It’s been gorgeous weather on a Bank Holiday for a change, and I hope you managed to spend as much time in your allotment or garden as I have.

Since I’m now the allotment site secretary, I was able to get advance notice of which plots on the site were becoming vacant, and I have bagged myself what I think is called a “project.”

The pictures don’t really do this allotment justice, as it is three times the size of our existing allotment!

Although it looks overgrown, it has many things going for it. It is right in the far back corner of the allotment site, and has an entrance which is off a separate avenue from the rest of the allotments on that row, so it is like walking into a ‘secret garden!’

This allotment was rented by an old gentleman for many years, who used to grow prize winning flowers on it year after year. This is why he has a fabulous old style glasshouse on the plot, which will be one of the first things that we restore, as since it is about three times of my greenhouse at home, it will a fabulous place for growing all my chillies.
Unfortunately the last person to sign the lease for the plot last year planted one tripod of beans and then buggered off.

So although it looks overgrown and derelict, with a little bit of elbow grease and patience, it will be up and running again in no time.

Since there is a lot of weeds on the plot that’s a good indication that the ground is still fertile, and amongst the undergrowth there are some fabulous fruit bushes, and also a raised her bed, so we’ll have to be careful when we’re chopping back around them. Also, since it is on the border of the allotment site there’s a line of mature fruit trees including apple, pear and cherry.

One of the first jobs on the new plot is to build an asparagus bed, as someone has given me six asparagus crowns, and I want to get them settled in as soon as possible.

However, in order to make it a little realistic, we have set ourselves six to nine months to get the new plot back to how it should be, as we’re keeping on our existing plot until March next year as we’ve already paid the rent for this year.

Our current allotment is doing very well, as you can see from the rows of garlic at the bottom of the picture, which continue out of shot to the bottom and to the left of the picture. I’m growing Tuscany Wight, Early Purple Wight, Lautrec Wight, Iberian Wight, Chesnok Wight, Albigensian Wight, Elephant Garlic and Solent Wight. ( I like garlic!)

Also out of shot is the frame of my polytunnel which was a casualty in the high winds at the end of last year, and since it was a ‘cheap and cheerful’ one the frame was a little bent of shape. However, in the best allotment tradition of ‘make do and mend’ it’ll be repaired with some gas pipe or similar. We also got down to the plot before the cover blew away, and miraculously it hadn’t torn, so that’s a job for next week.

I’ve also planted the rest of the potatoes, and also some peas and mangetout. I’m waiting to plant out the runner, broad and borlotti bean seedlings that are currently sitting in my greenhouse at home, as I’m sure we’re going to get a cold snap at some point and I don’t want to lose them.

However, the greenhouse is getting full with sweetcorn, rainbow chard, squash, broccoli, tomatoes, chillies, endive and melons all vying for the limited space in there! All the more reason to rebuild the polytunnel and get the glasshouse on the new plot restored.

As it’s getting towards the time of year when people think about planting potatoes, I thought I’d post my thoughts about how to get the best crop of home grown potatoes.

Before planting your potatoes, the ground will benefit from having some manure or compost dug into the soil. This will have two benefits, as firstly potatoes like to be fed, and also it will help the general texture and structure of your soil.

The big benefit of growing potatoes must be the taste and you have a choice of over 400 varieties to choose from. A few hundred more than you will ever find in the shops! So you need to decide what you want to grow. First of all, ask other growers in your area what they do well with and like. Different varieties will grow better in some areas than others.

There are various sites on the internet where you can get an idea of what types are best for what and you can often buy small packs of 10 seed potatoes so you can try different types and find what you like.

Do not just try and plant potatoes from the supermarket. More often than not you will be wasting your time and missing an opportunity to taste something really special for your efforts. They may well have been treated to stop them growing anyway.

First Early, Second Early and Maincrop Potatoes

These terms often sound mysterious but they’re not really. All the terms refer to is the time it takes from planting to getting a crop. First earlies are usually ready in around ten weeks, second earlies in around 13 weeks and maincrop after about 20 weeks.

Maincrop types tend to store better but they are at more risk of getting blight than the faster types, which are usually harvested before the blight periods begin.

Chitting Potatoes

There is no mystery to this process. All it means is that when you get your seed potatoes you put them in a cool but frost free place where they get some light but not direct sunlight. A north facing window is ideal in a frost free shed.

Each seed potato has a more rounded, blunt end that has a number of ‘eyes’. Stand the tubers with the blunt end uppermost in trays or old egg boxes, with plenty of natural light.

The potatoes will then grow short stubby shoots, which will get them off to a fast start when planted out. Some people suggest rubbing off all but three shoots to help get larger potatoes with the maincrops. There is some evidence that chitting doesn’t help greatly with maincrop potatoes but it certainly can’t hurt to chit them.

Frost

Frost is a big enemy so you need to keep an eye on the weather. Usually mid-March is about the right time to plant your earlies and you plant the maincrop a few weeks later. If after planting the leaves, also called haulm, start to show through and frost threatens you need to protect the plants. You can do this by pulling earth over the haulm from the side or covering with fleece.

Planting Potatoes

To plant you can just make a hole with a trowel or you can draw a trench (take a draw hoe and scrape a trench). You want it to be about 100mm deep. Handle your chitted tubers with care, gently setting them into the trench with the shoots pointing upwards, being careful not to break the shoots. Cover the potatoes lightly with soil.

If you have a comfrey patch try and get a cut of comfrey leaves, let them wilt for a day and just place them on the bottom of your trench, covering with a little soil. Comfrey will quickly rot down to provide fertiliser and it is almost perfect for potatoes and tomatoes.

Your first and second early potatoes should be planted about 300mm apart in rows about 600mm apart. The maincrop, being the heaviest cropper, need a bit more space so plant them about 400mm apart in rows 750mm apart.

Earthing Up Potatoes

As the plants grow you need to draw the earth from the sides of your rows over the plants. The potato tubers (that’s what we call the actual potato you eat) tend to grow towards the surface and if light gets to them they will go green. You do not want to eat green potatoes as they may give you upset stomach, so “earthing up” as this is called will cover these tubers and increase your crop.

It won’t hurt the plants when you cover some of the leaves by earthing up or slow down growth. You need to do this at regular intervals and by the end of the season each plant will have a small mound around it about 15cm (6in) high.

I mentioned they are greedy feeders and an additional dose of fertiliser after a month or so when they plants are established will really help. You can use specifically formulated potato fertiliser or an organic fertiliser such as fish, blood and bone. Good results can be had from using a liquid comfrey feed because the liquid is immediately available.

In dry weather keep them well watered. They produce a lot of crop and need their water. If the water supply is irregular the yield will be reduced and the potatoes can be cracked from uneven growth.

Harvesting

Your home-grown potatoes should be ready for lifting from June until September, depending on the varieties and the growing conditions. Earlies can be lifted and eaten as soon as they’re ready. This will be when above-ground growth is still green, and usually as soon as the flowers open.

Second and maincrop varieties can be kept in the ground much longer, until September, even though above-ground growth may well be looking past its best.

Two weeks before you lift the crop, cut the growth off at ground level. This should give the skins of the potatoes sufficient time to toughen up, making them far less prone to damage from lifting and easier to store.

Growing Potatoes In Containers

Some people question the wisdom of growing potatoes in a small garden as they take up quite a lot of space and potatoes can be bought incredibly cheaply in the supermarkets. However, once you have tasted organic freshly harvested potatoes from your own garden you will understand.

Even if you don’t even have a garden per se, just a backyard or patio area, it is possible to grow a usable crop of potatoes in containers such as old dustbins, large terracotta pots, a barrel, or even a large bag. And, it could not be easier to do.

Take for example an old dustbin or bucket. Drill 10 or 15 drainage holes in the bottom so that it does not become waterlogged. Fill the bottom of the bin with 5-10cm of crocks (old broken pots etc), and then add another 15cm of good potting compost. Put five seed potatoes on top with the sprouts pointing upwards. Cover the potatoes with more of the potting compost until they are just buried, and then water well. As the green foliage grows upwards add more compost. It does not matter if the leaves are covered as they will soon grow up through the compost again. If the compost is not very rich then add some fertilizer – for example chicken pellet fertilizer or well rotted manure to nourish the potatoes. Adding comfrey liquid or a foliar feed with extracts of seaweed every couple of weeks will also help.

The only things you really need to watch out for is that the leaves of the potatoes receive enough sunlight and enough water. If the container is very deep then no sunlight will ever hit the foliage and the potatoes will not do well. In this case either fill the container with a lot of compost before putting in the potatoes therefore raising the height at which they are planted, or reduce the height of the container. Compost in a container will dry out far faster than a vegetable plot so it is essential to keep an eye out. However, over-watered potatoes can have black or hollow centres, and potatoes which were irregularly watered end up knobbly.

So, whatever size garden you have, you can grow your own potatoes. I can guarantee that once you’ve tasted your own home grown spuds, you’ll never get them from a supermarket again!

As you’ll know from one of my previous posts my favourite ingredient next to chillies is garlic. I made the fatal mistake of not sowing it in the last week of November, and then as we all know the winter came with a vengeance, and I only managed to plant it last weekend.

So, if you were caught out by the bad weather, or now want to try growing garlic, you can plant it now, and here are some of my tips to ensure you get a good crop.

We think of garlic as a crop from those hot sunshine countries, but it grows well in the UK.

To grow good garlic, you need good stock. There’s no point in trying to grow from a bulb purchased in a supermarket. Chances are it’s a Spanish variety bred for a warmer climates and it will not thrive in a British summer. You need to buy varieties suitable for our weather.

I ended up buying ‘The Garlic Lover’s Seed Selection’ from The Garlic Farm, which contains Tuscany Wight x 1, Early Purple Wight x 1, Lautrec Wight x 1, Iberian Wight x 1, Chesnok Wight x 1, Albigensian Wight x 1, Elephant Garlic x 2 cloves, Solent Wight x 2 and Provence Wight x 1.

You can, however, grow from your own saved homegrown garlic if you want to save some money. Select the best bulbs and user larger cloves for the best results.

Types of Garlic

Garlic comes in two main types, hardneck or Rocambole garlic and softneck garlic. Softneck tends to store better. Varieties will vary in flavour, you just choose what suits you.

Elephant garlic is actually a perennial leek, and has a much milder flavour. Its cloves split up when it is dried, so elephant garlic does not store for very long.

Cultivating Garlic

Usually garlic does best planted in November(!) although some varieties are suitable for spring planting. Because the garlic is going to be sitting in the ground for a long time, you can get losses due to rot. A well-drained and cultivated soil will give the best results. A week or so before planting, give the soil a dose of a general-purpose fertiliser like growmore or preferably fish, blood & bone, which is slower to release. A couple of ounces per square yard is about right. Garlic doesn’t need too rich a soil but it will do better with some nutrition.

Use a dibber, an old spade handle is ideal, to make holes around 4″ deep and about 8″ apart each way. Break the bulb into individual cloves, being careful not to damage them, and drop into the holes pointed side up. Fill with soil and more or less forget about them until spring.

Birds can be a problem when the shoots appear, pulling the garlic out of the ground. You may need to keep them off with netting or fleece until they’re really established.

If you have a heavy clay soil, water logging is much more of a problem but just dib your hole a little deeper and put some grit and sand into the base of the hole. This will allow drainage and get your garlic through a wet winter.

You can start garlic off in 3″ pots under glass, planting out in early spring when the shoots are showing but I think there is little if any benefit to this method, as long as you prepare the soil first.

In the spring, another dose of fertiliser will really bring them on although you really don’t need to do much more than keep the plants weed free and water in the summer if dry.

The bulbs are harvested when the leaves begin turning yellow in midsummer. If you leave them too long, the cloves will split apart and storage will be a problem. Use a fork to dig them up carefully.

Sometimes the plants will throw up a flower spike or scape. Snip this off as soon as possible. These are actually quite nice snipped up small and used as a spring onion in a salad, but with that garlic tang. You can even use the flowerhead. If you leave them, the plant puts energy into seed rather than fattening the cloves.

Allow them to dry off for a week or so before storing in a cool, dark, well-ventilated place, although wet garlic, freshly harvested, is prized by many chefs and can be used immediately.

Garlic Problems

Apart from the birds mentioned above, the worst problem affecting garlic is rust. Usually this isn’t too much of a problem unless the plants are too close together or in a shady spot. Keep garlic well watered during dry weather. If it’s dry for long periods, the cloves will not swell and the resulting crop will have a short storage life.

So, as you can see, it is really easy. Give it a go even if you do not have a garden, as garlic does well in pots too!

Now that the first frost has arrived, I thought it would be a good time to share this recipe, especially since I found a motherload of sloes when I took my dog on a different route when I took her for a walk this weekend.

Although I mention gin throughout this post, you can replace this with vodka if this is your tipple of choice!

The Sloe, or Blackthorn, is a wild ancestor of the plum. The bushes grow in hedgerows all over the country, bearing blue-black, marble-sized fruits which develop a light blue, powdery bloom in dry conditions. It’s often said that you should pick them after the first frost, but in my experience late September is the best time; later in the year you’ll be lucky to find any left, and the all-important sharpness which makes this drink special will have diminished (if you bite into a raw sloe you’ll appreciate why they don’t tend to be eaten by humans).

Incidentally, don’t be put off if you dislike the taste of gin, because it’s completely transformed in this drink.

Pick 1.75 lb (800g) to infuse with 1 bottle (700ml) of gin to make 1 litre of liqueur. When picking the sloes, watch out for the long, very sharp spikes which are the plant’s first line of defence!

Buy the strongest gin you can, at least 40% abv, preferably a bit more (“export strength”). You’ll also need 8oz (225g) granulated sugar and 2 clean, dry 700ml bottles with screw tops (e.g. old gin bottles). There’s probably no need to wash the sloes, but if you do then make sure you dry them thoroughly. The secret of making this, as with any liqueur, is to keep the the alcohol content as high as you can – weak gin and/or wet sloes are bad news!

Put half of the sugar into each of the empty bottles then divide the gin equally between them. A plastic funnel and kitchen scales ease these tasks. Then you are ready to process the sloes, which means piercing the skin of each one as it goes into the bottle, so that the gin can get in and the juice out. For this rather lengthy job, sit down with a skewer and some good company or background music. You’ll soon fall into an easy rhythm of picking up 2 sloes, stabbing them with the skewer, and dropping one into each bottle. Stop when the level of the displaced gin has nearly reached the top of the bottles, then screw on the caps.

Now all you have to do is keep the bottles in a dark place, agitating and up-ending them daily; the sugar will slowly dissolve as the gin starts to leach the colour out of the fruit skins. Once the sugar has vanished just give them an occasional shake during the next 3 months or so. The colour will deepen through various shades of pink to a dark maroon, and the sloes will shrink to the size of raisins.

Now you’re ready to decant the liqueur off the remains of the sloes. This is easy if you pour it off into a new bottle through a tea strainer held above your trusty plastic funnel.

Finally, reward yourself for your patience. Sloe Gin is especially good after a large, rich meal when it has great palate-cleansing properties! I prefer this drink young, but if you do keep it for a year or more its flavour will mellow, becoming less sprightly and more nutty/plummy, and the colour veers from ruby to tawny.

There is then the question of what to do with the alcohol infused sloes. I have two suggestions. Firstly, add cider to the sloes, and in eight weeks you have a drink known as ‘Slider,’ and it tastes of apples, sloes, and gin flavours. Be very very careful with this, as it is like rocket fuel!

Secondly, I have also made a sloe gin sorbet using the left over sloes from the gin, which was equally delicious!

The weather this weekend put paid to all my plans, including a visit to the East Midlands Food Festival.

However, I was cheered up by the first of the new seed catalogues arriving in the post. I eagerly starting marking off the stuff that I wanted to order, and then it dawned on me that I have a limited amount of space, several more catalogues to come, and also a hell of a lot of seeds from when I ordered at the same time last year.

It then also dawned on me that I can’t be the only person that ends up with a huge amount of seeds left over at the end of the growing season.

So, in addition to revamping and restarting the forum on this site, I was thinking of adding a ‘seed swap’ function to the site, so that people could post what they had to swap, and also any seeds that they were looking for. A sort of ‘Freecycle’ for seeds

Let me have your feedback as to whether you would be interested in this.

It seems as if Autumn is already giving way to Winter in my part of the Midlands, so I have been digging up all those lovely summer crops of sweetcorn, late beans, etc, and my mind has been turning to what I can plant over Winter and next year.

People who know me will be able to tell you that next to chillies, my next favourite thing to grow is garlic.
At my last allotment, all I used to do was put my name down for some of the seed garlic that the allotment shop used to buy in bulk. However, as this is the first time that I have been able to grow garlic on this plot, as we only took it on in January, I decided that I wanted to try a few different varieties.

There is a huge patch of the allotment that I have just cleared and dug over, and will have had green manure dug into it before I plant the garlic. After a lot of research I found it impossible to narrow down my choices and have decided to go for the Porcelain Seed Garlic from The Really Garlicky Company and the ‘Garlic Lover’s Seed Selection’ from The Garlic Farm.

The Garlic Lover’s Seed Selection contains Tuscany Wight x 1, Early Purple Wight x 1, Lautrec Wight x 1, Iberian Wight x 1, Chesnok Wight x 1, Albigensian Wight x 1, Elephant Garlic x 2 cloves, Solent Wight x 2
and Provence Wight x 1.

Also, I have never tried Porcelain Garlic before, and looking on The Really Garlicky Company’s website, they also produce edible garlic shoots, known as ‘garlic scapes.’ They are described on their website as “Deliciously tender and providing a delightfully subtle garlic flavour, Garlic Scapes are the edible curly tops of our Scottish Hardneck garlic. Garlic Scapes are well suited to a variety of dishes such as stir fries, soups, salads or just simply as a vegetable or garnish.”

Sounds delicious, and I always willing to try something new!

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!

The lottie took a back seat this week, as I had to pot on the numerous chilli plants from the 19 different varieties of chillies that I’m growing this year.

I was worried earlier this year that the majority of the crop was going to fail, as they took such a long time to get going compared to last year. It must have been the long winter/cold spring, as they have most definitely cranked into life. It is a good job, as I’m now reaching the end of last year’s crop which were either dried, pickled or frozen, as I had more chillies than I knew what to do with at that point.

A lifesaver last year was finding out that I could freeze the surplus chillies that I had by spreading them out individually on baking trays and putting them in the freezer. When they are frozen, you just bag them up, and pop them in the freezer, and they don’t stick together or turn into mush. When you need one, all you do is take it out of the freezer bag, run it under the hot tap to defrost it, and then use it as normal.

Now that I’ve wrote this, I have a craving for some pickled chillies, so I’m off to dip into my final (very large) jar of them!

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!