Are you digging on my grave ?

It was good to be able to do some digging the other day, and following on from my "Victoria to the Bronze Age" blog, I found some teeth !


No, not somebody’s long lost dentures, but real “tussy pegs”.



Obviously they were animal teeth, which I suspect were from some old sheep that’s probably been buried here when it was a field, many moons ago. But I have to admit it did get me going for a while, and kept a wary eye out for any other signs that I was perhaps digging up someone's resting place.

It reminded me of this little poem which I find quite moving, and yet funny at the same time.

Ah, are you digging on my grave ? by (Thomas Hardy)

"Ah, are you digging on my grave,
My loved one? -- planting rue?"
--"No: yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
'That I should not be true.'"

"Then who is digging on my grave,
My nearest dearest kin?"
-- "Ah, no: they sit and think, 'What use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
Her spirit from Death's gin.'"

"But someone digs upon my grave?
My enemy? -- prodding sly?"
-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
And cares not where you lie.

"Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say -- since I have not guessed!"
-- "O it is I, my mistress dear,
Your little dog , who still lives near,
And much I hope my movements here
Have not disturbed your rest?"

"Ah yes! You dig upon my grave...
Why flashed it not to me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!"

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting place."

Scabby spuds.

Last season my potatoes suffered quite badly from scab (Streptomyces scabies). Though unsightly, they did make beautiful mash and chips, but unfortunately were rejected by my domestic quality control manager, who likes her potatoes as jackets.

I had intended to look into this and see what could be done, but forgot quite frankly, until today when talking about it to one of the other fellas down at the site. So I went straight on to Google when I got home, as you do, and thoroughly depressed myself with what I read.

Here are their recommendations, and my current situation.

1.Avoid growing potatoes in areas that recently grew members of the brassica family, such as cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, broccoli.

(The bed I had prepared for this season’s potatoes, was last year’s brassica bed !)
2.Avoid soil with high alkalinity.

(My soil is very alkaline !)

3.Avoid coarse textured soil.

(Mine’s sandy and gravely !)

4.Avoid varieties prone to scab like Maris Piper and Desiree.

(Guess which varieties I have already been out and bought ? !!!!!)

Quick....hide the veg !

We went shopping the other day to the supermarket, and my wife bought some carrots, parsnips and a swede to make a stew later in the week. Now is it just me, or does every allotment holder find it an affront to their dignity to have to buy veg.

I have to admit to defeat sometimes in my endeavour to be self sufficient in vegetables, take the carrots for example, those damn carrot fly have certainly got the upper hand this year. I tried telling her that the ones I brought home would be perfectly alright with the maggoty parts cut away. Her reply was unprintable, suffice it to say that what she suggested I did with them, would have been quite painful! So we have been buying them in for a quite while now.


Unfortunately, it’s a similar story with the swedes and parsnips. The swedes (Best of All) and that’s a joke, just seemed to stop growing and didn’t fatten up at all, whilst the parsnips forked so much they resembled something from outer space.

So, suitably disgraced, I reluctantly put them all into the shopping trolley, and quickly covered them up with other items in case we bumped into anyone from down at the allotments.

Grandma's Yorkshire Pudding

The weather yesterday was drizzly but OK, and as we were having all the family round for Sunday dinner, I was dispatched down to the plot to get some sprouts. Those left in (Brolin), are one of three types I have tried this year and are certainly the best, being large, firm and very prolific.

I noticed some brave souls had been doing some digging on nearby plots recently, and wanted to get stuck in myself but time wouldn’t allow, so I contented myself with a bit of a tidy up and a look around.

Well, everyone enjoyed the sprouts except the grandchildren, you would have thought we were trying to poison them when asked if they would like any.

All they wanted was Grandma’s yorkshire pudding, but you really can’t blame them I suppose, can you.

Hope springs eternal

I was planning on going down to the plot yesterday on the strength of last night’s weather forecast, not that you can rely on them any more. It said there would be rain spreading in from the west over night, but that it would eventually clear. Well the rain clouds came, but somebody forgot to tell them that they should move on and consequently it was miserably wet all day.

Looking out of the window on to the garden that was now visible after the snow had eventually gone, I thought how forlorn it looked after the battering it had over the past weeks. Even the winter pansies I had planted in the tubs near the front door were struggling.

Then I just spotted what I look forward to seeing every year around this time, the first snowdrops. They were very near flowering and because of the snow, I simply hadn’t been able to see them


What would we do without these little harbingers of spring to lift our spirits in the depths of winter, not long now.

Friend or Foe

This last season the whole site was plagued with Cabbage White butterfly, and everyone seemed to suffer no matter what they did. I tried netting all the brassicas with, what I thought, was a narrow enough mesh to keep them out and prevent them laying eggs. However, the day I saw butterflies fluttering in and out of the netting at will, I knew my plan had been foiled and it could only be a matter of time before the caterpillars appeared.

It’s a strange irony that though allotment holders are typically people who appreciate the wonders of nature, they have to deal ruthlessly with it at times. It’s similar to the idea that a weed is only a plant growing in the wrong place, I suppose. One minute you can be enjoying watching these beautiful insects dancing about in the summer sun, and the next be chasing them like a lunatic, with a cane, as they try and lay their eggs on your precious cabbages.

Not that I'm of any religious persuasion that sanctifies the protection of life in all its forms or anything, but it was with a certain reluctance that I had to go round all the plants and destroy any eggs by hand. Funnily enough, I found the netting made the job much more difficult, and don’t think I’ll bother at all with it next season.

I thought I had got them all, then one day when focusing more closely on something strange on a particular plant, I realised with horror that I was looking at a seething mass of caterpillars! As I had decided to not use any insecticides, there was only one thing for it but to literally pick them all off and dispatch them. Not a pleasant job.

The Cabbage White season came and went, and I’d almost forgotten about them, when one day in the shed I noticed a caterpillar stuck to the roof. Ah, an escapee I thought, nicely settling down to pupate, and my first reaction was to destroy it and the others that were there. Then I noticed what I thought were a bunch of eggs attached to it, but something wasn’t quite right, caterpillars don’t lay eggs.


After some googling, the puzzle was eventually solved. The “eggs” turned out to be the tiny larvae of a small parasitic wasp called Cotesia glomerata, that spin a yellow silk cocoon around themselves.

In this picture you can just make out the wasp at the side of the caterpillar.


The wasp parasitizes the Cabbage White caterpillar, by laying it’s eggs in the caterpillar’s body. Then, like something out of a horror movie, the larvae feed on the living caterpillar and eventually emerge to spin their cocoons. What’s more bizarre is that they don’t eat the caterpillar’s vital organs, so that the life of the host is prolonged as long as possible, and they even control the host’s behaviour by causing it to stay with the cocoon cluster.

So now, any that I find in the shed, are left for my new found little friends to do their gory job on.

Isn't nature just wonderful!!!

From Victoria to the Bronze Age

So who's been here before you ?
As promised earlier, here’s a bit of a diversion from the usual allotment type blog, which you may find interesting, about finds on my plot

Being interested in history and archaeology, I couldn’t help noticing the man made things that turned up as I was digging the plot for the first time. Most of it was just broken 19th and 20th century pottery, glass and clay pipes but there were a couple of earlier items that pushed the history of man’s presence on this piece land even further.

As you know, up to last year this was farmland, that I presume has been cultivated for hundreds of years, being close to a very old and important village and town. So most of the items found, probably came to be here through the activity of spreading night soil on the land. Night soil was the name given contents of household “privies”, from the towns and villages that was collected and sold as manure to farmers, before the days of sewers.

Given that they were basically a hole in the ground into which all sorts of rubbish, as well as sewage, was deposited, it is not surprising that broken bits of household items turn up, and here is a selection of them. Some things were a little more personal, like the little pot lid perhaps from a toy teapot and the opaque class bead possibly from a brooch, at the bottom of the photo.



However, some items will have been dropped by farm workers whilst working the fields, and I’m sure this is how the clay pipe bowls, come to be there. If you’re lucky you may find a bowl with a makers’s mark which can be researched.



Pushing things back even further, there was a piece of 17th century slipware from the English civil war period, aptly nicknamed Mr Kipling ware, and a couple of pieces of Medieval glazed earthenware from around the 15th C .



Now for the surprise!!!
Having studied Archaeology for a short while has enabled me to identify worked pieces of flint, from the many that you find in the soil. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found this piece.



It is not exactly a flint tool but what is known as a core, from which pieces of flint have been knapped (knocked off) to form small tools such as knives and scrapers. You can plainly see where the pieces have been struck off from the main body. As for its age, it was dropped or lost on this site by its owner during the Bronze Age, when flint was still being used, probably around 3500 years ago !

So keep an eye out when you are digging you never know what might turn up, and I’ll keep you posted on anything else I find.

By the way, I would love to hear what any of you have found on your plots or gardens, just post in the comments.

Summary of 2009

Click picture to enlarge







The first thing I did was to draw up a plan of the plot using an Excel spreadsheet, and I found this to be very useful. By narrowing the spreadsheet columns to represent 1 foot in scale, I was able to get a reasonable representation of the plot and paths. From this you can see the four quarters with 6 x 4 foot beds in each and also the position of the shed and compost heaps. I was then able to plan the distances of rows and plants, and get a good idea of quantities needed. For example, by finding out how many seed potatoes you get per bag, I could gauge quite well what to buy.

SOWING and PLANTING Summary (As best I can remember).
FEBRUARY - Sowed onions in green house, and also started chitting parsnip seed. Started chitting seed potatoes.
MARCH - Sowed Peas, Calabrese, sprouts and Caulies in greenhouse.Didn't have much success with the brassicas. Planted out Potatoes and Onion sets and Onions from seed.
APRIL - Sowed early and main crop carrots outside.Planted out Parsnips.Sowed in greenhouse French beans.
MAY - Sowed Peas,Beetroot, Swede and Spring Onions outside. Planted out shop bought Caulies,Cabbage and Sprouts. Planted out Runner Beans and shop bought Winter Cabbage.
JUNE - Planted out shop bought E.S. Broccoli Strawberries and home sown Lettuce. Sowed outside French Beans and Turnips.

RESULTS
BED A
Beans Runner (Enorma) - Excellent crop of large beans. Should have pulled more when smaller.Froze well.
Beans French (Tendergreen) - Excellent crop. Froze well
Pea(Kelvedon Wonder) - Very good crop. Planted rows too close, difficult to access.Froze well.
Onion Sets (Sturon, Stutgarter) - Both types very good crop.Stored well.
Onion Seeds(Ailsa Craig) - Enormous round onions. Didn't store well.

BED B
Beetroot(Boltardy) - Excellent crop. Kept well in the ground and into winter.
Early Carrot(Nantes) - Grew well enough but badly hit with carrot fly.
Main Carrot(Chartenay Red Core) - Same.
Parsnip(Tender and True) - Very slow and difficult to start. Forked badly.
Swede(Best of All) - Small roots and slow, but tasty enough.
Turnip - A bit woody.

BED C
Potatoes Early Arron Pilot - Very good crop, but rather tasteless.
Potatoes Main Desiree - Excellent crop, but scabbed. Excellent for mash and stews.
Potatoes Main MarisPiper - as above.Excellent for chips.

BED D
Calabrese - reasonable, froze well.
Brussels sprouts. (All Year round) good, froze well.(Brilliant)easily frost damaged. (Brolin)very good froze well.
Purple sprouting broccoli(Rudolph) - Don't know if I'll bother again.
Cabbage Summer(Primo and Golden Acre) - Both types very good and large
Cabbage Winter(Nichole and Torvey) - Both types good
Cauliflower Autumn - (All Year Round) poor. (Bodilis) good.

Note, all the brassicas hit badly with Cabbage White caterpillars.

SMALL BED.
Strawberries(Red Gauntlet,Hapil and Honeye) - All three types excellent.
Lettuce(Iceberg) - Very good
Spring onion(White Lisbon) - Slow but OK.

And this was more or less the finished result with everthing on it's way, taken in early June 2009.

The Plot Continues

So the fencing was finished, and digging commenced with earnest, not that I had a friend called Ernest to help me by the way, and eventually I had what was beginning to look like an allotment.

All this time, the efforts of us newcomers had been surreptitiously watched by one of the old timers from the old established section and occasionally he would wander over to have a closer look.

“You’ll never grow owt worthwhile on that land”, he would warn us, and when asked for his opinion on sheds and paths he would offer little gems like, “ Sheds? Paths ? you can’t grow owt where there’s sheds and paths !”

As regards the layout, I had decided to simply divide the plot up into 4 quarters and follow a crop rotation plan, with 2 foot permanent paths dividing the sections. Each section would then have six beds separated by narrower less permanent paths for access. With hindsight, I should have made these access paths wider and sacrificed a bed in each section.

Eventually the rough digging was completed, and my intention was to let the winter weather do it's job on the soil and then prepare the beds nearer sowing and planting out time.

It was interesting to see what old things turned up whilst digging, pottery and clay pipe stems for example, but alas no gold coins. Being interested in such things I collected a lot of them and I'll write a piece on them later.

Well, all that was left now was to get sowing in the green house at home and wait for the warmer weather.

In the next blog I'll try to summarise the 2009 season on the plot, not that I want to bore anyone to death, but it will force me to look back and see what I should have done differently.

To be continued.

How it all started.

It's been just over a year now since we were given the plots to rent, I say we because mine was one of 20 new ones added to an existing site with 16 plots already on it. So this time last year I was busy trying to turn a sixteenth of an acre of the farmers field you can see above, into something resembling an allotment.

The soil turned out to be quite light and sandy,good for digging, but in places had been compacted with farm machinery.Consequently, there were large patches where the spade just bounced back and sent, not so good, vibrations up my arms.

It soon became clear that a shed was needed, if only to store tools, but also to house a much needed bucket, if you know what I mean. So one was purchased, shed not bucket, and brought to the site in flat pack. We, as in my son in law and myself, must have picked the coldest and windiest day of that year to erect it, but after doing a good impression of hang gliding whilst trying to put the sides up, and suffering first stage frost bite, we succeeded. My wife also insists that she helped,I have to add, if only in keeping our spirits up by laughing at our antics from the warmth of the van.

Then on to the fencing. I don't know what it is about mankind's relationship to land, but we are never happy until we have created boundaries, and the new site was no exception. It wasn't long before the first plot was fenced in, with posts that that would have kept a herd of stampeding buffalo out,and others quickly followed including ours. This time my wife really did help by standing on the end of the wire, and stop it following me like a faithful puppy as I rolled it out.

To be continued.

A New Year Begins

At last I have managed to get down to the allotment this week, after all the snow we've recently had, and being the first opportunity of the new year, it seems as good a time as any to start the new blog.

There was still a covering of snow everywhere, and the crops left in from last season were barely visible, never mind harvestable. However, I did manage to gather a couple of rows of sprouts for the freezer.


Having an allotment certainly puts you back into touch with the seasons, and with nature in general. When I got down to the site, I saw very few human footprints in the snow, but there were many animal tracks, some recognisable some not.