Horticultural

A new trug

I treated myself to this rather lovely willow trug with a bit of the money from the advance on my book.

I bought it online from Great British Baskets, a Somerset-based company that makes willow baskets, trugs and other items. It took what seemed like ages to arrive, but I was delighted with the final product. Here you can see it stuffed with produce from the allotment - some oversized courgettes, French beans, red onions, carrots, potatoes, magenta dahlias and several pounds of tomatoes.

I'd gotten sick of having to put everything in plastic bags, which inevitably get filthy and are hard to reuse. This basket should keep me going for years. I've lined it with some old tea towels, which I can wash if they get muddy.

Jam today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ...

I've just invested in a small piece of kit that should make my jam/chutney making a lot easier - a jam funnel. No more sticky jars and lids, no more juggling with a ladel of hot syrupy stuff and a hot glass jar, no more puddles of jam on the counter.

In caseyou've not seen one, it's like a regular funnel, but the opening is wider and should fit inside the rim of most jars. It's metal and there's a handle to hold to prevent sticky burns from the hot jam.

I suspect I'll soon be wondering how I did without it before.

Have you got a priceless piece of kitchen kit? And do I need it in my kitchen too? Answers below, people.

How to get your tiny person started early on allotmenteering ...

A Playmobil Garden Allotment and Shed ...

Knitted vegetables, oh yes ...

I've just discovered a whole new world I had no idea existed.

I am referring to the knitted food that can be bought on eBay for a few pounds and used as play items for children, which I came across by accident when I typed "allotment" into eBay out of curiosity and came across some knitted veg for sale. I was instantly hooked - I've already bought my niece (aged two) some knitted sushi (which she loves) and some knitted fruit.

The trouble is, the junk food - biscuits, cakes, and even burgers and fries - outnumbers the healthy stuff. Get knitting those courgettes and onions, folks!

(Oh, and if model railways are more your thing you can buy an allotment scene on eBay.)

Link-a-Bord

Current allotment area of guilt: a strawberry patch so riddled with weeds and grasses that the strawberry plants are hard to spot. I know, I know, they won't fruit and flower without some urgent space or attention, but I just haven't got around to it yet ... other fish to fry. Or rather raised beds to construct. (To be fair someone else did most of the constructing - I was more of a foreperson. And a sem-grumpy one at that, if I recall correctly.)

I've invested in some Link-a-Bord raised beds and very fine they are too, and a doddle to put together, AND made out of recycled plastic so far "greener" than using virgin wood. Two are up, and I have another three to put in place when the ground's prepared. The great thing is, if and when I move home - and thus allotment - I can easily lift them out of the ground and take them along with me.

Frog statue insanity

I'm not a great fan of garden ornaments generally, but it's things like this, spotted on the back page of a garden catalogue that came through my door unprompted, that cement my view that they are a total waste of time and money.

What are these statues supposed to say about their owners? "Hey, we like frogs, but not in their natural, slimy, slug-eating form. We like to imagine they're froggy humans from fin de siecle England, pottering about the garden picking strawberries?" They're like something out of a Kafkaesque nightmare.

And what poor benighted person thinks, ooh, I'll have them for £35, I'm saving a fiver?

Furthermore, unlike other things you can put in the garden - sundials, bird baths and dovecotes, to name three - they serve no useful purpose whatsoever. Unless that spade the "man" frog is holding really is a spade that you can detach and use for a bit of light weeding.

Can anyone top this picture for hideousness?

Back to bed, so to speak ...

Sunburn in March?

Sounds unlikely, doesn't it, but I swear I had red cheeks last night after a long and satisfying afternoon at the allotment. It's an indication of quite how little time I've been spending outside since I started writing my allotment book last autumn, and even more so since I got ill (I am feeling much better, thanks for asking, although I am still occasionally stricken by what's become known, due to its severity and the seemingly endless nature of the spasms, as "the death cough").

Anyway, back to my afternoon on the plot: the first quality time I've spent there in 2006. As anyone who doesn't have a lot of spare time for their plot knows, each new year can feel like going back to square one. I looked around in horror, then tried to get down to something constructive. That turned out to be digging up one of my increasingly triffid-like cardoons before they took over every one of my five poles, and creating a new raised bed*. Lord god, have those things got thick roots.

But that story's for another post. Back to the bed. I have ordered two new raised bed sets from Link-a-Bord, which are made of recycled plastic, but I decided to do a bit of impromptu recycling by making a bed from bits and pieces I found around the plot. Granted, it's not the most beautiful construction ever to grace a plot, but it's an allotment, not Kew, right?

The items used were: two bits of board left over from flooring my bathroom, two strips of brick-effect stone edging left over from a garden project, plastic slats originally used to form a compost bin that I found on my plot when I first took it over, and two separate bits of defunct wooden shelving. It's not quite as deep as I would have liked, but it'll do.

At one end, I planted red sun shallots, interspersed with a catch crop of French breakfast radishes, and at the other, I put in one short row of white beetroot, one of bleu de solaise leeks, one of perpetual spinach, and finally, a row of turnip black sugarsweet from the Heritage Seed library. I was ridiculously excited by the whole afternoon, and came home grinning ear to ear. Even my aching limbs today haven't put me off.

*If you're interested in the pros and cons of raised beds, there's a good piece in the latest edition of Organic Gardening magazine (not online, alas). But let me sum it up for you this way: the pros are better drainage, less (or no) digging, not so far to bend down, soil doesn't get trampled - the cons are  that it takes a little time (and money, unless you do it my way) to set them up, snails and slugs can hide against the walls and launch sneak attacks on your seedlings at night, and if your plot's too dry, it could make the problem worse. Unless you mulch, which of course you should. Have I missed anything, chaps?

Labelling eureka moment

I was drinking my lunchtime latte in the office canteen when a thought hit me: the flat little wooden stick that you stir the foam with makes a perfect plant label. Just wide enough to write a name and date on in pencil, and just the right length for sticking in the corner of the seed tray. Now I am peeved that I didn't think of this earlier. All those wasted sticks.

If you prefer ice lollies to coffee, those sticks work would just as well ...

Finally: a cold frame!

After many hours of grappling, and being sent the wrong bits, I now have one double decker cold frame! I can't face putting the other one up yet, but this one should do for now. It can at least take the overflow from my lounge windowsill.

One of the annoying things about my house is the lack of windowsills wider than the palm of your hand. The only ones are in the lounge, so that's always packed with plants, and in the kitchen, but that one's too narrow and shady to provide much in the way of staging for seedlings. And given that I am sowing as if there's no tomorrow now - lettuce forellenschloss, rocket (pictured below) and cabbage southampton wonder have all germinated, and I am waiting for celeriac prinz to sprout too.

Gillian over at My Tiny Plot is having success with rocket too, but I am particularly jealous of her beautifully laid out masterplan for the coming year. My masterplan - such as it is - is sitting in the back of my Moleskine diary, and is very rough. I am going to try the three sisters approach to growing squash, beans and corn again this year, and rotate various groups of crops around to different areas of the plot, but beyond that, my main plan as it stands is to "grow lots of things". Organised, eh?

Flatpack fiasco

I've just spent the past hour an a half struggling to erect the cold frames I bought a while back. What I shall call The Law of Flatpack came into play: in other words, I got a fair way into putting the aluminium frame together, despite the opaque instructions (still no idea what a "bush" is), when I realised I'd been sent two lid panels, one back panel and no front panel. Oh well, I thought, I'll just cannibalise the second cold frame to make one up, at least, and get the company to send me the right panel to finish the second one. Then I looked in the second box to discover that one had two lid panels in it, as well.

D'oh!

Why can't companies just get these things right? I can't recall a single thing I've bought flat pack that didn't either have instructions so poor as to render them useless, or were missing several crucial parts.

I am going to plant some cabbage seeds as a zenlike activity to calm myself. That's providing, of course, I can find the cabbage seeds ...