also many varieties available now that are superb in hanging baskets.

Yesterday I spoke of the Chelsea Chop on my Sedums, and feared I had been a little too over enthusiastic this year with the secateurs. Their flowering has certainly been delayed perhaps longer than I intended, but you can see here that the flowers are now beginning to open, and they will make a super display very soon. Because of the "chop" they will not splay out from the middle as Sedum plants otherwise have a tendency to do, keeping them neat and compact in the border. do And again, the bees love them, so a bonus for biodiversity.

Year of Biodiversity - Bug Hotels

I took these photos earlier this year at Chartwell, the former home of Winston Churchill, in Kent, and at Pensthorpe in Norfolk.

These bug hotels are being built all over the country, in response to the appeal for us to protect the natural habitats of our bugs, amphibians, creepy crawlies. Encouraging and protecting this natural biodiversity is good for us all - good for crops - good to encourage natural predators - to keep pests and diseases under control naturally, without recourse to harmful chemicals.
In my own garden I have had a "stumpery" for a few years now. This is simply a pile of old logs and twigs left in a sheltered corner with absolutely no disturbance from one year to the next.
But "stumperies" are not for those who love everything in the garden to be neat and tidy (my husband, for instance!) This is where the bug hotels like those at Chartwell come in to their own.
I am hoping to build my own bug hotel at the allotment over the winter and will let you know how I get on over the next few months.

scarecrow

I think I have mentioned before how we struggle up at the allotments to keep birds off the crops. Pigeons are the worst problem and nothing short of overall netting seems to have any long term effectiveness.
But some plotters are inspired to make scarecrows. The children love them, and I really do think they may work, at least a little.

Certainly when this one first appeared on the plot next to mine, it would regularly make me "jump out of my skin" as I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye whilst I was working. I would imagine that loose clothing which blows in the breeze is most effective, and even better if the scarecrow has metal pots and pans or similar attached, which make a noise in the wind.
They're fun anyway, and a good talking point! Perhaps one year we should have a scarecrow competition!

Wibbly wobbly parsnip

I think it was HRH Prince Charles who once said that we should not spurn "wibbly wobbly carrots." He was I believe thinking of the supermarket carrots that must all conform to rigid size and shape criteria, or apparently we, the public, will not buy them.

I may have mentioned that our allotments are very stony. Root crops don't like stony soil - it tends to make them fork!! And how about these for forked and wibbly wobbly parsnips!

The trick of course is to either sift the soil (and I use the stones to make the paths across the plot) or to dig a trench where the root seeds are to be sown and fill it with compost. This I now do and I can now grow super straight parsnips!

I did cook and eat these strange creatures and they tasted jolly good anyway. But I doubt if any one would have bought them in a supermarket somehow!

Squash Harvest

These were my spoils today. All these squash will make lovely soup, or will roast well, and the beauty of them is that they will store well through the winter at room temperature and be decorative into the bargain.

I place this green plastic on the ground beneath the trailing plants to raise them above any puddles when it rains (not that we have had much of that this summer!) and it also gives some measure of protection from slugs.

Bee on Eryngium

Bees love Eryngiums - as do wasps and other flying insect pollinators. The flowers come in most attractive hues of blue, and the stems are the same colour. They make very good dried flowers in flower arrangements (minus the bees!).

Images copyright Eleanor Stoneham 2010

Blueberries and blackbirds

I would have found it all comical were it not for the fact that the blackbirds had already eaten most of my plump ripe blueberries.

When I went downstairs for breakfast I glanced out of the kitchen window and immediately noticed something amiss with the blueberry bush. Where yesterday there had been a good crop ready for picking, I could not see any fruit! So I padded out in my nightie hoping no one was watching, to survey the damage.

Sure enough, the birds had managed to find a way in through the plastic screening I had erected around the bush. I thought the mesh size was too small for the birds - but clearly not - or they have just become smarter at squeezing through the holes. It worked last year. Anyway, they had eaten all the ripe berries, leaving only a handful of those still to ripen. I must at least salvage those, I thought, so I straightaway replaced the screening mesh, using some with smaller holes! And went back indoors for breakfast.

Within less than a minute two blackbirds came down, a male and his mate. They strutted around the new guard, tried to cling to its sides, perched on top, walked around it again, and so on .... They just could not believe what had happened or understand why they could no longer get in to eat the fruit! It took quite a while before they gave up and went away! I wish I could have filmed their antics. They were very funny.

More Harvest

Yesterday was dry and warm; in fact it was almost unbearably muggy and humid. But in spite of that I spent several hours at the allotment doing lots of tidying up, harvesting, getting more barrow loads of manure to spread on bare patches, trimming the grass edges and keeping any stray weeds at bay.

I dug the shallots up and rather than leaving them to dry on the surface of the soil I have brought them home and spread them in the garage to dry - I am tempted to make ropes of them in the same way as garlic, (right) to hang in my kitchen for use throughout the winter.

I also took home all the remaining cauliflowers. They are slightly damaged by caterpillars and I soaked them in a bowl of water to flush the caterpillars out. This also brought forth several earwigs. All the creatures were given a new home in the compost heap!

With so many cauliflowers to deal with, I made some soup, using home grown shallots and garlic, with vegetable stock, and blitzing the softened mixture with cheddar cheese in the liquidizer. It tastes delicious and has been frozen for the winter. Those cauliflowers not used for soup will store in the bottom of the fridge for a week or so quite happily.

Also coming up ready for harvest are several of the squashes. Many of these store well through the winter or make delicious soup for freezing. Otherwise they roast well with a mixture of other vegetables for a hearty winter meal. More about those another day.

Middleton's Gardening Guide

It cost two shillings and sixpence in "old" money - that's 12.5 new pence post decimalization! Still quite a lot of money when I was a child. But I managed to buy it and it was my gardening "bible" for all my horticultural endeavors on my vegetable plot at home.

I well recall the frustrations of not being able to afford many of the aids recommended by Mr Middleton. How could I possibly afford cloches, for instance? Or seed potatoes? Or all the pots and seed trays he assumed we had unlimited access to? Or the peat, chalk, sand, loam, sulphate of potash, to make the recommended John Innes composts?

All I had access to in abundance was free cow manure from our covered yard, where our dairy herd over wintered, and I lugged vast quantities of the stuff over to the vegetable garden, spreading it widely as well as building a huge heap on which I grew amazingly enormous marrows!

But I poured over the "Gardening guide for every week - all the year round," marking items for me to act on at the appropriate times, whilst dreaming of all the many things beyond my grasp. I used to send off for all the seed catalogues and save pocket money to buy seeds. I wish now that I had kept those old catalogues.

A Heron at the allotment

When I cycle around our country lanes I have more than once been deceived by a field covered in horticultural plastic, shimmering in the sunlight, that from a distance I have mistaken for a sheet of water.

I was up at the allotment early today. It felt like one of those autumnal mornings with a slight crispness in the air and the promise of a fine day ahead. There was a commotion in the sky above me and I looked up to see a crow apparently chasing a much bigger bird away. But the big bird soon returned, and as I watched it circled above me, coming closer and closer to me. Surely I wasn't about to be attacked, I thought. Then I saw that it was in fact a heron. And suddenly it turned around and flew away to the woods beyond the plot. What was this about?



Then I noticed I was standing close to the fleece covering part of the plot next to mine. Could it be that the heron had mistaken this for water, a pond in which it could go fishing, perhaps?

I'm inclined to think so.

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.

Spring 2008 on the allotment

Some "plotters" as we are often now called were quick off the mark that first year and not only managed to get sheds up but also had the foresight to plant daffodil bulbs to give a show of colour that first spring. This photo was taken April 2008. It is not my plot!

There was plenty of construction going on all around the site. As well as the many sheds going up there were also plenty of strange goings on with posts and stakes as plotters planned mini orchards and fruit cages. And many were constructing raised beds with planks of wood and imported top soil.


I chose not to grow any fruit trees as I was concerned at the space they would take up. And I had no timber to make raised beds but I made my own improvisations as we shall see later.


For now just look at the difference another 3 months has made!! This was taken July of that first year! No one could really believe just how much progress was made and what superb produce we took home to eat that summer.

Look at those runner beans in the background, and the broad beans, broccoli and spinach in the foreground. The broccoli are totally caged to keep pigeons and butterflies away.
Pigeons found the allotment in no time and would strip brassica leaves down to the midrib given half a chance.
And the only sure way to keep caterpillars away from brassicas is to keep the butterflies out with suitably small netting!

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!