My Life on a Hillside Allotment

by Terry Walton

A relatively new idea, which we spotted while recording a television show recently on some other allotments and which some of us have since tried, is growing carrots in large bins some 3 ft (90 cm) above the ground. Over our two seasons of trials there’s been no carrot root fly whatsoever on some really nice clean roots, and I’ve been sufficiently impressed to have a go myself. I put some stones in the bottom to act as drainage, add the compost mix emptied out of the greenhouse border to three-quarters full, and then top up with fresh growbag compost to give the seeds a good start.

  Something I’m trying to develop now is a natural form of slug and snail control, always a challenge for organic gardeners. We don’t have any song thrushes these days, but we do have a lot of local frogs up on the mountain behind us and in the wild, abandoned area that flourishes in the top corner.

  A few years ago, when somebody gave me an old empty drum, I decided to install a pond on my allotment – only about 5 ft (1.5 m) across but large enough to satisfy frogs, which only need water at breeding time. I sank the drum to its rim in the ground, filled it with water and stocked it with some oxygenating and aquatic plants and some frogspawn, all from my pond at home. To my surprise and delight, frogs spawned in there of their own accord in 2005 and again the following spring, so they’ve obviously established themselves. Just behind the pond there’s a corrugated zinc barrier and my thicket of blackberries, which I leave a little wild to provide natural hiding places for the frogs.

  * * *

  Feeding the frogs

  SOME TIME AROUND JULY, when the new generation of little frogs are starting to develop but are not yet ready to leave my pond, I combine some simple pest control with feeding them up for their venture into the wider world.

  I grow a lot of sweet peas, and these are like magnets to aphids, which always seem to go for the growing tips. I like to spend a nice summer’s evening going round the plants and collecting up these aphids. All I do is bend the flexible growing tip into a paper bag, give it a good tap with my finger, and all the aphids fall in because they don’t cling on very tightly.

  Then I go down and scatter them on the surface of the pond to feed the baby frogs, which immediately start gobbling them all down. That way the frogs have a good body-building diet for several weeks before they leave (and hopefully get the taste for aphids as well) – if they’re fat and robust they’re more likely to survive the winter. And I keep my sweet peas clean with very little effort and no poisons.

  * * *

  Making that pond was a conscious part of finding an alternative means of pest control, although I’ve always carried a flag for wildlife and have never supported killing a rabbit or disturbing a hedgehog or badger, for example. To me these are simply a part of the natural world with their own roles to play in the balance of life, something that intervention by man usually upsets.

  A fox, for example, can live quite happily in the country and adjusts its own numbers according to the amount of food that’s available. It will help control the rabbit population because there’s a natural food chain and relationship there. But when man starts getting involved, an imbalance sets in, and these creatures get driven into urban areas where they thrive completely unnaturally. You might see a nice bushy-tailed fox walking through a suburban garden, but that’s not where it’s supposed to be. You shouldn’t have foxes living under your shed in an urban area, eating out of dustbins instead of hunting rabbits. Such foxes are no longer predators but scavengers.

  I’ve got mixed feelings about some kinds of wildlife though, especially since the gardener’s friend, the humble honey bee, seems to have made me its enemy. It all began during an hour-long special of The Jeremy Vine Show that I shared with Jimmy Doherty (he of Jimmy’s Farm fame). We were discussing the merits of keeping bees and I made a plea on air for some beehives on the allotment. Laura and Anthony, a local couple and both enthusiastic beekeepers, got in touch with me and offered to put two hives on our plots. I went to visit them and we did a broadcast, with them explaining the benefits of keeping bees.

  I was appropriately kitted out from head to toe in a protective suit, including a face veil, and felt perfectly safe when they opened up their hives. While I was looking inside one of them and talking away to Jeremy with the mobile pressed to my ear over the veil (which stretched it tight across my nose), I spotted a bee landing on the bridge of my nose and starting to crawl downwards. It reached the tip and then promptly committed hara-kiri by stinging the end of my nose.

  I continued talking on air as though nothing had happened, even though my eyes were streaming and my nose running like a tap – what a pro!

  By the time I got home my rather bulbous red nose made me look like a circus clown. And I took plenty of stick at the pub that night, with predictable comments like ‘Good job it’s not Christmas, you could stand in for Rudolph.’

  To add insult to injury, I was doing the show live with Laura two weeks later, after the bees had been installed on the allotment, and we both went up to have a look at the hives, just to see if the bees were working. No need for safety gear this time. We were standing close by, explaining to Jeremy how the bees seemed to have settled down, when two of them decided to sting me for no reason at all, one on the chin and the other on my neck. By the evening I looked like a bad case of mumps. In future I think I’ll keep a wary distance.

  When I went organic in the eighties, I started exploring other vegetable varieties, because some are more successful than others if you’re doing without artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides. I found I couldn’t better ‘Boltardy’ as a beetroot variety, although I did try some others, such as ‘Crimson Globe’. I used to favour a carrot variety called ‘Parano’ which has disappeared from the catalogues and I am now trying ‘Maestro’ to see how that does on my ground. I’ve moved away from the short stubby kinds because my soil’s become very deep with cultivation and they don’t produce so much crop for the space they take.

  Onion sets have been ‘Sturon’ for as long as I can remember, and I think the best shallot is still ‘Golden Gourmet’. My peas tend to be ‘Kelvedon Wonder’, a fine old early and late variety with good natural resistance to mildew, but I grow ‘(Hurst’s) Greenshaft’ for maincrops. I’m a little more adventurous with runner beans, which were always ‘Scarlet Emperor’, and now I grow ‘Polestar’ or ‘Lady Di’, which I find give good-size beans and do not tend to become tough and stringy even towards the end of the season.

  Under glass I grow ‘Bella’ or ‘Petite’ cucumbers, both of them short female-only hybrids, because we’ve learned that it is better to have a small cucumber you can eat in one meal than to grow the traditional long ones which end up going to waste in the fridge. And my sweet peppers are usually ‘Gypsy’ these days, because they turn red extremely easily: a lot of varieties go through the natural cycle from green to light orange and then red, and some of them take ages, but ‘Gypsy’ finishes ripening very quickly.

  After many years of growing first ‘Moneymaker’ and then ‘Alicante’ as my standard tomato variety, I’ve settled on ‘Shirley’, a well-tried kind which as a hybrid is more expensive to buy as seed but seems to be resistant to most problems and does extremely well for me. I like to grow a couple of ‘Gardener’s Delight’ too because they crop well right through until November, and you get a good steady harvest of cherry-size fruit on huge trusses. I don’t grow any tomatoes outdoors because they’re a waste of time in our short growing season.

  Ideally I’d grow a good beefsteak tomato too, but even one plant takes up a lot of room. In an average-size greenhouse it’s hard to find space for more than a few tomatoes, three cucumbers and at least a dozen pepper plants. They always reckon you should have separate houses for tomatoes and cucumbers, because of their different preferences for heat and humidity, but I’ve always grown them together in the same greenhouse and never had problems. If you haven’t got the luxury of ample space, you make do without.

  I use the extreme corners of the greenhouse for t
he cucumbers, one inside the door and one in each back corner, so they may get more humidity trapped in the corners, although strangely the one in the doorway, which is the coolest place, has given the greatest crop before now.

  I don’t grow greenhouse crops in growbags because I like my plants to have a footing in the ground, but I do use their contents as one of the cheapest sources of potting compost. When I remake the greenhouse borders every two years, I spread some well-rotted manure on the bottom, fill the beds from my bins of home-made compost and then spread the contents of a couple of growbags on the top, and everything does very well in that without the water stress they could experience growing in bags.

  These indoor crops have to be sown early, in my heated greenhouse in the back garden or in the airing cupboard (thanks, Anthea!), because they need a long growing season to crop. A slightly later sowing will often catch up and you can delay things a bit until it’s warm enough to sow on a windowsill or even on the staging in an unheated greenhouse.

  But there comes a point beyond which it’s too late. A seed takes however long it needs to germinate, grow and yield, and if you’re too late starting the cycle you could find yourself into August before you know it, when the majority of stuff has stopped growing in the shortening days, and if you do manage to harvest a crop it will be greatly reduced.

  The amount of leeway you have with conditions like the number of days to maturity a plant needs is often limited, and you need to match timing and variety to the particular nature of the locality and typical climate. This applies very much to sweetcorn, which wants plenty of sun and heat in August to do well, and plants need to be flowering and setting by then.

  I’ve been growing sweetcorn for nearly a decade. The first year I grew a standard large variety, but ended up with half-filled cobs, so the following year I tried ‘Mini-pop’, which is a small type with sweet immature cobs used in stir-fries and eaten raw in salads. They don’t need pollinating, you harvest them before the tassel withers on the cob, and they’re so tiny that you usually get three or four per stem.

  They did extremely well for me (and have done ever since). The next year someone offered me half a dozen sweetcorn plants that were going spare, and I got those in just after the last frosts, which gave them the maximum growing season outdoors. The result was six cracking full-size cobs, persuading me to go back to growing those again. The variety was ‘Sundance’, which matures early, a great asset in our indifferent Welsh summers. The plants are best grown in rich, fertile soil in squares to ensure the cobs are pollinated, because this depends for success on the wind blowing the pollen from the top of the plant on to the tassels of the immature cobs below and on adjacent plants.

  You have to make full preparations when the cobs are ready for picking (shrivelled tassels are a good indication). The cobs need to be cooked and eaten, or frozen, almost immediately after harvest because the sugar starts changing to starch very quickly – after only twenty minutes, some authorities say. So the sooner you eat them, the sweeter they are. They also need plenty of space and careful positioning because they can be very tall and cast a lot of shadow over their neighbours.

  One season recently I tried to get a second, late crop of ‘new’ potatoes. I had seen seed tubers advertised that had been kept refrigerated for late planting, and thought I’d have a go. I planted them in August, they soon came up and looked reasonably good, and there were no late frosts to cause any problems. But by the end of September, when the days were becoming shorter and cooler, the plants started to turn yellow so I dug them out. I think the size of the potatoes I harvested was significantly smaller than those I put in, and we had enough for just one meal.

  Again this might be something to do with the length of our growing season, which always makes me cautious about trying too many glamorous or unfamiliar new varieties. With potatoes I tend to grow largely the same ones year in, year out. I might try an odd novelty now and again but only as a small sample, just to see what it’s like. To be sure of results I keep mainly to my standard early, second crop and maincrop kinds. I tend to grow a lot of ‘Arran Pilot’ as my early, although I did try ‘Pentland Javelin’, which is a nice shape but didn’t crop as heavily as ‘Pilot’.

  I started growing ‘Charlotte’ a few years ago when it became the ‘in’ potato, and that does quite well for me as a second early. But I find that ‘Kestrel’ is one of the best for a follow-on crop, an attractive potato with a lovely shape and tiny little purple eyes. Remember, though, that it’s very difficult to grow maincrop potatoes in sufficient quantities to become self-sufficient, because they’re big plants and take up a tremendous amount of allotment space.

  In 2005 the adventurous gardener came out in me again when I tried a completely new maincrop potato that I saw advertised in a daily paper. It was called ‘Sarpo’, a Hungarian variety that was said to be completely resistant to blight. They were very expensive – nearly £20 for just forty potatoes – but I thought, what the hell, I need to crack the blight problem, so why not indulge myself? So I sent for them, and I must admit I had my doubts when they arrived, because they looked totally insignificant considering their cost.

  I planted them in mid-April, they took an age to come through, and I began to think those keel slugs of mine had probably enjoyed a very expensive meal. Eventually they appeared, though, and grew an enormous amount of foliage. They went through August into September without any tell-tale signs of blight, whereas other varieties around the plots had succumbed badly to the disease.

  About the second week in September I couldn’t contain my inquisitiveness any longer and had to dig up one of the plants to see what, if anything, was under that mass of green topgrowth. To my great surprise there was a very good crop down below – but alas, they were a red variety, which always attracts the little black keel slug (the one that lives underground and is hardest of all to defeat), and some holes were already appearing in the tubers. They all had to come out then, despite the fact there was probably two or three weeks’ more growth left in them.

  They certainly succeeded in proving their blight resistance, and the experiment confirmed that it’s always worth trying something new. To avoid further heavy expense, I saved forty of my own tubers to trial again the following year.

  In 2006 I tried growing overwintered onions from sets for the first time, starting them at the end of August 2005 with the aim of lifting in May just as the stored onions ran out. It was a very sharp winter, the coldest for ten years, so it was probably not a reliable trial. Although they made a lot of growth in the early part of the winter and looked well in April, there was still very little bulb at the base at the time when the previous year’s onions hanging up in the shed were starting to sprout and needed using up.

  This always happens once the weather turns warm in the spring, leaving a barren two months without any fresh onions – getting a full twelve-month supply is difficult, and the overwintered ones were supposed to fill that gap. But they needed to be on time, because by mid-July I could start using some of my green spring-sown crop.

  However, despite the harsh winter making them mature later than I had hoped, I was able to pull onions just when we needed them. They were smaller than the spring-sown ones, but usable nonetheless, and sweeter in flavour, perhaps as a result of their struggle through the cold weather. Mission accomplished.

  On the whole I don’t think I’ve discovered anything that I wish I’d grown years ago, though. When I tried pak choi it bolted to seed, so I didn’t even get a taste of that. Salsify was nice, with a delicate flavour like asparagus, but the roots were quite small and never made a significant size. I’ve never grown asparagus (although my father tried it, without success), because our soil tends to be too heavy and supports huge numbers of keel slugs which graze on the spears just below ground level.

  One crop we really did enjoy without any reservations was the vast and unexpected supply of mushrooms which sprang up after we started using spent mushroom compost on the plot.r />
  Back in the eighties people’s tastes were changing and a lot more mushrooms were being used in the kitchen. New places began producing them to meet this demand, and not far away in the Vale of Glamorgan they were starting up at a phenomenal rate. The standard way to raise them there was to make up bags filled with a mixture of bracken, compost and a bit of lime, and grow the mushrooms on top in very long, steamy polytunnels. Vast amounts of used mushroom compost came out of these bags once the crop was finished, which became an embarrassment to the farms. Its use as an excellent soil improver hadn’t caught on at that stage and so they were having difficulty getting rid of the stuff.

  In desperation they started to get in touch with allotment societies. One contacted us and said they couldn’t move for this enormous mountain of old compost in the yard, and were we interested? We said, ‘Well, what’s the deal?’ And they explained they didn’t want anything for the compost, they were so glad to get rid of it, and all we had to do was pay for the lorry to bring it across.

  So there we were in the mid-eighties, with as much compost as the driver could get on the lorry – anything up to 300 bags or more – and all it cost us was a £40 tip plus petrol. There was enough for three of us to have 100 bags or more each, which was fantastic: for less than £15 you had as much as you could use, delivered to the door. This idea caught on around the allotments, until the guy was bringing four or five loads over to us, if not more.

  We found the stuff was ideal for root vegetables such as parsnips, carrots and beetroots: they don’t benefit from manuring, which makes them fork, but they certainly revelled in the friable, loamy-based soil you got after digging in mushroom compost. If you could turn it in during the autumn, by the time you came to plant you had a beautifully textured soil and grew some extremely clean roots. And it contained a small amount of lime, which was particularly beneficial for sweetening and lightening our naturally heavy, slightly acid soil.