We took a mid-week opportunity to visit the plot to tend to the runner beans that have been causing me some anxiety. For some reason our beans are turning crinkly and growing in an ugly branched fashion. I initially thought they had been caught by a cold spell but I’ve been growing them in succession and every little seedling that pops up proves to be a disappointment.

Not quite every seedling – some shine.

I planted two varieties of seed, a hand me down from Lynn’s dad that has been in existence for decades and a saved variety from the Sheen plot which is probably a version of Wisley Wonder. One of them seems to produce half way decent plants and the other doesn’t.

I’ve planted loads more seed and now can only hope for the best, or perhaps try and buy some plants in from the garden centre.

Lynn in the meantime was down on her hands and knees trying to capture the wonder of the onions with her phone.

It’s hard to do justice and this photo just doesn’t evoke the same sense of pride.

Lynn has claimed the onions as her own, along with the other plot success – peas. The plot failure on the other hand is always referred to as “Angela’s carrots”.

Hardly fair.

The peas are pretty wondrous though. The plants are vigorous and healthy and the peas are a delight.

A lovely sweet pea must be about the best thing to come out of an allotment (maybe second to purple sprouting broccoli?), and they cook up marvelously with a handful of Arran Pilot, prepared in the garden shed trangia and eaten on the plot while surveying our land.

We barely made it to the plot at all in March but just as the month was turning, the sun arrived. We grabbed our seed potatoes and ran to the plot clutching a days supply of delicately cut sandwiches and flasks of hot drinks.

Four hours later, stripped to our t-shirts, we would have happily discarded the flasks in favour of a few tinnies.

We worked ferociously planting spuds and sowing seeds. Lynn would of course argue that she worked the hardest as she planted 7 rows of spuds while I weeded the seed bed and prepared some labels with my Brother P Touch – pah!

Weeding that seed bed was the devils own job. We’d planted onions, lettuce and assorted brassicas under the glazed area some weeks back but pretty much the only thing that had germinated was a field of weeds. After half an hour of dabbling around with a tweezer to uncover 1 lettuce and 3 brassica seedlings it occurred to me that it would be a far better idea to blitz the lot with a hoe and start again.

Our potato planting led to some interesting debates. I’m relying on C. H. Middleton with his Dig for Victory advice from 1945, topped up with a modern infusion from Joy Larkcom, while Lynn is regularly in contact with her Dad – a potato farmer by profession.

I’m a big fan of books and so would usually disregard 50 years of practical experience for something that could be gleaned by a quick scan from the comfort of a bath. We opted for the Dig your Own method: 1/2 spade depth furrow, place in spud and then cover with soil and a sprinkling of manure. No earthing up until the foliage starts to poke through.

The experienced voice tells us to dig a trench, place in manure with spuds on top and then earth up enough to allow the rain to run off and prevent rotting. I know it sounds sensible and was in fact my method of old, but its hard work and in clay, I’m all for short cuts. I do hope the buggers don’t rot though, I’ll never hear the end of it.

We have set ourselves a challenge to excel at two crops this year – peas and leeks. Of course we want all our crops to be prizewinners but these two have proved to be challenging in the past.

I wouldn’t waste time with the autumn sown peas – horrible dry things, but I think a hot day at the end of March might be perfect for the sweet summer variety. We prepared two drills and I started laying out the seeds in a perfect arrangement – square layout with a centre pea, then had a flashback to last years germination rate and walked back along my row scattering the rest of the packet.

Here’s Lynn proudly constructing the mesh cloche over the sowings.

We also had time to set the uber cheap summer bulbs (care of Lidl) by the rhubarb patch and get in a few rows of carrots and parsnips. I’ve gone mad with carrots again, so along with the standard Nantes varieties I’ve got some Red Samurai and Purple Haze, so with my usual carrot success rate these are all set to be mighty expensive tubers again.

We’ve dabbled a little bit on the old plot at North Sheen, pulling parsnips and leeks but have finally decided the time has come to hand it over to the next budding gardener on the list.

I went over to see Sam to hand in my notice and nearly came away blubbing. It felt very hard handing over my lovely little corner plot that turned from a bindweed monstrosity into a moderately productive little haven in the space of a season. We emptied the shed and carted the trammel and another blackberry bush over to the new plot and rapidly felt at ease again.

We are lucky to be able to start over again, making plans and building stuff, and this new plot is sooo tidy!

It’s rapidly approaching the end of February and yet this was our first visit of the year to the Norbury plot. It’s been so wet and claggy and the snow still hasn’t declared for the season so we haven’t been able to dig or sow. My allotment task list is covered in red overdue stars though so we decided time had come to brave inclement conditions, ignore gardening sense and plant the cabbages anyway.

We knocked up this cold frame top for the seed bed in a downpour and I planted greyhound cabbage, cauliflower, onions and lettuce while Lynn started on the compost bin construction. I don’t hold out much hope for the seeds but that compost heap is a thing of beauty.

The weekend was scheduled for the installation of the guttering and water butt, a task I’d handed over to Lynn but not before I had passed on the benefit of my huge and heroically unsuccessful experiences. I’ve been spouting tales of woe for the last week, predicting DIY disasters of monumental proportions and just to add to the pressure I thought I’d invite my parents down to witness the whole event.

Of course my parents are renowned troopers in the allotment world so I might also have hoped to benefit a little from their digging prowess and work ethic as well.

This shot nicely captures Lynn’s fear as she spots the kinky boots I bought my mum a couple of Christmases ago, I like to think she’s wondering desperately how she can backtrack and remove wellington boots from the xmas wishlist she left me with.

Too late though I’m afraid.

I’ve been revisiting an old book “Companion Planting” by Gertrud Franck and it triggered a little obsession with the mass planting of spinach seeds. I sourced a bulk supplier, Seeds By Size, awaited delivery of my 25,000 spinach seeds and then waited for the general mocking and guffawing from the children to die down, before sitting down myself and wondering if I’d gone ever so slightly nuts.

I am reasonably content that the mocking will die down when they find plate-fulls of slimey green stuff turning up day after to day but between then and now there is a lot of planting to do.

Luckily my Dad was quite prepared to get stuck in there and start me off with the first row.

I think the general idea with the spinach planting is to cut and leave in-situ as a mulch or green manure but I’ll worry about the specifics later.

Heading back to the water butt, I’m afraid there is very little left to say.

It was disappointingly uneventful.

The guttering was erected in moments, Lynn and my mum sorted the trajectory without recourse to swearing and the whole thing was dressed up like a work of art before I had chance to get my hands dirty.

My hands may have remained relatively clean but I didn’t let my folks get away with anything easy.

All in all they transplanted two fruit trees, dug the grotty front patch, planted a rhubarb crown, transplanted a row of spring cabbage, commenced the sowing of the 25,000 and demonstrated a bit of synchronised digging.

I did give them a cup of tea though.

Funny that Soilman should choose to leave a comment on my blog about the folly of early planting and specifically mention that parsnips don’t need to be planted yet. Before receiving the comment I’d been building myself into a crescendo of dithery panic.

We were on the plot this weekend getting in an urgent planting of spuds and a sowing of summer cabbages before the sociable Easter flurry comes upon us. I set up a mobile hotline with my Dad who was also on his plot and expected him to keep me informed of what he was planting. He mentioned ridiculous things like runner beans (he’ll be lucky!) but failed to inform me about parsnips which very clearly need planting now.

He slipped the surreptitious sowing, subtely into the conversation a few days later.

Soilman’s comment didn’t come through in time to calm me down, and anyway, Lynn had already been out on an emergency parsnip sourcing exercise and successfully provided me with some fresh tender and true seed.

So straight out of work yesterday I took a bit of a detour and managed to plant two rows of parsnips in the twilight. I’m looking forward to the clock change so I can sow my way along a semi-straight drill in daylight.

Also managed to pick another bucket of purple sprouting broccoli so the journey turned out to be quite worthwhile.

I rounded the corner whistling away to a tune on the iPod and came face to face with this scene of blunt trauma nastiness.

Blasted vandals.

Not worth getting upset about it though and as my trangia and ‘room of one’s own’ mug were still intact, I managed to start the whistling again.

I ignored the DIY implications of the damage and got on with the digging. I had spud planting on my mind and didn’t want to put it off while the clouds were threatening to turn soggy.

I’m pretty pleased by the results, I’ve pulled my hamstrings and twisted my back but there isn’t much that surpasses the satisfaction of a freshly turned plot and a neatly stacked heap of hot horse manure.

While still ignoring the shed I thought I’d whizz around and complete many an outstanding task.

My second double row of Broad Beans went in, Bunyards Exhibition next to autumns sowing of Aquadulce. I’m pretty sure that I was close to cropping my beans this time last year but I suppose it has been a harsher winter.

I got a load shallots through the post yesterday, another forgotton and impulsive purchase from last year.

I noticed on the invoice that I have another two bags of onion sets due to arrive in the near future as well. Having only just got over the planting of the 5000 I’m not exactly looking forward to this delivery. I need to be a little more sedate with my purchases, at this rate I’ll only be cropping onions and spuds.

The weekend was a scorcher, which was a blessing as I had quite a few onion sets to plant. I arrived thinking I had a fairly big job on my hands trying to find a home for about 200 onions but when I opened the padded envelope and ripped open 1 of the 3 sacks of onions, I realised that 1000 might be nearer the mark.

I was pretty determined not to run out of onions quite as quickly as I had this year but 1000 might be overkill. Much sucking of teeth and sharp intakes of breath followed as I wondered where they were all going to go. I could actually turn the entire plot over to onions at that rate but that was going to require a lot of digging. My big job just got a lot bigger, so I did the only thing that can be done under the circumstances. I opened a bottle of honey beer and had a little sit down to think.

Two bottles of waggledance later, the onions were still sitting there, so I gave one pack to my neighbour and reduced the challenge by a third. Success!

A couple of wonky rows went in before I started watering and was pleased to create my very own rainbow. Having the foot of the rainbow land in my Brussel Sprout patch must augur well for a bumper Christmas harvest, it didn’t unfortunately mark the site of a pot of gold.

The kitchen waste bucket has been overflowing and Shakti was complaining that I haven’t collected hers for a while either and was in a similar state. Compost pressure forced me to get out of bed to go and fix the tyre on my bike so I could take the trailer on a neighbourhood sweep, collecting food waste before heading to the allotment.

It was threatening rain all day but I had a very productive afternoon on the plot. I dug up an entire row of Maris Peer so I could clear some space for another row of peas. I’m risking a late sowing of Kelvedon Wonder as I’m desperate for a taste of the sweet peas of my childhood rather than the starchy offerings I have to put up with at the moment. I’m a little worried about my glut of spuds though, I’ll probably be 3 stone heavier by the end of the summer, I seem to be eating a combination of potato salad and spinach and potato curry for breakfast, dinner and tea.

I took the cloche off the solitary carrot bed to remove more weeds and discovered that what I thought was lush parsnip growth was actually radish, swollen to elephantine proportions.

Shame I missed out on those, they were too hot to handle at this size and had to go on the compost heap.

I’ve found a couple more carrots in the bed and have replaced the weeds with yet another sowing of carrot seeds. I’ve taken advice from all quarters and followed the following procedure, practically guaranteed to result in a carrot bed worthy of the name:

Prepare drill
Soak drill thoroughly
Sow the carrot seed
Top off with potting compost
Do not water for a fortnight (to prevent capping)

I like the tram line effect.

I stripped the gooseberry bush bare so I could make jam but thinking there weren’t quite enough fruits to bother with, I pulled a few sticks of rhubarb to bulk it out.

Back home, an exhaustive search of the interweb failed to reveal anything useful on the subject of Rhubarb and Gooseberry jam, although there were plenty of recipes on the individual versions. I considered the possibility that jam makers of the past had tried the combination and declared it vile and constitutionally un-jam-like but rejected the notion and proceeded to knock up my own recipe.

It went something along the lines of, 1lb gooseberries, 1lb rhubarb both simmered in juice of 1 lemon and 1/2 pint of water. The resulting puree seemed very watery and I considered draining but didn’t. To this I added 1 bag of sugar (1kg) and then boiled for ages and ages as the damn thing refused to set. I was hoping to boil off enough excess juice to give the setting process half a chance but then I got fed up waiting and wanted my pan back so I could make yet another batch of spinach and potato curry, so just slopped it into my waiting jars.

It’s been a few hours now and it still pours like very runny honey. Tastes damn fine though.