Sal, Nuthurst Community Allotment, Feb 2021

We had the pleasure of welcoming David and Chris from the local Parish Mag (The Link) to the Allotment today. Despite the wind and rain, we had a photo op outside and a bit ‘o filming inside. We all took turns to blather on about our plans for future allotment expansion and what we have done so far on site. We were ever so slightly excited to share our thoughts and now I can only imagine the team at The Link will be hunched over the editing table in an attempt to make us sound coherent! No, no, only jokes, I think we got our point across rather well. The lens was trained on Jonathan (the original brains behind the whole shebang) and Angus (the owner of the land and the other brain….in fact there are a few brains but you get the idea) who took turns explaining when the idea started and how we are going about putting it into action.

Every member of our crew got to introduce themselves and explain why they wanted to be involved in the project. The team have been working so hard over the past two months to get the site ready for planting….and we can smell Spring in the air. Here’s a shot of us all standing in the rain holding various gardening-type implements. Obvs.

Nearly the entire original crew were on site for the action, (the action consisting of pretending to rake the soil in the background while the camera was rolling) only Suzi was missing; she is our incredible Membership Secretary and Sponsorship….ummm Manager who has managed to secure us multiple lorry loads of top soil from two lovely local businesses (see our Sponsorship page).

Anywho, the team at The Link are writing up a double spread for the March edition and they will be uploading a video to the online version of the publication. Please give it a watch and then tell us how much you enjoyed it….but mainly, get in touch and tell us you were so inspired by our words that you simply HAD to get involved. We would like that a lot.

Until next time….

January 2021. On the allotment.

A blank sheet! Or, rather, an empty glasshouse and some vacant land. What an opportunity! Yet – how daunting – where do we start? Well ORGANIC it must be!

Of course it would be crazy to try to grow too many different types of vegetables to begin with, but over time, with a fair wind and lots of hard work, and enough space, it’s amazing what we could achieve. Here are some suggestions from which we can select the most popular to start with.

Outside, in the WEST BED, which is less sunny than the east bed, so root crops to start with.

• Potatoes. An embarrassment of varieties – it depends on what you want them for – salads, boiled, mashed ,roasted, baked, or just general purpose, they’re the most versatile of veggies.
• Beetroot, sow bolt-resistant in March/April, for later use sow May-July.
• Carrot, again can be spread across the season with different varieties.
• Parsnip, sometimes difficult to germinate but worth persevering.
• Jerusalem artichoke. Flatulence-inducing, but makes wonderful soup.

In the sunnier EAST BED.

• Broad beans, wonderful early veg, can be eaten whole when very new.
• Butternut squash, which is prolific and can be stored if you’re careful.
• Courgettes will turn into marrows unless you harvest them regularly.
• French beans, earlier than runner beans and very versatile.
• Leeks sown in a seed box, plant singly in a hole which you fill with water.
• Peas like broad beans can be eaten whole when young, but delicious at any time when freshly picked.
• Runner beans, scarlet or white flowers, bumble bees love them.
• Spinach beet is the best variety and lasts for a long time, pick regularly.
• Sweet corn, plant in a square, not a row, for maximum germination.

Brassicas are difficult to grow because they get eaten by caterpillars, slugs and sparrows, so they have to be protected, but we could try a few.

• Brussel Sprouts, grown in the summer, harvested in autumn.
• Cabbage, spring, summer, winter – take your choice.
• Cauliflower, difficult to grow well, small varieties probably best.
• Purple sprouting broccoli is a winter crop harvested from January to May.

The onion family is another opportunity, garlic, onions, spring onions and shallots, but you can get such good locally grown products that they’re probably only worth growing when you’ve exhausted all the other vegetable varieties.

And of course herbs – Basil, Fennel, Mint, Parsley, Rosemary, Thyme, to name but a few. This is a specialist field and could be the province of a herb enthusiast if we’re lucky enough to find one in our midst!

Shall we establish some perennial crops?

• Asparagus – a massive challenge for the organic grower, difficult to establish and weeding is a nightmare, but………what a reward, if only!
• Globe artichokes – beautiful sculptural plants with wonderful foliage and rewarding edible seedheads. Can be propagated by planting suckers.
• Rhubarb takes time to establish and shouldn’t be picked in the first year, and only lightly in the second, after which you get a delicious result.

And what about fruit?

• Strawberries, Cambridge Favourite are hard to beat and easy to establish.
• Raspberries are trickier to establish than strawberries and they need supporting with wires and posts, but if you grow different varieties you can harvest them from midsummer until October.

Jonathan & Sal, January 2021

Despite Covid, we’ve managed to get a lot done since we launched in early December 2020.

Thanks to a shout-out in the local Parish mag, we have recruited some VERY keen allotmenteers from the village and are now a small committee of seven. It turns out seven people can really get stuff done; we’ve been weeding, clearing, shovelling soil, chitting spuds and amassing a fairly wide range of seeds. First of all, working in bubbles, we cleared the weeds and other detritus from the first glasshouse.

Then we used the tractor to carry loads of topsoil into the glasshouse, which the team then raked into raised beds on top of the shingle, ready for planting. We are experimenting with pilling up the soil in narrow enough rows so that we can reach the veg from either side without having to stand on the beds, but the beds also have to be wide and sturdy enough that they don’t just collapse (our current budget doesn’t stretch to railway sleepers or boards to hold up the beds). 

The next job was to tidy up the large centre glasshouse (nicknamed the Cathedral) and sort through all the stuff inside. So, now we have a great space, ready to use for storage, propagating plants, and ultimately as a field kitchen/café when the time comes.

Wendy, Michael and their kids have been hard at work drafting up a planting list, chitting potatoes and getting some seeds in the soil too. VERY exciting.

The next challenge is to get the ground outside prepared and fenced off so that we can start planting when the weather allows. We’re hoping a ploughman will soon arrive to do his stuff. We’ve had some massive loads of organic soil/compost mix donated by local company KPS Composting Services (www.kps.uk.com), ready to spread on top of the ploughed soil.

So, we press on hoping that, when the current Lockdown is ended and we’re all able to get out, more and more enthusiasts will want to join in and share the work and the companionship and the delicious veg and fruit and flowers we grow together. Please do get in touch if you are keen to get involved.

Jonathan, Bulls Farm, January 2021

Slugs and Snails can cause problems in the allotment. If they get the chance they’ll eat all the best bits of our produce: lettuce hearts, ripe tomatoes, juicy cabbage leaves, even beetroots aren’t safe. So, what’s to do?

Well you absolutely mustn’t use ordinary slug pellets. The Metaldehyde chemical is completely toxic to any creature which might eat a pellet, or which might eat a slug which has eaten the pellet – any bird, especially a thrush, and hedgehogs, foxes and badgers too.

You can now buy slug pellets made from wool which act as a protective barrier which the slugs and snails won’t cross. Being sheep farmers, we use wool which was sheared from the back-ends of our sheep – the dags, to use a good old Aussie expression –  and spread it on the ground round the plants we want to protect. I’ll bring a sack of this wool to the allotment when we start growing stuff and we can try it.

Of course, natural predators are the best solution, and these include slow worms, hedgehogs, ground beetles and rover beetles, and centipedes. So these allies should be welcomed.

Jonathan, Bulls Farm, January 2021

Two of the most important creatures in the allotment world are Lowly Worm and Babbity Bumble.

Lowly turns dead leaves and other similar stuff into fertile soil by making worm casts and at the same time aerates the soil, so that oxygen can get to the roots of plants, and the little tunnels he makes as he works away drain the soil, so that when it rains the water sinks into the ground instead of flooding everything.

Babbity helps to pollinate the flowers on the veggie plants – especially beans and peas – so that the seed pods set and turn into edible food for us to eat.

So, treat Lowly and Babbity with respect and make sure they’re well looked after. Babbity nests in holes in the ground and under the foundations of old buildings, so don’t go around stopping up these in a fit of tidiness, and please make sure that Lowly has plenty of old vegetable matter to chomp on. They’ll reward you many times over.

Babbity and her other pollinator mates will fly to our allotment if we grow plants to attract them. It’s a good idea to have a wildflower area or two, and we could sow some native wildflower seedballs which we can buy from Beebombs.com – a great website to visit.

Cumfrey is a fantastic plant to grow in a veggie garden, and it thrives in any old corner or on the edge of the allotment. Its flowers attract pollinators and you can make an organic liquid feed from the leaves, which you dilute with water in a watering can, it’s very good for tomatoes and most other plants. We’ve got a lot of cumfrey in our veggie garden, so I’ll bring some up to plant in the allotment, and a container of liquid feed to get us started.

Sal White, Cooks Farm, November 2020

We have big plans. Having made the first step towards creating a functioning and fruitful allotment (pulling out all the weeds from the greenhouse if you must know….well, we’ve got to start somewhere), we are now looking forward to the seventy-fourth step (falling somewhere after recruiting a bunch of enthusiastic allotmenteers, planting a load of seed and harvesting the bountiful produce from our raised beds) of setting up a field kitchen. Literally, a kitchen in the field. Or perhaps a kitchen in the paved bit in the middle of the greenhouse. We should probably call it the Paved Kitchen. Hmm, I quite like that. 

So anyway, the Paved Kitchen idea comes from the fact that we love cooking and eating. We also know that we will have lots of produce that we will have put a lot of effort into growing and therefore won’t be even the slightest bit interested in letting even one tiny carrot go to waste. 

The Kitchen will work alongside the veg boxes that the allotmenteers will take home in exchange for their enthusiastic veg tending. It’ll be a way to raise funds to plough back into the allotment and to generally raise awareness of what the earth can produce, food miles, bio-diversity, insect-diversity, seasonality, healthy soil and deliciousness of organic food type stuff. 

The Paved Kitchen will also be a great way to get the children from Nuthurst’s St Andrew’s primary school even more involved in the allotment and further their education in how to feed themselves with real food in a tasty way. 

Anywho, we had better get on with step two and three (building a rabbit/deer proof fence around the allotment and tilling the earth using a tractor contraption) whilst planning the Paved Kitchen menu. 

Who’s in?

Angus White, Cooks Farm, November 2020

What needs doing first?

We have about 1000 sq metres available outside and about 300 sq metres available under unheated glass. There could be more of both but this sounds enough to start.

To get it ready for growing fruit and veg we need to make it deer and rabbit proof. This could cost more than a pound. Well actually, it’d cost quite a lot more than a pound but it’s undoubtedly the most important and the most expensive part of the enterprise as hungry deer and bunnies are plentiful in Nuthurst.

Needless to say, emotional blackmail will be turned up to screaming pitch in attempting to persuade various local fencers to do their civic duty and do it for nothing. However, we must brace ourselves to face disappointment in this area. Maybe they’ll do it for abitlessthantheynormallywould or we can raise money by subscription and pay them. Anyway, not to worry. It will be done because it must be done. Somehow or other.

The greenhouse was our old propagation area and the ground is covered in 2 ft of crushed sandstone. To remove this would expose the original sloping soil and the general consensus is NOT to do that as it would be a fantastic amount of work to little effect. If we acquire some nice topsoil and some nice spent mushroom compost, we can make raised beds on the existing surface that’s level and well drained. We have the use of a small tractor with a front-end loader for getting the stuff in the greenhouse. We then need workers to hand rake the soil/compost into useable piles or ‘raised beds’ as we like to call them. We could then do exactly the same outside. 

Please note the use of the words ‘acquire’ and ‘workers’ in the previous paragraph. Words which are thick with innuendo and slightly sinister intent. i.e. it might appear that we’re looking for something for nothing.

Nothing? Nothing? Certainly not. The reward is getting involved with a worthwhile community adventure. A way to make friends, enjoy yourself and enjoy your very own home-grown fruit and veg.

Jonathan van der Borgh, Bulls Farm, October 2020

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