There is LIFE in Bulwell!

Over the next few weeks I'm going to showcase some of the lovely garden projects I work on, as a way of updating this blog for non-Facebook viewers.
LIFE (Learning In A Fun Environment) started off in Aspley, and was the first place I ran a gardening course as Sessional Lecturer for New College Nottingham. It's the brainchild of the inspirational Suzie Wright and is more than just a day centre for adults with learning disabilities - it's also a place where they are on the staff. I owe the 'It's The Gardening Lady' name to LIFE - when I used to arrive on my bike I'd hear people shout 'It's the gardening lady!" so when I needed a business name that's what sprang into my mind! We had a lovely garden in Aspley which we used to grow food for several years, and when LIFE relocated to Bulwell Suzie created a very different but equally lovely space in the area behind the building. If only all day centres valued gardens and food-growing so much.
Here's some photos of gardeners creating 'Pizza Pots' - tomatoes, sweet peppers, oregano, and basil. Colouring-in is very popular so I try to incorporate it into an art activity which everyone can join in with.The first picture is our mural of May Flowers.

What a fab summer!

First published in Nottingham Organic Gardeners Newsletter Autumn 2013

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.

What's in a name?

First published in Nottingham Organic Gardeners Newsletter Spring 2012.
A week or so after our Potato Day, I was putting my tubers into egg-boxes to chit. Colleen, Lady Christl, Red Duke of York, Charlotte, Desiree, Lady Balfour, Linda, Sarpo Mira, Anya, and Robinta. Wait a minute, isn’t there a hint of a theme there? Why are my potatoes nearly all named after women? Maybe it was me, unconsciously choosing potatoes named after members of my gender rather than picking them for their pest resistance, productivity or whatever. Linda sounds like a good potato, but I do also have two good friends called Linda!

So I looked back at the list from potato day and did some very basic statistics. It’s called counting. There were 13 which have women’s names, including the two Ladies named above, and British Queen. Bonnie Dundee and Belle de Fontenay are probably girls too. There were a few which were possible, such as Aura and Harmony, but both are descriptive words in their own right so I didn’t count them. Mira and Robinta sound as if they should be women’s names but I’m not sure, so I didn’t count them either. 

 Some of my 2012 potatoes, later in the year.

So how about male potato names? There were five. Duke of York (Red or not), King Edward, Picasso, Romano, and Ulster Prince. Even without the Bonnies, Belles and Miras, there’s no comparison. The difference is the ones simply given a female name, rather than named after a famous woman. There were more famous men than women – but that’s another issue! So what was going on? I decided to find out, and in the best tradition of contemporary journalism (if that’s not an oxymoron) I spent an evening googling. 

An investigation of the potato names on the British Potato Variety Database didn’t reveal much, just that potatoes like Orla, Cara and Colleen are Irish, no big surprise, and Nadine, Harmony and Anya are Scottish. So they weren’t all from one seed company, nor were they all of one age. Then, looking at European varieties, I discovered that it wasn’t just British breeders, but French and Dutch and many others tended to give their potatoes women’s names, Annabelle, Fianna and Mona Lisa being just a few. 

So was it something to do with the history of the potato in the west, and when it became accepted as a vegetable? It took many years from the potato being brought from South America to it being the staple of so many countries. It is a fascinating story which even includes Marie Antoinette wearing potato flowers in her hair. However for many years potatoes were regarded with great suspicion, and were called names like ‘Devil’s apple’, ‘Forbidden fruit of Eden’, and ‘Eve’s apple’. Women being implicated again, but it doesn’t seem to connect with current names. 

I came across a report that an international team recently tried to sort out the tangle of 600 scientific names for potato – which corresponded to just 4 cultivated species. There were also about 100 wild species, with about 500 scientific names. As you can imagine, this will help in communicating about potato breeding as scientists search for new genetic inputs for addressing issues of climate change and pests and diseases. But no clues about the cultivar names.

Then I discovered the article ‘Why the Quechua Women Grew Four Thousand Species of Potatoes’ – and was off on another fascinating side-track. The Quechua are a pre-Hispanic culture in the Andes, and the tradition of propagating potatoes by seed is continued by the women in gardens (while often the men farm commercial potato varieties in fields). The women’s potatoes have an incredible variety of shape and colour after thousands of years of selection, and have names which reflect their traditions, environment, and relationships: ‘like an old bone’, ‘like a deer’s white tongue,’ and ‘makes the daughter-in-law cry’. Wonderful stuff, but I couldn’t see that this, coincidental as it was, would have any influence on names many years later. And why did the daughter-in-law cry?

Then some more delights, via Google books: back in the old days in Peru in the Amará language they used a different system: red potatoes are usually considered female, whilst white ones are associated with maleness. So ‘Saq’ampaya’ means ‘Long Male Potato’.  No sniggering. But also the answer to my new question: in Quechuan ‘Cachan huacachi’ means, yes, ‘Potato which makes the daughter-in-law cry’ – because it has very deep eyes which makes it difficult to peel. Poor daughter-in-law, I’m sure she was doing her best, but the old harpy just kept giving her horrid potatoes. 

Fascinating stuff, but I still don’t really know why so many potatoes have women’s names. I guess the real answer is quite prosaic: potatoes are named after women because most are bred by men. And women’s names sound nice. Would we want to buy a Fred, Derek or Wayne potato? (sorry Fred, Derek and Wayne!)

References:

http://varieties.potato.org.uk/menu.php

www.wikigender.org/index.php/Why_the_Quechua_Women_Grew_Four_Thousand_Species_of_Potatoes

www.cambridge.org/us/books/kiple/potatoes/htm

‘The Complete book of Potatoes’, De Jong, Sieczka and De Jong. (Available via www.google.co.uk/books/ ) 

A year in the new allotment

Mid-October marked an important anniversary: a year ago I chose my new allotment. So how has my first year been? Of course, there have been ups and downs. I last wrote about the pleasures of my first harvests of broad beans, my disappointment with early potatoes and my hopes for my cabbages, broccoli and kale. The success with beans has continued with dwarf French beans and – even better – climbing French beans. They are ones saved by a friend so I don’t know the cultivar, but they have a ‘ying yang’ patterned bean and flattish pods. I’m currently saving some of my own seeds.

The later potatoes have done much better than the earlies, having got much more rain. Still not massive crops, but they were planted into rather compacted soil which hadn’t been cultivated for years. ‘Robinta’ red main-crop were particularly good, I’ll definitely plant those again, and ‘Nicola’ too. We’ve still got lots in the pantry to eat, and I’ve still to lift the last ‘Pink Fir Apple’.

‘Highland Burgundy Red’ were a surprise – I’d picked up a bag of these without knowing anything about them – they are red right through! So it’s been pink mash…

The onions looked as if they were going to bolt in April, but this stopped once the rain came, and I’ve had a nice crop of varying sizes. This is useful in the kitchen, I wouldn’t want all the same size. I was still pleased that plenty were of a good size though!

I was also pleased that I got a small crop of carrots, unexpected in somewhat clayey soil. Beetroot and chard also did well.

The brassicas are a different story – what is it about the cabbage family that everything wants to eat them? Even though I’d netted the cabbages, the blasted pigeons teamed up and sat on the netting so that they could peck the leaves. Completely ate four nice fat cabbages.

I can see why fruit cages over brassicas are the thing round here. The kale was doing better but I’d not got round to getting some small-sized netting… so cabbage moth caterpillars have done their best to make the leaves all lacy. I do like wildlife but I must say I’ve got into squashing caterpillars. Feeding the robin, right? Talking of feeding, it was with the brassica plot that the need for fertility was most obvious. They’ve had various things this year – blood fish and bone, seaweed feed, chicken manure pellets – but I’ll be happier once I’ve really got going with compost.

I’ve also learnt a lot about the allotment layout and planning. My plots, at 130cm by 360cm, are just a bit too wide, I’m a bit titchy so it’s hard to reach into the middle. Over the next year I’m aiming to narrow them to about 110cm. This will be complicated as I’ll also be rotating crops, and extending the beds too! It’ll be worth it as it’ll give me space for more compost and leaf mould bins. I didn’t really have any major gluts, but next year I’ll sow more beetroot and leeks and less chard – I do like it but it goes a long way. I’ll plant a few coloured ones in the garden at home. I’m going to grow fewer kales and cabbages but look after them better, and try some oriental salads crops.

October is also the turn of the seasons – no denying, it really is autumn now. No looking at seed packets and thinking ‘it’s not that long past September, surely it’ll be OK…’ However there’s still a lot to be planted and sown. I’m looking forward to nurturing overwintered onions – ‘Snowball’ and ‘Sen Shu Yellow’ – and broad beans (‘Aquadulce’ and ‘Stereo’), sown right at the end of September, with some white radishes. Both have emerged enthusiastically and are now fleeced or under a cloche.

However winter lettuces ‘All the Year Round’ and ‘Lobjoits Green Cos’ sown in mid-September failed completely to appear. I’ve tried again with salad mustards ‘Green in Snow’ and ‘Red Giant’, and lettuce ‘Winter Density’. Sown in mid-October, these have yet to appear. If they still don’t appear I’ll sow more in modules to plant out under cover. Late in October I sowed ‘Feltham First’ peas, encouraged by the Chase Organic catalogue. I’m also trying garlic (shop-bought, so not guaranteed to thrive) in a ridge of soil nourished with bonfire ash, tips from Joy Larkcom’s book ‘Vegetables for Small Gardens’.

Autumn has coincided with some spare time and I’ve been able to catch up with a few things. Exciting jobs like digging up a 2m by 2m tarpaulin which had been buried under 20cm of soil then a fire lit on it. The lumps of partly-fired clay are now covered with a heap of hedge-cuttings, and the tarpaulin will still be useable to smother weeds. The extra potato bed has been dug over (revealing another couple of pounds of potatoes!) and will make part of a soft fruit area. The sycamore saplings cut down last winter will make posts for a cage over the bushes. I’ve a winter of cutting the second half of the hedge, and of digging over new ground, and of digging out bramble roots.

It’s been a good year. I’ve not always been able to get to the allotment as much as I wanted, but I’m pleased with what we’ve achieved together. The top third does look like – and is - a productive vegetable garden, and I’m not particularly worried that it’s a slightly weedy one.

I’ve started to sort out the bottom two thirds, which I didn’t think I’d manage this year. Soon I am to pick up an apple tree from the St Ann’s Allotments Fruit Tree project, so I need to work out where it is going to live in what I hope will become a small ‘forest garden’-ish area.

Many thanks to everybody who has given me equipment, bought me tools, and helped out. I’ll report back on progress over the next year, as I work out how to factor in the allotment with a full-time job.

First published in Nottingham Organic Gardeners' Newsletter

August

Summer seems to be speeding away, the weeks turning over faster and faster. The story in the allotment is of harvesting: the broad beans are long gone, some in the freezer, and now replaced by dwarf French beans, the modest amount of early potatoes are superseded by better yields of maincrop. Tasty little turnips and gorgeous beetroot for salad, swiss chard for mixing into pasta dishes and curries. Plus some rather oddly-shaped carrots (but at least I can grow carrots!) The onions did much better than I thought, once the rain came they stopped bolting and started filling out again.
Talking of rain though... it's very dry. Forecast heavy rain today which didn't happen, which in one sense was good as I was out doing good works with the Green Power Team but we do need it...

First Harvest

After months of taking stuff to the allotment, it's good to be bringing something home!

So, I have 'Maris Bard' early potatoes, 'Aquadulce' broad beans, and a mixture of rather beautiful but large radishes. Fortunately I like them hot!

Last week I dug up some of the 'Premiere' potatoes. Sadly these first earlies have not done too well: a combination of drought in spring and rain in June. No plants grew anywhere near as large as they should have done, and several have gone yellow. With black stems and a mushy seed potato, this could be black-leg. I ate some of those potatoes above this evening, tasty but fell apart in less that 10 minutes boiling, as the 'Premiere' did last week. I'm not sure whether this is due to the problems described above or a characteristic of these cultivars. I'll try steaming next time. It's also obvious that the potatoes in the section which I had dug over have done better. So if I do go over to no-dig, I'll prepare the ground, by digging, first.

The 'Aquadulce' broad beans are big but a little floury, the 'Stereo' are smaller but sweeter. It's good to be growing them, it's been some years since I had space to grow broad beans. The French beans are going well, had to make bigger netting over them. It seems a bit of a shame to have to use netting so much, but I hope that an approach with more ground cover in future will take its place to some extent. That will have to wait till all is a bit less weedy.

After digging out the potatoes I planted a 'Lady Godiva' squash at one end of the plot, 'Nero di Milan' at the other. Both from Nottingham Organic Gardeners' Plant-swap. I planted two innominate courgettes and two 'Di Nizza' round courgettes under cardboard over some garden waste in the lower part of the allotment, a bit of an experiment.

In the onion plot I planted out lots of module-sown calendula, and on the brassica plot I planted african marigolds. Not as companion plants per se, but to attract hoverflies and other useful insects.

Now I am eating yoghurt with strawberries from my little plot at home!

Two hours

I'm just not getting as much time as I'd like in my allotment, for all sorts of generally rather good reasons. However I like to think I make the time I get there really count.

Today I was there for two hours and I...

Weeded the brassica plot. 

(Before) 

(After)

I also planted a red cabbage and a Nero di Toscana kale from the NOGs plant swap, plus some more left-over Offenham 2, rather titchy, will see how they do.

Cut down the under-performing module-sown broad beans as green manures.

Netted the chard and beetroot as the fleece wasn't protecting all of it (look hard at the top of the photo and you can see some very pecked chard).

Removed the under-performing module-sown onions (it's a theme...) and planted 10 leeks which I'd bought from Stonebridge City Farm at the Green Festival.

Here's the allotment really not looking at all bad.