the evidence
Suddenly it’s all happening and the huerto takes longer to harvest than to maintain. The most delightful surprise from a culinary point of view for me has been the golden cylindrical beetroot, which has grown huge and yet, to my surprise, is not at all woody but delicious. White concentric rings of sweet delicacy when peeled and roasted in Rachel’s special olive oil and rosemary. Even my girls tried and (quite) liked it!
So at last the sunshine is well and truly here. And everything is starting to look abundant and as imagined back in the cold days of hope and muddy hard work!
I’m particularly pleased with the stripey tigerella tomato in the cold frame with its lid off. Already showing some little fruits, with green tiger stripes just starting to show.
And the brassica cage is filled to capacity, the summer purple sprouting starting to sprout already (the white variety still a bit behind, which is good and avoids a glut). I’m very pleased with the little hooks I put on the inside of the raised beds to keep the butterfly netting tautly stretched over it. It has worked perfectly and the reward of blemishless enormous veined leaves is a joy after the caterpillar mayhem of last year…
And how lovely finally to be taking home a trugful (is there such a word?) of produce for supper. With all the hard work over the winter and spring, I had almost lost sight of the reason for doing it in the first place.
So the first allotment supper included the first weeny little courgettes (including 2 little oval striped ‘piccolo’ courgettes, complete with attached flowers) and a few first purple managetout Shiraz.
The sweet peas have been marvellous – they’ve suddenly taken off and are flowering like billyo on their new arch. Purple, white, pale mauve & highly scented.
The broad bean harvest was an eclectic business – I’d planted several varieties; the inevitable Aquadulce Claudia (planted in January indoors) then Crimson Flowered and Imperial Green Longpod (which lived up to its name), Witkiem Manita and some other little one I can’t recall the name of… Sutton Dwarf perhaps.
All remarkably healthy and absent of black fly this year, which was gratifying.
The one pestilential invasion was easily despatched by means of pinching off and transferring directly to the wormery :0)
first strawberries from hanging basket
Despite the lack of sunshine, there are now some signs of fruit beginning to ripen. Some tantalising strawberries are reddening in the hanging baskets (the ones in the ground are still quite green, though prolific, in amongst the jostling raspberries, black & red currants and goosberries in the crowded fruit cage). Another couple of days and there will be enough for the first taste.
Happily, the gooseberries on the standard bush kindly bou
ght for me by my father at the wonderful Rassell’s nursery near Stamford are looking as abundant as usual. I don’t recall what sort they are – definitely a green / yellow dessert variety – but they are always an early cropper and very sweet.
Last year, completely mysteriously, they disappeared en masse overnight! There were none on the ground so they hadn’t suddenly dropped, so it was very mystifying. The only answer I could think of was that an army of naughty little mice must have climbed up and stolen them away…
Any other thoughts as to what may have happened to them would be most welcome, bearing in mind that they are securely inside a wire mesh fruit cage where no bird or larger creature could get in.
I was also delighted to see that the quince tree that was planted two years ago has at least 7 vestigial fruits developing where the lovely blowsy flowers had been. It looks very nice alongside the fast-growing and gorgeously coloured rosa ‘James Galway’, growing up the side of the adjacent shed, whose deep blue is a joyous contrast to the purply-carmine flowers.
In the rose bed, of the 3 verbena bonariensis bought from Wisley last year, one is putting up nice new growth, one is definitely a goner and one might just be feebly coming back. So I had been thinking of buying more, but baulking at the expense.
But then yesterday, weeding the rose bed in my usual over-zealous way, I suddenly realised that what I was removing were quite possibly self-seeded little baby verbenas. The leaves look very like the parent plants’ and so I’m gong to leave them and see what transpires.
What a very happy piece of Nature’s profligacy if they do indeed prove to be what I hope they are! We’ll see.
Meantime, I also picked the first posy of roses – mostly ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – gorgeous!
So, despite the rain and the cold and the slugs… the beans are in. As are the tomatoes, florence fennel, courgettes, squashes and lettuces. Also more lettuces and a new row of celery, courtesy of my friend Julia. In fact, there are now precious few spaces for anything more to be planted. Amazing how fast the ground becomes filled. I always underestimate the eventual spread.
A surprise new addition has been a lovely present from Rosie Rose in Spain – from her wonderful secret garden which includes 100 different tomato plants, mostly heritage varieties! It looks like a delicate miniature pink agapanthus, smells pungently like a cross between wild garlic and pongy onions and will, I hope, take comfortably to its new home alongside the red sorrel.
Rosie’s huerto includes a fabulous ancient olive tree around which she and Paul have planted a delicious little garden. If it had been exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show it would certainly have won Gold!
The baby brassica plants nurtured from seed in the cold frame were becoming too big and in danger of scorching, so yesterday I removed the black tarpaulin from the end bed and dug it over ready to become the new brassica bed (last year it was beans), revealing an alarming number of ants and prodigiously fat worms! It was (almost) a pleasure to dig as the soil is now so much healthier than the solid stony clay of the early years. This was the last bed I dug, so it’s a year or two behind the other more established ones.
Hungry pigeons were looking on greedily from the surrounding trees as it started to rain, so fast action was required. It was pretty easy to bash in the corner stakes, less so to organise the butterfly netting over it. In the end I had a brainwave and trotted off to buy some cup-hooks which, screwed into the wooden base, meant I could attach the netting taut along the bottom on either side and still have the bed accessible for weeding and, eventually, harvesting.
So this is how it looked in the end. From the front: purple summer sprouting, white sprouting, cavolo nero, red cabbage and finally, nearest the path, January King cabbages. Just hope I’ve left enough space between them. It always pains me when there’s not enough room to plant out all the seedlings, but there’s always the compost if I can’t find someone to give them to.
Sunshine at last over the weekend, so I was able to make progress (despite feeling rather tired and sore from over-zealous digging in the garden at home – finally eradicating the extreme network of roots put out over decades by an injudiciously planted Rosa Mundi!).
The cold frame is full of plants that have now germinated, but still awaiting the right time to plant out. But in the meantime, I was able to fill in the gap between autumn sown garlic ‘Chesnok Red’ and cheery looking shallots (Jermor). So we now have a row of zinnias (one looks a bit unhappy, but hope she will come round), several rows of seeds – purple spring onions ‘Lillia’, rocket, orange & yellow carrots and coriander ‘Confetti’ (sounds nice and will I hope again confound the carrot-root flies :0). Then another row of still rather straggly antirrhinums, The Bride, which I hope will end up as a regal row of white loveliness, helping somewhat to mitigate the poor snapdragon’s lowly reputation.
I also spent a happy hour or two on my knees, edging and weeding and gene
rally primping the little herb/flower beds that I’d dug out at the end of the fruit cage in a frustrated effort to create more planting space. It’s this sort of thing that deeply compromises any aspiration I have to allotment precision and order, as exemplified by my next-door-neighbour! I must face the truth that my little plot will always be on the quaint side …
A happy discovery too; the box hedging that my Darling gave me last Christmas, planted as bare root into lovingly dug and manured trenches around a new square bed I’d rescued from nettle-throttledome, is putting on new growth, with lots of tiny green shoots appearing. I had been very concerned to see last year every leaf develop a nimbus of yellow, causing me to fear the arrival of box blight. The lady at the RHS information desk at Wisley had said it may be trauma due to planting and the dreadful wet summer – and so it has proved to be. I’m very pleased, and to celebrate did some forensic weeding around the roots and treated them to a little sprinkle of fish & bone. I’ve planted wild strawberry ‘Alexandria’ (grown from seed from ebay last year) all around the internal edge, which I think will look lovely when it’s had a bit of warmth to help it fill out. Then the plan is potager-style rows of different lettuce and parsley, perhaps beetroot too if there’s space. We’ll see.
first asparagus tips
So despite the horizontal hail on Saturday, I went to pot on some seedlings but ended up huddled in the shed, shivering!
But one happy discovery in amongst the icy particles: the first tentative asparagus shoots.
Hooray! This will be the first year I’m ‘allowed’ to harvest them. It’s been very hard to watch them come up over the past couple of years, letting them turn into wavy fronds without giving in to the temptation of cutting them and eating with butter.
I even have the perfect plate to serve them on – bought at an antique market and stored away in a cupboard waiting patiently for this moment (though I fear the total crop will look woefully small and puny on such a flamboyant platter!)
Haven’t yet dared to cut them – will go again this week to inspect and make the final decision as to the perfect moment to harvest the very first crop…
This gallery contains 5 photos.
So these are some of the images that I was looking at over the dreary winter…
The blue shed and Connie’s chair – July 2012
Through this long winter what has kept me going has been this image.
Difficult, but inspiring, to imagine that this could be the same place that was in turn tundra, muddy flood plain and a snowy winter wonderland!
Attempting to dig the permafrost as the winter months continued their icy grip was not only disheartening; it was impossible.
So instead I pored over photographs of bountiful baskets of harvested flowers & produce, crimson flowering broad beans, jewelled raspberries, yellow and green courgettes (round and long and sometimes patty-shaped), blood red, pink striped & yellow beetroots, tiny wild strawberries invading neat rows of lettuces – speckled, red-edged, green and bronze – crazy squashes with their triffid tendrils, elegant asparagus fronds (tantalisingly forbidden to cut until established), friendly purple clumps of thyme and chive flowers, lush patches of parsley and coriander interspersed with jovial rows of carrots (hah! fooled you, Mr Carrot Fly) and purple spring onions and pastel coloured asters with frilly petals, ravishing radishes and oh-so-disappointing peas….
Huerto 
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