My Life on a Hillside Allotment

by Terry Walton

  I think that initially no one even considered flavour, because the stuff looked healthy and inviting. After all the toil and care that had gone into raising the crops from seed, fighting off the pests and feeding all that lavish growth, we were almost bound to enjoy the fruits of our labours. It’s disconcerting to realize we didn’t spot any difference in flavour and eating quality.

  By the early seventies I had gone from fully organic to almost completely inorganic on my plots. With ten to look after I had barely enough time to plant, grow and harvest the stuff and then sell it. There is only a short window in April and May when everything must go in, and it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to get all the crops under way.

  And then during late May, June and July the weeds became rampant, mainly because they loved these inorganic feeds as much as did the crops. A handful of sulphate of ammonia makes a cabbage look dark green and extremely appealing, but it does the same for weeds, which seem to leap out of the soil and flourish even more strongly than before. This made more work for me: it was like feeding a lawn when you don’t like mowing.

  But on the whole it made gardening a lot easier, producing quick results with little effort. All you had to do was spend a pound or two on a 1 cwt (50 kg) sack, which then lived in the corner of your shed. Every so often you took a plastic bucketful and cast it round all the plants while the ground was wet, and within days they would start to look extremely healthy. The more you used, the better they looked. No need to go humping tons of heavy manure any more.

  Chemical insecticides, too, seemed the answer to every gardener’s prayer, and we didn’t appreciate that they were not just destroying the enemy but killing allies as well: anything that moved died. But I don’t suppose realizing that would have alarmed us unduly, because we didn’t seem to need these friendly creatures now we had a more foolproof method. If this white powder could kill all the pests, who needed ladybirds, hoverflies and those other beneficial insects that were now defunct anyway?

  Every advance was greeted with enthusiasm and a regrettable lack of caution, and it wasn’t clear for ages that we were creating longer-term problems.

  About twelve years after the advent of the chemical revolution on the allotments, however, concern was expressed that these substances were going into the soil, where they were accumulating and doing no good at all. Articles started to appear in gardening magazines about the poisonous side-effects of insecticides on wildlife and the way residues were building up in the bodies of birds and animals, resulting in their declining numbers.

  I had been working in industry with chemicals long enough to know that there’s never smoke without fire, and when the use of insecticides became a real issue I stopped immediately. I didn’t wait for conclusive proof. As soon as there were rumours about their safety I started to think, hold on, I’ve got two young kids who are eating that food, living on it constantly. So the first thing to go was the use of lindane and DDT.

  Then it became evident there was more and more water pollution occurring in local streams and waterways from excessive amounts of nitrates draining from the soil. Again, what was happening everywhere was obvious, once you really thought about it. Chemical fertilizers were concentrated and worked quickly because they were soluble, so that plants could take them up straight away. But if they were easily dissolved it meant that any residues were soon washed out of the soil by rain, and these had to go somewhere.

  We knew the effects on the plot were short-lived because it was evident at the beginning of any new gardening season that when plants came up they were struggling. There was no fertility left in the soil, especially in the Rhondda valley, a wet, hilly place where, from late September or October right round to the following March, rain fell constantly on the sloping ground, leaching out these chemicals and carrying them straight down into the river.

  By the time this was common knowledge, all of us on the allotments had fallen completely into the habit of using chemical feeds, at first just one or two basic kinds and then the various superphosphates and potashes. Eventually there seemed to be an inorganic fertilizer for any need – potash to feed fruiting plants, superphosphate to help beans to set, nitrogen for quick growth – and all in a scoopful of powder. It was so simple.

  Some people made weird and wonderful cocktails with different materials. One of the worst was a mixture of lime and sulphate of ammonia, which causes a chemical reaction that makes your eyes water. It was particularly useful on brassicas to help fight clubroot: even though the ground would have been limed beforehand, adding a bit extra was a good insurance against the clubroot, while the sulphate of ammonia made everything grow fast and green. But when you mixed the two together, the smell of ammonia was tremendous and should have warned us something wasn’t right.

  * * *

  Importance of lime

  EVERYONE ON THE PLOTS had limed the soil regularly for as long as I could remember, and lime was one of the few ingredients that the early gardeners here actually bought: looking back at the records of sales at the allotment shop in the 1930s I see the only entry in the ledger is for the sale of lime.

  Our soil tends towards acid clay and lime is the perfect additive for reducing this acidity, adjusting soil conditions to a pH in the range 6.5 to 7.0, which is near perfection for most of the vegetables we grow. It’s the ideal conditioner for improving the structure of our heavy soil, and for adding to ground where you’re going to grow brassicas, which it helps protect against clubroot.

  I use it regularly to this day, because it’s still one of the best and most natural things for improving soil fertility and texture. If it’s added on a rotational basis, any part of the plot will be limed every two or three years, so there’s no chance of an overdose. Legumes need it as well as brassicas, and even though I manure my bean trench deeply, the surface always gets a very thin coating of lime to sweeten it.

  * * *

  I made a resolution never again to trust anybody’s word on something which had been man-made nor to use any form of artificial additive in the garden, even the modified insecticides which were so-called ‘safe’. They might have been ‘tested’ but there is no test that can reliably take into account the really long-term effects. It is the same with herbicides, like the glyphosate we’re using everywhere in agriculture: no one can predict the long-term impact of regular use.

  Giving up the use of chemicals left me with the problem of what to do instead. In place of herbicides I resorted to the simple alternatives of hoeing or hand-pulling weeds among my plants, and hacking them off my paths on a hot day, leaving them to wither and dry out. Replacing inorganic fertilizers and insecticides was not so straightforward. But I had to find something: intensive cropping needed to be supported with some kind of regular feeding or the soil would eventually become exhausted, and pests would continue to appear and threaten the health of my crops.

  I soon discovered that alternative methods of controlling pests aren’t in fact hard to find. They all depend on vigilance and a prompt, ruthless response: you have to keep an eye constantly open, and the moment you spot a pest you must counter-attack with every means available.

  There are two methods I regularly find very successful. When you first see a pest, use your thumb and forefinger to crush the larger ones individually, or rub your fingers up and down a leaf or stem where a whole colony of something small like black or green flies are feeding. That will usually kill 99 per cent of them.

  If an infestation is more severe, I get my hand-held pressure sprayer, fill it with tepid water from one of my drums, pump it up to the maximum pressure and set the spray to a full hard jet. Then I put my hand at the back of the plant to support it and blast the pests off: most don’t swim too well, so they tend to drown on the wet ground.

  The only pests I’ve failed with to date are slugs and snails, and I haven’t yet completely eliminated the use of the notorious blue mini-pellet. But my usage has dropped dramatically, I avoid exposing wildlife to them, and I don’
t throw them liberally over plants once these are large enough to look after themselves. But when I start seedlings under a cloche or under fleece I always add a few mini-pellets, because they’re isolated there from wildlife and are ready to catch all the slugs and snails that gather in that piece of paradise: plenty of tender food, a lovely warm environment and complete protection from predators.

  There are alternatives, like copper deterrents and coarse mulches, but on a full-size allotment these more intimate measures just aren’t practical. It’s the same with parasitic nematodes, which seek out and feed on baby slugs in the soil. They are difficult and expensive to apply to large areas of ground, and in an area that gets an excessive amount of rain you would be adding them for ever.

  Slugs and snails are one of those problems that have to be lived with. We’re never going to eliminate their populations, especially on an allotment site backed by a vast expanse of mountainside that’s always damp. I suspect they get sick of grazing on the rough pasture up there and decide to charge down in the summer for a good feed, like raiding parties off the hillside. You can almost see the rustling in the grass as word gets round that you’ve just planted your lettuces.

  The other method that I use more often in my own garden involves going out after dark with a large torch and a kitchen knife with a pointed blade. I shine the light into their eyes, and while they are dazzled I hit them with the kitchen knife. This is quick and surgically precise because I know exactly where the heart is! It satisfies the sinister side of me and also amuses the neighbours, who see this moving beam at eleven o’clock at night and catch a glimpse of me in my balaclava, flak jacket and blacked-out face.

  I use no pellets whatsoever in my own garden because I don’t want to harm the frogs living in my pond. They are good allies, but unfortunately there aren’t enough of them to keep all the pests under control. Many years ago we used to have a good population of thrushes, which were extremely efficient at clearing snails, but these days we never see one. I’m sure the general use of slug pellets can’t have helped. The birds don’t realize a slug or a snail has been poisoned, in the early stages at least, and feeding on them may well have affected their numbers. We really haven’t done the creatures we share the planet with any favours over the years by our careless use of all these chemicals.

  My rhubarb soup (see here) seems to be effective on brassicas as a combined feed and caterpillar deterrent, but sometimes a butterfly manages to get through and deposit its telltale yellow eggs under the foliage. Just turn over the odd leaf as part of your regular inspection and rub off any egg clusters you find.

  If you notice little holes appearing in a brassica leaf, turn it over and you’ll probably discover a mass of tiny, recently hatched caterpillars, easily dispatched with your finger and thumb. Even then one or two can escape and you may get caterpillars three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) or so long: don’t waste these, just pick them off and throw them in the hedge for the birds.

  There are some pests you can’t control by organic or chemical means, and possibly the most persistent is the rabbit, a widespread raider wherever gardens and allotments sit next to open country. If you’ve got rabbits, you’ve got problems, unless you accept they are always going to be there and protect your garden instead of trying to eliminate them.

  We had a question about that once on Jeremy Vine’s show. The caller explained that she had just taken on an allotment and rabbits had got in: what could she do? The first inclination of some people would be to shoot them, but I’m not really into that sort of thing and it’s certainly not advice that would go down very well on air.

  I said, ‘Well, rabbits are rabbits, and they will decimate a plot very quickly, given the chance. The trouble is that they browse on the best bits, taking out the centres and ignoring the outer leaves. If they would only eat the outsides and leave the rest alone, you could at least still use things. What I would do is dig a trench all round the boundary, put up a wire netting fence with the bottom part down deep in the ground, and completely enclose the area. That’s the only way you’ll keep them off your veg.’

  We don’t sell any chemical insecticides in the allotment shop now, apart from slug pellets. I was already secretary and controlled what we bought at the time I went organic, and I simply never stocked them. I’d say, ‘Sorry, but I don’t sell those,’ without giving any explanation, because I wasn’t about to become an evangelist and try to convert people who still favoured them. On the other hand I don’t want to use them and it would be completely hypocritical of me to sell them, so I adopted a passive way of trying to discourage the others on the allotments.

  We do still sell some inorganic fertilizers, such as Growmore and sulphate of ammonia, because many members still depend on them, and I don’t think their sensible use has the same alarming effect on the environment: it’s over-application that does so much damage. But over the years there has been a decline in their sales, and we sell a lot more blood, fish and bone, for example, than we do Growmore.

  Again I try to persuade people by my actions. Apart from all the manure and compost I collect over the year (of which more anon), I buy one bag of blood, fish and bone and one bag of concentrated fertilizer based on cow manure, and I mix them half and half to make a surface feed that I scatter around growing plants on a rainy day to give them a bit of a boost. I rake in the same mix as a top dressing before sowing or planting. The concentrated manure is a quick source of the plant nutrients needed for growth, while the blood, fish and bone gradually breaks down to give a slow-release feed over the longer term.

  Whatever method you use, whether it’s organic or inorganic, I find you always need to keep an eye on fertility on an allotment. Food crops are intensive, greedy plants and you’ve got to feed them in some way, basically spend a bit of money to accumulate. It’s no good just sticking plants in, hoping the ground is good enough for them to grow well. You might get away with it the first year, perhaps, but the second year you certainly wouldn’t.

  After a winter in the ground most chemical feeds are all gone, so you start out every spring with virtually infertile soil, and even organic fertilizers are quickly lost from the ground. When you work in humus and natural compost and manure over a period, however, you build up the soil with slow-release nutrients as well as improving its texture, making it easier to work.

  The problem for many people is finding enough manure and other bulky stuff, especially in town where you may be far from stables and farmyards. I make a lot of compost on the plot from green waste materials, and supplement this with manure, which I collect regularly during the summer months (not the winter when it’s wet, heavy and unpleasant to handle).

  I have a very large composting area, about 6 ft (1.8 m) square, and as green material is cleared off the plot I spread this to make a layer of about 4–5 in (10–12 cm) thick. At this point I go and collect some well-rotted horse manure, which I tip all over the green layer. Then I add further green waste, gradually building up a kind of ‘McWalton’ sandwich of alternating layers throughout the summer months until I reach the top. This is left to rot all winter, breaking down into a very nice friable mixture for digging in the following spring.

  For me, finding a source of manure is a weekend job in summer, when I go scouting to discover where people have the stuff to give away freely. There are still plenty of stables and other places around where you can find it, even though they may not be within the valley. On those mornings I take Anthea along with her yellow Marigold gloves, and her job is to hold the bags open – there’s nothing worse than trying to fork manure into a plastic bag on your own because you always end up missing the bag, which makes hard work of the job. I aim to get about twelve bags in two journeys.

  * * *

  No wood, please!

  SOMETHING YOU NEED to watch out for when obtaining stable manure (not ‘buying’, you notice: no thrifty allotmenteer would actually pay for a waste product) is that the horses haven’t been kept on wood shavings or sawdust
. These take a long time to break down, seriously depleting the ground of nitrogen as they do so.

  I was caught out several years ago when I was given a big supply of stable manure that included wood shavings. For weeks and weeks I went and collected it, and dug it into the ground the following spring. The result was one of my worst seasons: potatoes and beans went yellow because they were struggling for nitrogen, the potato crop was just a lot of tiny little tubers, and I had a very poor onion year too. If you can stack the stuff for several years until it’s well rotted, it will eventually do the ground good, but manure based on hay or straw breaks down much faster with no ill effects.

  * * *

  As well as collecting all the green waste off the allotment to go into the main compost heap, we save all our kitchen waste apart from cooked food scraps. Peelings and vegetable offcuts, teabags and fruit cores all end up in a caddy outside my back door with a bag inside it, and when that’s full it gets emptied into one of two special upright bins on the allotment. When one is full and rotting down, I switch to the other. The resulting compost goes into the greenhouse beds, which I empty and change every two years.

  I always find it strange that, even now with all the emphasis on recycling, there are so few who actually collect waste and manufacture their own compost. You won’t find many plots up on the allotments with compost heaps, although there’s been a little improvement in recent times since the local council have been offering deals on basic plastic bins.

  Because of this lack of interest I tend to inherit a lot of compostable waste from other people. It could be put out for recycling by the council, who will collect from the gate, but I’ve told everybody they can give it to me for my heap. And that adds to the amount we collect ourselves – although it can be a pain in the summer when everyone mows their lawns and puts black bags containing their grass cuttings at the end of my drive!