What a fab
summer! In my third season at St Anns Allotments I’ve finally got to see what my
allotment is really capable of. So good to get enough sun – and enough rain
too. But it didn’t seem like that to start with, and what a strange year or so
it has been. Back in spring 2012 we were in a drought which we were told would take
over a year of exceptional rain to recover from. And that wasn’t going to
happen, was it... but it did. We optimistically sowed seeds and booked holidays
in Britain but the summer never really seemed to arrive. Potato blight came in
waves, and mildew and slugs did for my courgettes. 
Autumn carried on in the
same way, and people who will never get the difference between weather and
climate started making snide comments about global warming.
2013 didn’t
get off to a particularly good start either. Though I spent a bright New Year’s
Day enjoying sun at the ‘lottie, before things really got going there was that
extraordinary late snow. I don’t think there’s been snow on my late March birthday
since the original one, and my Easter cycle trip to see friends in Devon was
hit by blizzards. My April 2013 allotment photos still look like winter: in
2012 photos it’s definitely spring, the potatoes are in, the broad beans are
up, the currants are in leaf. So all my lovely seed potatoes from Potato Day
had to wait quite a while till I planted them.
But then things started to
change... by May plants were starting to catch up, and there’s not much between
the allotment in late May 2012 and 2013.
June wasn’t
exactly flaming, but was starting to give us hope that this year, maybe,
perhaps, we’d get ‘a summer’. Just as July was getting going, as the
forecasters were getting more and more confident about a heatwave, as the
allotment was starting to need watering, and as the weeds were starting to flex
their muscles, I went off to The Netherlands for two weeks. Well, I’d promised
myself a decent cycle tour this year, big birthday ‘n all that. My dedication
to my allotment can only go so far.
Fortunately I had a deputy, who went there
every second day and kept it all alive. I also spent quite some time
summer-proofing my cabbages and kale with a massive chicken-wire and mesh
structure to keep pigeons and butterflies off, and mulching all the beans.
Back
in the UK with a cyclist’s suntan and a slight addiction to stroopwafels I was
relieved to see that the allotment was green and thriving. But what was this?
Last year I had noticed a few, just a few, tendrils of bindweed. It hadn’t
bothered me, after all the allotment does have ground elder, couch grass and
Japanese knotweed! But here now was a great carpet across the whole of my
orchardy/forest gardeny area. When I pulled a bit, half the allotment moved. So
I carried on winding it all up into a ball – quite fun but could have done
without!
So what
about the produce? My broad beans were prolific last year but I’d over-wintered
them and they got horrendous chocolate spot. This year with spring sown ones in
an (eventually) decent late spring, they were spot-free. I tried asparagus pea
– but won’t bother again. I’ll sow the rest of mine as a pretty border plant
but it’s a sparse crop for the space, and I couldn’t detect any asparagus
flavour. Dwarf and climbing French beans were great – and I’ve finally learnt
not to sow too many. I tried runner beans for the first time in years, and
trained them up into the tree above the plot as they were too tall for my
bamboo poles. They were fine, but I feel that you get a lot less leeway between
too small and too big than with French beans. Better for the back yard where
you can check every day. On a similar subject I had planted a ‘Di Nizza’
courgette which did really well. In August I checked it one Saturday, and there
was a lovely little courgette, just too small to pick... then I went away that
week (bit of a theme here!) and the next Saturday the courgette was bigger than
my head...
I’ll save
details on the potatoes for another time, when I’ve had a chance to try them
all, but suffice it to say that it was my best year yet. I even had to dig up a
path to get some out! Although the late spring meant my onions weren’t much to
write about, I’m still cropping healthy beetroot and chard.
So, how did the brassicas get on under their
cage? Well, it worked, but maybe too well. It was actually more Karen-proof
than cabbage-white-proof, and I ended up spending several hours picking
caterpillars off, after laboriously pulling up tent-pegs and squeezing under
the cage. I can see why people use fruit cages for their brassicas now! I did
have help though: once the cage was lifted off I saw a common wasp carry away a
small caterpillar, and that several caterpillars had stopped moving and were
surrounded by yellow pupae of the parasitic wasps which had eaten them from the
inside out.
Finally, it’s
been a great year for strawberries, with a couple of kilos from my small-ish
patch, enough for some jam! I’d tried to do things properly this year, putting
straw round them and netting them. Was it this, or was it the weather? I’ll
never know. Every time we say something like “this year I’ve grown...” we’re
actually saying, “this year me, and nature, have grown...” This year it’s been
a great partnership. I’ll forgive the fact that nature loves bindweed and
cabbage whites as much as beetroot and strawberries.
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