Looking back at my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions post, I was pleased to see that I had accomplished some of my ‘resolutions’ for last year, although lack of time and job hunting made sure that I never had the time to get round to doing all of them.

This year, I’m going to take more of a relaxed approach to things, and if they happen, they happen. More ‘plans’ than ‘resolutions!’

One of my goals for this year is to do more writing. I’m about to see one of my articles in print for the first time in Great Food Magazine, which will hopefully become a regular column. I’m also still writing my cookbook, but have still to find that elusive publisher!

I’m also going to be doing some guest blogging, and I have some plans to expand and revamp my own blog. More details about that soon!

Also, now that we have a larger allotment, it will give me more space to expand my chilli empire, although the freezer and larder are groaning under the weight of last year’s harvest, both frozen and pickled. Even though our growing space has been tripled, I’m still going to have to scale back my current seed order for 2012, as otherwise I’ll run out of space in April, never mind by the summer!

Following on from my post on how to clear a new allotment,I thought I’d share some tips about crop rotation, which will again give your fruit and vegetables the best chance of growing up to be big, healthy, strong and tasty!

Why ‘Rotate?’

An allotment usually has relatively large “blocks” of crops, each hosting plants of one family. Growing the same crop in the same “block”/bed, year after year, causes two problems:-

Put the two together, and you have a recipe for epidemics striking down ever more sickly plants!

How To Rotate

I found rotation plans in gardening books frustrating – I don’t suppose I’m the only one who doesn’t work their ground like that! I have spaces after early crops, (for a second crop, or for a green manure), and I keep popping seeds into odd empty spaces, whatever my paper plan says!

So I’ll try to express clearly the “tools” I use – the principles and ideas that go into decisions about what goes where, when.

Step 1 – Basics

• Rotation is essential – use the ‘KISS’ principle, just keep the crops moving! Leave at least a year, or better a 2/3 years gap, before a crop returns to the same bed.
• Set aside an area for the “permanents” – the fixed beds for asparagus, comfrey, fruit bushes, herbs, rhubarb, and strawberries.

Step 2 – Know your crops strengths and weaknesses.

Think about how susceptible your crops are to soil-borne disease, bugs and pests.

• Some crops “must have” rotation, as they are VERY susceptible to disease and pest damage – potatoes and brassicas are obvious examples of crops which should not return to the same bed for 3 to 4 years.
• Some crops “are keen on” a rotation – the onion family (unless you have white rot); and the carrot family. Leeks are probably the least susceptible of all the onions, so they are quite flexible – and can fit in a number of places (mine go in after early potatoes).
• Some crops “are generally not that choosy – but it’s worth humouring them” – peas and beans.
• And some, bless their cotton socks, are just “eager to please”, and can go anywhere – beetroot, the leaf-beets, spinach, lettuce, the squashes and cucumbers, sweetcorn, salsify and scorzonera.

• Beans and peas fix nitrogen – so let nitrogen-hungry brassica follow them (possibly in the same season);
• Potatoes don’t like lime, so follow them with liming in the winter; next season, plant the crops that like lime most (brassica, or beans/peas);
• Roots dig deep and break up the soil – so follow them with potatoes;
• Peas and beans like the rich deep dug soil left behind after the potatoes;
• Brassica like a firm soil, so don’t follow potatoes very happily;
• The onion family are generally happy in the firm soil left by the brassica.

Year 1 – Beans/peas,
Year 2 – followed by Brassica,
Year 3 – followed by Onion family,
Year 4 – followed by carrots/parsnips,
Year 5 – followed by potatoes, (add lime in winter),
and back to the beginning

• Digging in manure in the winter before the potatoes;
• Adding lime before the peas and beans;
• Adding compost before the brassicas;
• Growing a winter cover of green manure as preparation for the onion, and roots crops.

Step 3 – Real World!

• Knock out the families you DON’T want to grow;
• Merge families when you don’t want that much;
• Slip in the “friendly” veg – the squashes, sweetcorn, beets, spinach and lettuce;
• And feel free to compress the 5 year cycle into 4, or even 3 years.

See, easy when you know how! Happy growing!

I’ve seem a few people recently on Twitter that have been lucky to have landed themselves an allotment, but are a little bit anxious about what they have taken on. I thought it would be a good idea to share my tips about how to start clearing a new allotment.

So you’ve received your allotment from the Local Council, or allotment association. Perhaps even built a tiny shed. You might also have a garden chair to sit on whilst drinking your well earned beer or smoking your cigar.

Easy tiger, hold on! The hard work’s just about to start.

Unless you’re incredibly lucky, the gardening allotment you’ve been given will be overgrown with a vast variety of weeds…. a mini jungle that you must clear before you can even think of planting anything else. It’s by no means a conspiracy against you….the last tenant of the plot would’ve left by end-summer; so by the time you get possession, the weeds will have had plenty of time to lay their claim on your patch.

The key question is – what are you going you do about it and where do you start?

1. Do a little weed-survey first. Find out what kinds of weeds are growing. (Note: Having weeds is not bad news; it just means that the soil is fertile.) If you find weeds like buttercups, docks, daisy and nettles, your soil would be acidic in nature. If the conditions are damp, there would probably be a predominance of docks.

2. Clear a patch at a time, and then plant some crops. This will help to keep the weeds down. It will also give you some reward for your labours. There is nothing worse than digging over a whole allotment at once, and then to turn round and see the weeds appearing again at the other end!

3. Now don’t even think of running a rotavator over the plot to get rid of the weeds. Rotavators are often seen by new allotment holders as a marvellous way of clearing the plot. They do have their advantages but not as many as you might think. To use one, you have to pull and push it backwards and forwards, which is very painful on the shoulders, even if it saves backache from normal digging. It will not dig as deep as traditional spade digging and more annoyingly, will chop up the roots of any plant it meets. For normal grass this is probably fine, but for couch grass, anything that can regenerate from tiny root sections like thistles, bindweed, dandelions, docks and ground elder, it simply makes the problem many times worse. So unless you are sure you don’t have any of the above or are willing to go through the ground after rotavation to hand-remove all roots, beware!

4. Another option is using chemicals. You’ll have to spray the plot with a good weed-killer, wait for them to die out, and then use a rotavator to clear it up. Then again, like me, you may feel that using chemicals on the soil may not be a palatable idea for you. In that case, you can use organic methods like covering the plot with thick tarpaulins, plastic or carpets to hold back the growth. But unless you can maintain the cover for a year or so, this method is no good for killing the weeds. Having a rough carpet laid over your allotment also looks….hmmmm….well, shabby.

5. For the deep rooted perennial weeds, you have to use a different approach. Use a rake or rotavator to break up the surface of the soil. Decide how much you can dig in a couple of weeks, and cover the remaining area with mulch. Then remove the grass and weed roots from the exposed area. You’ll have to repeat the process until the whole plot is cleared up.

6. As you clear one patch after another, keep preparing the ground according to your overall plan. If you find stray weeds growing back (as they invariably will), just hoe them away.

Digging

The usual method of clearing is to do it in sections, covering them over as soon as they’ve been dug until the time is right to plant up a crop. There are two main digging types: single digging and double digging. The latter is also sometimes referred to by a variety of rude names such as bastard trenching, simply because it is…

Single digging

Single refers to the depth of the dig, measured in spits, which is the depth of a standard spade or fork. In this, you dig out a trench, throwing the soil forward onto the soil in front and then hitting it with the spade or fork to break it up a bit. This also reveals the roots or any perennial weeds and allows you to remove them as you go. Have a bucket or wheelbarrow next to you while digging to put the weeds in.

Double digging

Here you dig the single spit trench as before, putting the soil either on the ground or in a wheelbarrow, then dig another single trench in front of it, putting the soil on top of the previous or in the barrow. Then dig down another spit, incorporating manure or compost into the soil. This deeper soil is known as subsoil and should not be brought to the surface. When you have finished with the trench, dig your next single trench, throwing the topsoil on top of the manured subsoil, then do the next deep trench etc etc. When you have worked your way across the whole plot, you barrow the topsoil from the original trench across to the final one and use it to fill in the hole. This is very hard work, but sets up the soil fertility extremely well for several years. It also means you get deep enough down to get out all the really pernicious weed roots. Rotavators cannot get deep enough to get into the subsoil, which is as well since you don’t want it at the top.

Hand-weeding

This is possibly the easiest way of getting shot of weeds when you’re first cultivating an allotment. If you have been lucky enough to inherit a plot which has bare soil visible and scatterings of weeds, then working your way across with a hand trowel will allow you to get rid of a lot of the smaller weeds into the compost heap. Then when you dig over the plot, you can just dig rather than having to keep bending over to pick out the weeds. It also allows you to be more confident about using or not using rotavators, since by forking it over to 3-4″ you’ll have a good idea if there’s perennial weeds lurking.

There we go, not as scary as it first seems! As I found out now, if you put the effort in now, you will reap the rewards very soon. Happy digging!

I know that I’m a little late to the party with this, but after seeing this on other people’s blogs, I thought it would be good for me to share my allotment based resolutions for the year, and also for me to look back in a year’s time to see how many have been achieved.

So far, I have decided that my resolutions are:-

1. I will bake bread at home more often. and also build a bread oven. I have always tried to bake bread at home, but last year, people were kind enough to send me some sourdough starters, so that has spurred me on to be more creative with my bread. Also, the ‘BBQ Man’ in me wants a bread oven in the garden!

2. Make my own sausages, salami and chorizo. I have already taken a step forward in this by taking delivery of my mincer and sausage maker! However, the local butcher looked at me like I was from planet Zog when I asked whether he could get the sausage casings for me, so I’ll have to order those online before getting creative.

3. Although I am writing a cookbook of my own, I now have enough cookbooks. I tell myself this every year, but I am now running out of shelf space, so this is one resolution I will have to keep to this year, otherwise I will be tripping over them.

4. Hatch my own chickens. After reading about other people’s exploits on Twitter, and also converting my wife so that she has now fallen in love with our ex-battery chickens, we have decided that we want to hatch our own. However, I think a little bit of reading and getting advice from other people is needed before we start on our chicken empire.

5. Plant lots of wildlife friendly flowers. This was a plan for this year, but time and other things meant that it was put on hold. However, we need to attract more bees and wildlife to the garden. Which nicely leads us onto ….

6. Keep bees. We have a hive on our allotment site, but my ultimate aim is for us to have a hive on our plot.

7. Forage for wild food. My allotment site has a plot where sloes are in abundance, and for some reason, the plotholder has no interest in using them. I’ve always made sloe gin and vodka, but after seeing what is out and about, I want to use more food from our wild larder in my cooking this year.

8. Get better at composting, feeding and sustaining my crops this year. I made a start on composting this year, but could definitely try harder this year.

…. and finally ….

9. I will not get seduced by the exotic sounding seeds in seed catalogues. So many times this year I have found myself saying ‘oooh that sounds nice,” just as I hit the send button to order the seeds. Then, later in the year, I found that I had run out of space to plant the stuff I originally wanted to!

So, that’s my resolutions for the year, and I wonder how many I will stick to?! Have any of you come up with food related resolutions for the year?

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.


Despite only getting our allotment plot in January, and also all the late frosts doing their best to kill anything we took the chance to plant out, we had our first major harvest from the plot this weekend.

We’d been able to pick a few peas and broad beans here and there, but this weekend, we lifted all the first and second early potatoes, and now have enough of them to feed an army! The picture above is me planting two varieties of pumpkins and some climbing courgettes in the place where they used to be.

The planned third installment of building ‘Chickenopolis’ was postponed as I had a monumental hangover, so instead I used the carcasses of some old drawers as raised beds, and planted the baby turnip seedlings.

The onions are also looking suspiciously ready, even though technically we shouldn’t be pulling them until August. They have swelled that much with the changeable weather, that we had to pull a few onions anyway to give the others more room to grow. We used them in a Shepherd’s Pie for dinner yesterday, and they weren’t bad at all!

The sweetcorn is really kicking into life now as well, so it looks as if we will have an OK crop from those as well.

What I can’t work out though is why some of the chillies in my greenhouse have decided that they want to flower, even though they are only about a foot tall!

As you will have picked up from yesterday’s post, I’m a big fan of Cafe Direct’s ‘Sow Your Own’ campaign.


So taking their ideas to heart, I started to have a look around what the previous tenants of our allotment had left behind.

My eyes lit up when I saw some solid old drawers from an old chest of drawers, and I immediately knew what I could do with them. I took the bottoms out of them, unscrewed the handles, and put them to use as raised beds!

It was obviously meant to be, as they are the same height as the other raised beds on my plot and fit in perfectly!

These were put to use straight away, and I planted my baby ‘Red Top’ turnip seedlings in the new raised beds.

I then turned my attention to what I could use at home to plant some more salad, as I like to do successional sowings throughout the summer to have a continuous supply.

For some bizarre reason, the previous owner of our house left behind one tyre, which had been lurking at the back of the garage for some time, and everytime I saw it, I made a mental note to get rid of it.

However, after a bit of hadywork, and a quick paint job, I had a nice little planter for the next sowing of my salad.

I’ve now got my eyes on the colander in the kitchen for my next ‘Sow Your Own’ creation, but I think my better half will break my fingers if I try!

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.

We moved the greenhouse to a more logical place last weekend, and this weekend started the job of clearing the large pile of assorted rubbish that the previous plotholders had shoved behind it.

We foolishly thought this would take us no more than a couple of hours, but combined with sweltering sunshine, we found that the mound of earth and rubbish contained glass, rotting carpet, stones, rocks, roots, and lots of other nasties.

We eventually cleared it by the end of the day, and levelled the ground out, so stage two of Chickenopolis, (building their coop) will have to wait until next weekend.

Once that is up, we will then build a bigger run around it, so that the ex-batts that we want to adopt will have some room to roam around if we are not up there to let them roam around our lottie!

So, as you can see from the pictures, the lottie is changing shape. We were also excited to find pods appearing behind the gorgeous purple flowers on the broad beans, and also our first pods appearing on the peas!

I can’t wait to taste the first harvest from our plot … and also to welcome the chickens when they arrive too!

Today was time for some long overdue weeding at the allotment, but since it was a Bank Holiday, I had to do what everyone seems to do on a Bank Holiday and do some DIY … lottie style

Since we are allowed to get chooks soon, we thought it would be a good idea to clear as large a space for them as possible. We moved the greenhouse to a more sensible place, and cut down all the nettles, brambles and nasties behind it, and put down black polythene to kill the rest.

If everything goes ok next week, then it will be stage one of building the chicken palace! Then it will be ready for when the The British Hen Welfare Trust (formerly the Battery Hen Welfare Trust) let us know that we have some hens to pick up … can’t wait!

… everything seems to be growing so far after the frost last week.

I was a little concerned because when I came down to water one day, the plastic on my spray gun had cracked where water had obviously expanded, so I was more than a little concerned for my poor little veggies.

However, I got a nice surprise this weekend, when after weeding, I noticed that all my spuds were up, even the first earlies, which I had written off.

The lottie could do with a little more rain, but then again, so could everyone else’s!

The next big project, along with clearing the rest of the ground, potting on veg, sowing more seeds, etc …, is to block up where the gate to our allotment is now, and make a new opening on the right hand side. It doesn’t really make much sense where it is now, and if we move it, we can have access straight off the car park.

I’m just wondering when we are going to have time to do everything!

What a fantastic weekend. Sunny skies all the way through, and I ended up with red arms!

We spent all of Saturday building frames for the beans and peas to climb up, and then we planted the “Hugh’s Huge” peas and “Crimson Flowered” broad beans. I have a load more of both, together with runner and french beans coming up in the greenhouse.

We were also frantically trying to clear the overgrown bit on the right hand side of the lottie, as we have 42 sweetcorn plants (they all germinated!!), and several other things in the greenhouse that will need a new home at some point. Luckily, one of our friends there has a petrol rotavator/tiller that made the job a lot easier.

I’ll try and take some pictures tomorrow night when I go down to water.

Hope you all had the chance to enjoy the glorious weather this weekend.