Terry Walton reflects on his year at the allotment
Changeable weather certainly provided some challenges!
Ihope the festive season brought you many useful gardening gifts – and a few books on the subject to give you inspiration this coming year. That’s the wonderful thing about a life of gardening, there’s always something new to learn and there are many crops still to be tried and grown.
Everybody has an opinion about what to grow and how to grow it. At the end of the day it’s your garden, your choice and you can grow what you like. There are, of course, guidelines on how to get the best results and how to prepare soil for various crops, and to listen and read about it from ‘experts’ is a help.
At the same time nature holds the upper hand and will have the biggest influence. Never take the advice of instructions on a seed packet as gospel but learn from experienced gardeners in your neighbourhood of the best time and way to grow crops. Most of all, enjoy what you’re doing and never lose heart.
There are no such things as green fingers; these come with experience and the only quick way of getting green fingers is squishing caterpillars between them!
The next couple of days will be spent relaxing for the New Year celebrations with an hour or two walking about the plot. If the conditions are right and the ground’s workable, who knows, I might barrow a few loads of my home-made compost onto the dug over areas. The exercise is much needed after the excess of last week! Still, the Christmas lunch was a healthy affair with a wide range of vegetables. It far exceeded the daily five requirements! A look of satisfaction creeps across my face that the work of almost nine months of growing is appreciated and enjoyed without a word being spoken.
With 2017 just about to expire it’s time to reflect on the year past. The last winter was wet and mild, then at the wrong time in April it decided to stop raining and the ground became very dry. This made the sowing of early seeds a more difficult task, as the ground had to be watered before and after sowing. The early planting out of broad beans also required them to be well-watered in to get their roots started in the dry soil.
Then it was a couple of months of cool and wet conditions, which didn’t affect most of the crops too badly, but the climbing beans were decidedly unhappy and refused to twine up the canes so they turned a pale shade of yellow. After much persuasion, gallons of feed and the warming of temperatures in July, they finally twined up the canes and flowered. This meant there was no sizable harvesting until August and a glut took place over a four-week window! The potatoes also succumbed to blight in mid-July, with the exception of the ‘Sarpo Mira’, due to the high humidity that continued. Brassicas, onions and all the salad and root crops coped well and brought forth bountiful harvests.
My experimental crops of the year – kohlrabi, celeriac and Florence fennel all exceeded expectations, and the star of the show was Rob Smith’s kohlrabi called ‘Superschmelz’, which formed massive bulbs and challenged my wife’s cookery skills!