by Terry Walton
The big problem they have – common to most school gardens – is that the summer term finishes about the third week of July and they then have the whole of August off, just when the crops are coming along nicely. There’s nobody there in the holidays to do a bit of routine work and harvest the produce, which is a shame because they’ve all worked hard up until then. Most of the produce goes to waste as plotholders never go on to other plots without permission.
All in all, the allotments are a lively place to be these days.
But the changes that have occurred haven’t eroded some of the typical allotment attitudes, such as the old-fashioned respect and helpfulness members have traditionally shown towards one another. It must have something to do with sharing a good cause and working outdoors with plants and the soil. Even today, when all around us common courtesy seems to be on the wane, no self-respecting plotholder would dream of charging another plotholder for produce. Members tend to combine in natural groups who share any surplus plants or produce among themselves.
The habit of sharing means you don’t have to be quite so concerned about continuity and range of produce on your own plot. Most of us grow more than enough of something for our own needs, especially lettuces, cabbages, beans and other stuff that doesn’t keep too well, and there’ll be a surplus to share with others. Someone will always be able to give you something if you run out. It’s the same with tomatoes. I always end up growing more than enough plants for my purposes, so I can supply Albie and Nuts with some of those left over. Then, come midsummer, Nuts will usually give me a large carrier bag full of tomatoes because he’s got more than he needs, and I bring them home for Anthea to make lots of soup and tomato chutney. I don’t charge anything for the plants in the first place, but I get something in return later which is of more value to me than money.
Sometimes you try to grow something that fails miserably – these things happen to the best of us – but not everybody’s unsuccessful and you rarely find yourself going without. This doesn’t happen so much with staples like potatoes or onions, because these are grown for store and people don’t tend to give them away unless you’ve had a real disaster, but more perishable crops are always readily exchanged between groups of plotholders. They would only be wasted otherwise, and why watch a cabbage or a lettuce go to seed if there’s somebody who can use it?
Again, some people simply don’t grow certain things. Albie, for example, never sows his own beetroot, but he’s usually the first among us to pick runner beans, so I’ll usually get a feed of beans earlier than I would off my own, and in return I’ll give him a few bunches of my beetroot throughout the summer. Because my beans will tend to run on a week or two later than his, he’ll get some of those off me at the end of the season, when all his plants are exhausted.
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Early beetroot
I LIKE TO PULL a steady supply of beetroot through the season, and start the first batch extra early by sowing in pots.
A beetroot seed is a little knobbly brown thing that is in fact a capsule containing several seeds. Come early March I put two or three of these capsules in a small pot, about 1½ in (4 cm) in diameter by 2 in (5 cm) deep, and keep these in the greenhouse to germinate and grow on. I do about twenty to twenty-five of these pots, thinning the seedlings to leave three to four beetroot plants in each. In early May I transplant the complete potfuls outdoors. I start pulling the roots when they’re not much bigger than a ping-pong ball, and use them as my first early beetroot. The rest I leave to grow to roughly the size of a tennis ball, and they’ll be my second harvest.
All the other beetroot sowings go straight in the ground, because they are fairly easy to grow and for some reason largely trouble-free – no aphids, no beetles, and even a slug will only occasionally nibble at a seedling leaf.
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So there’s a lot of swapping of vegetables going on between all the various plotholders in their small self-help groups. This sometimes surprises newcomers in their first year or two, before they’ve mastered the art and started producing steadily for themselves. We can all sympathize – we’ve been there ourselves once – and always give them something to take home. Then when they go out of the gate they’re taking some locally grown produce with them, and also an understanding of the cooperative way life goes on here, which is probably more valuable in the long term.
Plants are regularly exchanged, especially young transplants like cabbages, lettuces or Brussels sprouts, because you always raise more than you want, whereas new plotholders may not be familiar with how to plan far ahead or raise their own seedlings. Surplus onion sets or seed potatoes get shared out in the same way.
It’s all part of the ancient custom of barter, and no money ever changes hands. It’s the same with practical help: as I said before, if someone’s ill, a neighbouring member will often do the plot for him and take produce to the house. People help you out if you’ve got a problem or simply water the plot for you if you can’t get there. Help and cooperation on the plots is an allotment tradition.
The exchange system even works with outsiders who come to the allotments looking for surplus crops, and over the years I’ve gone home with all sorts of weird and wonderful swaps. Someone who keeps chickens on the top plots will often come down looking for some veg, and you’ll probably get a dozen new-laid eggs in return. There’s a local angler who fishes for rainbow trout in a lake near here, and he often comes up for two or three pounds of beans. He’ll ask, ‘How much is that?’ and of course you say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’ The next time he turns up he’ll usually bring a fat, freshly gutted trout.
Wayne is a long-term plotholder, one of the ’70s club, and after many moves he now tends the plot next to me, third in from the gate. He’s an excellent gardener but has suffered ill health in recent years and undergone several serious operations, all of which makes gardening a bit of a trial. I do as much as I can to help him, and sometimes I’ve planted his plot and harvested produce when the crops are ready. Now Wayne’s wife makes her own bread, and when I call in at their house to drop off stuff from the plot, I always come back with a piping hot, home-baked loaf.
We had someone there who never grew marrows – I don’t know why, because they’re so simple – but he always liked to make marrow rum. He’d ask me, if I had any spare marrows, to save them for him, and so I used to grow a couple of reasonable-sized specimens and give him those. In due course I’d receive two bottles of marrow rum in return.
Another example is Russell, who we all call ‘Nuts’ because he used to go around with a pocketful of peanuts that he was forever picking at. He’s an inventive gardener who can happily spend three hours making some special tool to save himself twenty minutes’ work. He grows everything in square pots, because he reckons that saves space and the plants grow better than in round pots, and so he made himself a square dibber for transplanting all those square rootballs to holes of the right shape. When he wants to net his cabbages against the pigeons, he puts a series of canes in the ground and then goes to Porthcawl at the end of the season to buy up their used tennis balls cheaply. He splits these with a Stanley knife and fits them over the ends of the canes, so the net will sit nicely without getting caught.
Whatever you want, Nuts has got it somewhere in his shed, whether it’s screws, nails or washers, in any particular size you name. And he’s a great collector of gadgets for every job under the sun. He’s got a semi-automatic riddle for sieving soil (which the rest of us don’t do – we use compost) and a pump for getting water out of barrels, whereas the rest of us simply siphon it out. He just has to have a special tool for everything. He used to be a toolmaker, so it figures.
One year Nuts’s veg had failed so some of us had been giving him our surplus. He regularly goes out shooting and he came in one day with a brace of partridge for me and another brace for Albie. I didn’t know what to do with them – they’re not something I’m familiar with – so he took them away and prepared them, and then brough
t them back all trussed and ready for cooking.
There’s an elderly lady living nearby, the widow of a man who used to teach me when I was at school, and she will often come over on a Sunday morning to see if we’ve got any spare runner beans for her dinner. She always brings a small tin of Welsh cakes, freshly cooked, to trade in exchange, and we keep these to have with our coffee throughout the week. So even outsiders join in with the allotment barter system.
Plotholders seldom ask for anything outright, though. The usual opening gambit is to remark casually, ‘Oh, those cabbages are looking nice then,’ or ‘You seem to have a lot of tomatoes in there!’ Never a direct ‘Can you spare me some of them?’ But you’re cute enough to translate that as meaning they haven’t got any of their own, and wouldn’t mind some, please, if you’ve got any to spare.
One of the old unspoken rules is that you always deal face to face. Nobody goes on anyone else’s plot without permission, so even if someone had told you to help yourself you wouldn’t dream of doing so unless they were there. No one would go on your plot and cut or pick something if you weren’t around.
The only thing you’ll ever take from anybody else is water, and that’s because it’s free to all, running constantly out of the hillside. If they’ve got their hose connected up and running, you know you are at liberty to go and join your hose on to theirs to share the supply. But you wouldn’t actually go and take produce. You never touch without being given.
That’s one of the very few rules these days, and compared with my father’s day there is a much more easy-going atmosphere now, and it’s got better and better as the years have gone on. The majority of us are not working any more, so that probably contributes, but even when I started quite a few members had retired and it was never as friendly and relaxed as now.
I find since I’ve retired that I can go up to the plot sometimes and wonder exactly what I’ve done all day. This applies in foul conditions as much as fair. A lot more people seem to turn up as usual nowadays in inclement weather, whereas before if it was raining there was simply no point in going; you couldn’t do anything. Now you can always do a bit of work in your greenhouse as well as spending an hour or two chatting in the shed.
It’s far more of a community than ever before, and you very rarely walk in and find the place empty. There’s usually someone in there from early morning until sundown, depending on their habits: some people like to go at half five in the morning to enjoy three or four hours before the sun is up fully, whereas others prefer to be there in the early evening and stay until the sun goes down, or even later.
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Terry’s Tip for October
A pond on the plot
TRY TO FIND ROOM on your allotment for a pond. It doesn’t have to be large. You can direct the overflow from your greenhouse water butts there to keep it topped up, and you’ll find it hosts all kinds of wildlife that will feed on various garden pests and help you control them without using any poisons.
Among the first allies a pond will usually attract are frogs and toads, which feed voraciously on slugs and, if conditions are right, will produce masses of spawn in spring to increase their populations. You can always tell one kind from the other: frogspawn looks like masses of transparent jelly studded with black dots, which are the eggs, whereas toadspawn forms in long floating ribbons.
It always amazes me where creatures come from once you install a pond. You may never see frogs or toads on a plot, but construct a pond and they very soon colonize it. Newts appear from under moist stones, and beetles fly in before you’ve even finished filling it with water.
The aim is to attract as many pest predators as possible to help you in the organic approach to controlling pests. Birds, for example, will enjoy the benefits of a handy oasis, flying down to drink at the watering hole and then lingering in the surroundings to catch the odd aphid or two.
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Anthea’s Recipe for October
Tomato Relish
LIKE SOME OTHER crops, tomatoes tend to ripen in great flushes once the plants are up to speed. One way of using the surplus is to skin and purée the fruit for freezing, to add to soups and stews throughout the year. This is another suggestion, which transforms tomatoes into a warming relish to remind you of summer on a cold winter’s day.
4 lb (1.8 kg) ripe tomatoes
2 lb (900 g) sugar
2 large onions
1 pint (600 ml) malt vinegar
5 tbsp plain flour
2 heaped tsp curry powder
2 heaped tsp mustard
3 oz (85 g) salt
Skin and chop the tomatoes and onions, sprinkle with salt and leave in a bowl overnight.
Next day drain off and discard the liquid, put the vegetables in a pan and cover with vinegar. Boil for 5 mins.
Blend flour and curry powder with enough vinegar to make a smooth paste. Add this and the sugar to the contents of the pan.
Bring back to the boil and simmer gently for 1 hour, stirring until the contents reduce to form a relish.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pumpkins at Large
EVEN THOUGH THE gardening press and other media are always on the lookout for new ideas to attract readers’ interest, most of the crops grown on the allotments remain the same as they have been for decades, even generations. This has much to do with the natural conservatism of Rhondda gardeners that I’ve already mentioned, but there’s also sound common sense behind it. At its heart allotment gardening is all about growing food, and this means ensuring a good supply of the staples that you depend on from day to day.
We might not live in a subsistence economy any more, but we’ve still got to eat. That’s the top priority, but it doesn’t have to exclude experiment and adventure, even perhaps some fun. Now ‘fun’ is not a word that would have been used on allotments way back, but many people are thinking about their leisure a lot more now, rather than concentrating on just being providers.
I still grow for the wholesome flavour of my own fresh food and to know where it’s coming from, but people are being tempted by the exotics and the more unusual ingredients for adding to dishes, because they’ve got used to finding them in supermarkets. And these days I’m getting more and more keen to try something new as well. I was totally conservative earlier on, but now there’s just the two of us to feed, as opposed to a growing family, I feel I can spare a bit of ground for novelties, provided I’m still getting an adequate supply of what I need to live on for most of the year.
The media interest has been a huge encouragement, because there’s obviously a professional concern that audiences don’t want to hear every year only about the standard vegetables which I grow. So over the past few seasons I have expanded my range of crops and methods, and I’m finding that exploring them adds a little spice to allotment life. Rather like swimming, once you dip your toe in you find it’s not so bad after all.
The first big change for me came with marriage and the arrival of children, and the need to expand from a concentrated season of commercial vegetables to a wider range of food crops to feed us throughout the year. But family circumstances are constantly evolving. As recently as the late nineties the structure of the Walton household changed again. In July 1998 our younger son, Andrew, got married to his long-term girlfriend, Sarah. This event was followed in March 1999 by the wedding of his brother, Anthony, to Alison.
Thus in a short space of time the household shrank to just the pair of us once more. This led to complications at meal times as Anthea adjusted to feeding two after so many years of catering for four, and I found I was growing too much. With time this change resolved itself, and now that both sons live within a short distance of us there are two extra households dependent on allotment produce. The circle of life keeps on turning and, as I’ve always said, if you stand still long enough, everything catches up with you.
Then there was my father’s new greenhouse, which introduced me to growing tomatoes and cucumbers unde
r glass, something I’ve done every year since. In the last six years I’ve grown peppers as well, because we tend to eat a lot of them. What deterred me from growing them before was their reputation for attracting greenhouse whiteflies. These can be a real nuisance and are difficult to avoid, although I’ve found that planting marigolds (Tagetes varieties) with the peppers helps enormously to deter the pests from settling into the crop in the first place.
This is one kind of companion planting that I find does work, perhaps because of the closed environment under glass. I don’t subscribe very much to companion planting ideas outdoors, however, where conditions are more variable. I’ve tried growing carrots between rows of onions, for example, without any success: I’m convinced that the carrot fly, although a very small creature, must have a fair-sized nose and would probably find the carrots no matter how strong the scent of onions.
It always amuses me when you buy some of these so-called root fly-resistant carrots, because the seed packets will sometimes advise you to grow them near a non-resistant type. That suggests to me that they are in fact only slightly more resistant than the ordinary kinds, and you should still grow these as a sacrificial crop which, given the choice, the flies will attack first. Another kind of companion planting, perhaps?
Some pungent herbs act as deterrents, but their effect is only partial. Like all other organisms, pests evolve and adapt, and eventually find a way round your schemes.