Horticultural

Perrone profiled

I've been profiled over at the excellent Normblog. Check it out if you're curious to know who I'd invite to dinner, what I think of skin on custard and other important issues.

And if you're a new visitor coming to this blog via Normblog, hello and welcome! Can I suggest you start by reading my about page?

Christmas canned

Being a gardener makes for an easy time for family and friends with Christmas presents in mind. I'd say 75% of my gifts this year were garden-related, including this very fine watering can (for the garden - too nickable to go on the allotment) and a very groovy and compact plug plant trainer that's already been sown with some red baron onion seeds and (optimistically) some lettuce.

I also got a pole-mounted bird feeder that I braved the snow to set up in the garden today. I keep checking for customers but no sightings so far. I wonder how long it takes for birds to spot a peanut feeder and home in on it? Are they nervous at first? Can they smell the nuts? Despite being a YOC member in my youth, I have no idea and am hoping a budding Bill Oddie (or maybe even the man himself) can help me out ...

And I have a serious question for you about blight on tomatoes and potatoes, in relation to "the book". I've never experienced it but I am curious as to how much it impacts on allotmenteers and organic gardeners. Have your potatoes and tomatoes suffered from it? How do you treat it? Is it the worst disease you face? Answers on a virtual postcard please ...

How to care for your Christmas tree

So it's nearly Christmas eve, and you may have had your Christmas tree for over a week now. If it's a plastic one, you're laughing: but if it's a real, living tree, there's the worry that you're going to trip down the stairs on Christmas morning and find Santa has brought you a floor full of pine needles.

Here are a few tips for keeping your tree in tiptop condition this festive season:

• When you buy a tree, choose one with stiff, hard needles that show no sign of dropping when you brush past it or shake it. If it comes with its roots or trunk in damp sand or soil, all the better. (If you're like me and allergic to pine needles, wear thick gloves whenever you touch the tree).
• When you get the tree home, stand it outside and wash the branches off with a hose to dislodge soil and insects. When you're ready to decorate it, saw a fresh base to the trunk, cutting diagonally to maximise the surface area of wood available to take up water.
• If you can, place your tree in a specially-designed stand that can be filled with water: check the water level every day and make sure it's topped up to at least an inch above the base of the trunk. If the tree is planted in soil or sand, keep it moist but not wet.
• Friends of mine would add always add half an aspirin or a spoonful of sugar every so often to help keep the tree fresh, or add cheap lemonade to the water, as you would do with flowers. I've tried this too and it seems to prevent needle drop.
• Remember: this is a tree! It's used to being outside. Try to stand it well away from radiators or air ducts and keep the heating as low as you can comfortably go, especially at night.
• Accept that some needles will fall, whatever you do. Keep a Dust Buster or old-fashioned dustpan and brush on hand to keep them tidied away.
• Always turn Christmas tree lights off at night and when you go out to prevent a fire risk.
• Once the festive season's over, make sure you recycle your tree: many local authorities will take yours away for you and turn it into compost or mulch. Or simply chop it up yourself and make a hibernation spot for hedgehogs under a fence or hedgerow in your garden by placing the branches in a bundle to slowly break down of their own accord. The hedgehogs will like it if you add a few leaves, too.

Well, that's it from Horticultural now until after Christmas. I do hope you all have a wonderful festive season and are looking forward to a happy and healthy 2006.

Gardening in the Guardian

Guardian Unlimited (who I work for) has launched a new Life and Health site, which includes an easier way to locate the latest gardening columns by the likes of Monty Don, Lia Leendertz, Sue Stickland and Christopher Lloyd. Check it out.

Christmas parcels of the seedy variety

My Heritage Seed Library order and my seed potatoes from the Organic Gardening Catalogue both showed up this week, causing inordinate levels of joy in my neighbourhood (well, for me, anyway).

The spuds I have gone for this year are a blight resistant early called Orla (not one I have tried before) and my old favourite, the salad potato Pink Fir Apple. Between them, my small household should be stocked with potatoes for a third to a half of the year, which isn't bad. For the moment they are sitting in the dark a cardboard box in my cool, damp-free garage: in a few weeks I'll start to chit them (click here for the lowdown on what chitting is and how you do it).

The HSL order included a tomato called Whippersnapper, Bronze Arrow lettuce, dwarf French beans called Mr Brooks Blue Bean and the rather more widely known as Hutterite Soup, Southampton Wonder cabbage, and the turnip Black Sugarsweet, plus my "lucky dip", a tomato known as Sub Arctic Plenty. (As an aside, you may like to know that Black Sugarsweet has been the subject of a House of Commons question back in 1996 about seed list regulations.)

Now I am just itching to get going and get growing. Now the winter solstice is over, I feel like we're over the worst, as it's getting lighter by the day: that means more time for allotment work.

As a total aside (and what is blogging about if not interesting digressions?) if you're a fan of globe artichokes, can I recommend the marinated whole ones they sell in the Italian deli Gazzano's, near the Guardian offices in London? They are divine, if a little pricey. A perfect Boxing Day treat, with some sliced ham and pickles, don't you know.

The Victorians and their carrots

The Guardian and Guardian Unlimited hold an annual sleaze raffle of the gifts and freebies given to hacks in the course of the year, in aid of whatever charity is to benefit from our Christmas appeal. I always buy tickets, and put some freebies into the prize haul:  this year I won four books, including Londoner's Larder: English Cuisine from Chaucer to the Present, and Monty Don's My Roots.

I started to peruse the former on the train on the way home tonight and it looks very promising. One fact mentioned in passing caught my attention, though: in the preamble to a recipe for a Victorian dish called Kalecannon, the author Annette Hope writes:

Victorian recipe books always insist on carrots being boiled for at least an hour, although the timings for other vegetables are not very different from modern ones. Were the carrots a different variety?

From my knowledge of heritage varieties, I know there are strains still being grown today that were around in Victorian times, so I don't think it can be that. Maybe they boiled them whole? Or simply liked their carrots very mushy ...

'It’s my Eden'

Here's a great article from a newspaper in Manchester on how allotments are catching on among younger people. The best quote in the piece comes from allotmenteer Dawn Evans:

I’ve been unwell for a while and it’s a great way for me to get back out there and relax. There’s something quite magical and cut-off about the allotments – when you get into the heart of them in the summer it’s like a little oasis.

Link: South Manchester Reporter - Allotments are the new Eden for young.

Worms: they're rotters

There's no sight more welcome to the dedicated composter than that of a mass of red worms writhing in among the decomposing contents of your heap.

Usually I'd leave the worms tucked up safely with their carpet lid in place at this time of year. But I took this shot while adding some extra cardboard insulation around the edge of one of my compost heaps, which necessitated moving some of the material away from the compost slats.

These fellows are different from the earthworm you'll find in your soil when digging - they specialise in breaking down garden and kitchen waste and turning it into lovely crumbly compost. Given that the soil of the ground was still frozen on some parts of my allotment, the compost must have been many degrees warmer.

I also emptied the other heap of ready-to-go compost that has been cooking for the last eight months, spreading it as a mulch on empty parts of the plot as a protection against the leaching of nutrients from heavy winter rain. It's amazing to think that several months' worth of kitchen and garden waste rot down to a few trugfuls of "black gold". Contrary to people's expectation, well rotted compost smells, well, earthy. There's none of the whiff people expect.

Top six pests

What's your most hated allotment pest? Add your vote to the comments below: it'll only take a sec and I'd be fascinated to know.

Choose from:

1. The slug
2. The cabbage white caterpillar
3. The gooseberry sawfly
4. The aphid
5. The flea beetle
6. Something else?

The slug wins hands down for me. They cause the most damage to the crops I probably care the most about: lettuces and potatoes. And they still give me the heebie-jeebies despite years of dispatching them in all manner of ways, from late night slug patrols to nematodes.

Tool time

Thanks to those of you who emailed me with your musings on weeds - if I haven't replied to you I'll do so soon. In the meantime, I've been thinking about tools. It has struck me that I don't write an awful lot here about the stuff I use on the plot: forks, spades, rakes and so forth - even though they're central to what I do.

Monty Don says he has one special spade that he won't let anyone else use. My favourite tool is my bronze spade. But I'd never leave it on the allotment for fear of theft. So I am wondering if allotmenteers try not to get too attached to their equipment because there is the constant risk of theft or vandalism? Your comments welcome.

I'm also after your top "bodge" tricks: in other words, what commonly used household objects do you put to a completely different use on the allotment? I am trying to gather as many uses for plastic bottles as I can, but also any unusual ways you've found of recycling things that would otherwise go in the bin.

Here's a couple of mine to whet your appetite: an old wooden spoon makes a great dibber for planting seedlings. If you have two, twist a length of string around one, tie the end to the other and, hey presto, you have a way of making a straight line for seed sowing.