The Fruits of Planning

Now there are 7 beds dug on the allotment from hell and the green turtle pool thing I found on the allotment is buried as a pool and it may attract some frogs, though I hope they don't sit around all day discussing philosophy, throwing their Gauloise in my veg and trying to commence cinq heures septs with the girls of the allotment and if I get a shed no doubt shagging their new mistresses in it.


Still, some progress has been made and plans are afoot. At the top of the allotment there should be space for seven pear cordons. After a bit of dreaming through some fruit web sites, I thought no, I'm heterosexual, and started looking at sites about fruit trees and the pears I might plant.


At the moment I think I will get:

Dr Jules Guyot fruiting mid August

Williams Bon Chretien September

Gorkham mid September

Doyenne du Comice October, November

Winter Nellis late October, November



and two more to choose, so I'll go back to



chrisbowers.co.uk

Since I wrote this a while ago I have had a change of mind about the plants. I thought that the Allotment from Hell (Allothell) might not be the one that I stick with, heavy clay but great view and maybe the other allotment, Eden, might turn out to be the alpha allotment. So I revised the grand plan. I wouldn't have pear cordons but I would get some different types of rhubarb. In the end I chose to get from the above nursery four rhubarb for the top end of the allotment:

Albert and obviously

Victoria then

Timperley Early and finally

Cawood Delight

I also bought some gooseberry bushes, two for the back garden, for my girly as she loves goosegogs, and three for Eden, these were for the garden:

Broom Girl, its early fruits are very large and oval being yellow to almost olive green. The fruits are excellent for exhibition. A heavy crop from a vigorous grower.

and

Jubilee, an improved form of Careless with substantial improvements. The fruits are slightly earlier and are larger, handsome and yellow. Superb for all culinary purposes, freezes well and delicious for dessert when left to ripen. The flavour is excellent.

whilst on the allotment I went for

White Lion, an old but vigorous variety that crops late in the season with heavy crops of large white fruits. The flavour is excellent.

Lord Derby, one of the largest berries of all varieties. Large round, dark red fruits with a fine skin that is almost shiny with a very faint down. A good crop of well flavoured dessert fruits that are produced late season. The fruits are the darkest red of all and excel for exhibition.

and lastly

Howard's Lancer which is a mid-season to late cropper with large, smooth, yellow/green berries of superb flavour. A strong grower in all soils, believed by many to be the best variety ever raised. Also does well on light soils where other varieties may have proved difficult.

I was partly seduced by the names and the colours, white gooseberries, I've never seen them before. All the descriptions are based on the Chris Bowyer website, worth checking out.

I have got the beginnings of a fruit cage, with some mesh and I think I will extend this to cover the masses of strawberries that are living on the site already. At the moment I'm casting covetous eyes towards the allotment at the end of mine, not so much land but a fruit cage, tool boxes and lots of other kit. I'll have to cross my fingers.

A Tale of Two Allotments

It was the best of allotments, it was the worst of allotments; it was a dark, friable loam of Eden, it was a deep, boot-sucking clay; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

As Dickens might have said if he'd been hanging around like little Dorritt on the waiting lists of various allotment associations for what seemed like the very eternity of time, but I had great expectations. And eventually something turned up. Well two allotments turned up in the same week. I said yes to the first and then the second; you can't say no after waiting so long. I now have one tenth of an acre but be careful what you wish for.

Allotment the First is on a hill, totally overgrown with briars and small ash trees, on what turned out to be deep, unforgiving, boot-sucking clay. But in a fit of desperation I took it on. The digging of beds on this allotment has been hard back-breaking labor. The sowing seed in a properly prepared bed has been quite difficult; the story of my life.

I've put in some crocuses and tulips in a small flower bed. I'm not sure whether they will come up out of what seems to be pure clay.

I have also planted a mixed bed of Sutton Broad Beans, along with two heads worth of White Garlic, and a few rows of onions, with a sprinkling of reds among them.

On the other 3 beds that have been dug so far I have merely sown some field beans as a green manure, they might come up.

Allotment the Second is also on the side of a hill but there the resemblance disappears. at first glance I did not appreciate the difference but the first time I slid the spade into the soil there was a whole world of difference.

On the other allotment you have push the spade through body armor camouflaged as matted couch grass and then push down through the clay and risk a hernia trying to turn a spade's worth of sod. That's if you don't hit a buried plank, iron bar or a medium-sized piece of sheet metal.