Too too hot

It's 35 degrees out there and we're melting. I visited the allotment this afternoon at lunch time as we have a busy week and it's the only time I could go. I can't help but feel that the water I gave the plants probably all evaporated!

I asked about the redcurrants on my plot and apparently the plants are 17 years old! No wonder their yield is low and they look ill. This winter I'll replace them with other plants. I'm thinking of a gooseberry (kruisbes) and some other raspberries ...

Oh, the garden is so exciting!

So so much stuff happening in the garden.. raspberries starting to ripen - I've had three! Peas in quantities big enough to keep the kids busy for a while, strawberries ripening under their nets. Not enough for much, but they add a nice touch to a fruit salad.

This is a picture of the strawberry nets, with my legs and pink crocs in the background!

The spinach started to make flower buds so I pulled it all up yesterday and we will be having spinach and ricotta cannelloni tomorrow. Mmmmm.

There's enough lettuce to feed an army. The beans are flowering away, the climbing beans are climbing, some nasturtiums are flowering.

The butternut plants have recovered from their chill and have gone nice and green and have started doing a mile a minute growing. The tomatoes that I planted first out still look a bit sickly, but the ones subsequent to those are doing fine. It's a bit of a gamble with those tomatoes anyway as there is usually tomato blight at the allotments, which is why I have 24 tomato plants in pots on my balcony!

But most exciting of all, my gemsquash plants have flowers and one has a baby gemsquash! That's the picture at the top! I am so excited I can barely speak! If all we get is gemsquash from the allotment it will be worth it.

Next year I am definitely doing more pea growing, more strawberries and concentrating on getting a bigger and better harvest from the soft fruit. I should have a cracker raspberry and blackberry harvest judging by the amount of canes they've put up this season so far, but I'm completely unsure of how to prune the red and blackcurrants. The bushes look a bit elderly and one of them is completely dead in the centre.

The redcurrants in the picture above are from the younger plant. The older plant has tiny fruit and yellowed leaves.


More photos here.

Not for all the Lovage in the world ...

Lovage or maggikruid in Dutch is a rather unassuming plant when you see it in the garden centre. They have it in these tiny pots and it looks like it would quite happily stay the same size forever. What an untruth!

Lovage tries to take over the world!

I didn't plant ours myself. It conveniently came up all on it's own, even though I had intended to buy one after reading that it's a 'beneficial to everything' companion plant, much like borage.

When the lovage started coming up in the spring I thought maybe we had something exciting, like asparagus. I asked someone and they told me what it was and I left it alone.

Until today that is, where I ruthlessly pulled it all up. Judging by how fast the little shoots have forced themselves up through the ground I'm sure it will be just as big in no time at all. It grows to 2 metres high!

It has an interesting smell, very clean and celery like. Brad wasn't so keen - he said it stinks!

I also paid Sebastian 2 euros to weed the onion bed and carry the weeds to the compost bin. He had to do it without complaining in order to get paid. And he did! I also trimmed the dead wood out of the black and redcurrant bushes, and we removed some growth from the plum tree which appeared infected with a virus of some kind. Then we covered the strawberries with a net to save the first strawberry from the birds. We laid some slug traps using milk.

My onions and garlic are starting to yellow. I can't believe it's time already, is it?

I am still unsure whether these are black or redcurrants ...

More May photos here.

The tomato plantation

My tomatoes seem fine. I transplanted six of the Orange Berry into pots and their leaves immediately stopped turning downwards. I think that the downward turning leaf problem was definitely a signal that they didn't like being root bound, not that they were suffering some heinous sort of wilt. So physiological and not disease.

The ones with the brown spots on the leaves are doing quite fine in isolation and now that they are out of the rain has stopped the leaves have stopped spotting up.

The six other Orange Berry absolutely have to be transplanted to the garden. I'm thinking of doing that tomorrow and covering them with fleece to keep them warm. The balcony is a good deal warmer than the allotment site as we don't get the wind directly off the open polder here.

Patrick came over yesterday bearing bounteous quantities of tomatoes! In return he took only one Red Pear. I hope it bears well for him!

My tomato collection has been swelled with the following (thanks Patrick!):

Pineapple
Black Pineapple
Black Prince
Silvery Fir Tree
Matt’s Wild Cherry
Sugar Cherry Currant
F2 Hybrid, Ida Gold x Whippersnapper

You can read more about these on Patrick's blog entry about them

Added to my:

Gardener's Delight
Costoluto Fiorentino
Red Pear
Ildi
Orange Berry
Tigerella

(No affiliation with any of the suppliers listed above, I just used the first that came up with a usable link.)

Of the tomatoes Patrick gave me I'll keep all but the currant tomatoes here on my balcony, or at the allotment in pots. The others that I have in trays will be divided between the garden and the balcony. The heirloom varieties will need bigger pots - I'm thinking 40 cm and upwards.

As for the garden itself. I was up there twice yesterday and didn't do much except look. It's wet. Very wet.

Next week there is dry weather forecast so I'm going to use the medieval tool that the association owns to earth up my potatoes. It's sort of like a v-shaped spade on a long pole that you pull between the rows and it throws up earth on either side of itself.

I'm very excited to see that my Contender dwarf beans have flowered and now have baby beans on them. Likewise the peas are at a stage where we can eat a few peas every time we visit the garden. I'm desperate for the space currently hosting the potatoes, onions, garlic and shallots. Roll on June/July!

You can see some pictures from the garden here.

What the garden did on vacation

Came back from vacation and first thing on Saturday we were at the allotment. The committee had made sure my garden was watered and I was amazed to see how everything grew while we were gone! The weeds grew too!

Some new photos to show you what I mean.

A beautiful butterhead lettuce. This one was a seedling from the garden centre.



We ate one just like it for supper tonight with a chilli vinaigrette, chopped tomato, feta cheese and sliced carrot. Oh, and the best kebabs ever! Marinated in a ginger, garlic, maple syrup and vinegar marinade. Mmmmm...

One of the Salad Bowl lettuces planned for dinner tomorrow. This lot was sown indoors back on the 3rd March.



First pea pods, sown indoors on 3 March. Don't they look just like peas in a pod?



A cauliflower surrounded by some purple kohlrabi. The idea is to harvest the kohlrabi as golf ball sized fruit and then pull them out, leaving the cauliflowers the rest of the space.

These cauliflower are remarkable because they were eaten almost down to the ground by the ducks before I made my cunning chicken wire enclosure for them! They've recovered wonderfully. The chicken wire is off and they now have pirate flags protecting them from errant fowl. I'm hoping the pirates on the bunting will prove even more chillingly frightening to the ducks. Pity you can't threaten ducks with walking the plank.

The caulis were from the garden centre and the kohlrabi from my neighbour. Don't they look beautiful together?



Blackberries in bloom. I'm thinking ... JAM!



A procession of cows on the polder:



I wonder what they were doing? Do you think one said 'follow me' and the rest did? Maybe the two behind have co-dependent personalities. Maybe the one in front is a dictator. Psychology among cows... I'm sure someone's studied it.

I also replanted some tomatoes to 10 cm pots, bought some compost to replant the rest, potted on some calabrese (broccoli), planted more lettuce in a tray, weeded my entire plot, tried out the new sprinkler, and then tidied up everything and brought it home because tomorro, after 45 days of drought, it's going to rain!

My green thumbs are about to get a workout

Yesterday I went to the volkstuin (community garden or allotment for English speakers) and finalised the deal with the head of the association.

I am now the proud lessee of 50 m2 of very muddy tilled land which currently houses a plum tree and some blackberry canes.

You can see some pictures I took at the allotment today over here, including a beautiful photograph of a heron in the water.

I also saw a very large rabbit, but he ran off before I could take a photo of him. Hope he doesn't hang around much in the summer or we might have to call in Wallace and Gromit!

The kids were hoping to see the ponies kept in the paddock alongside the allotment, but the ponies were in the stable, out of the rain and snow.

I plan to create raised beds and follow an intensive vegetable growing plan, however, when I took the kids there this afternoon I realised that I may have drastically overestimated the space available. In order to create a balanced little garden I'll just plant less of my chosen varieties of plants.

I've written a list here so that you can try and picture it with me, working clockwise from the plum tree which is on the right hand side of the plot.

Bed #1: Strawberries, onions, garlic, lettuce, celery
Bed #2: Runner beans and peas (on wigwams), sweetpeas, marigold, sunflowers
Bed #3: Pumpkins and squash, corn, nasturtiums
Bed #4: Carrots, chives, rosemary
Bed #5: Tomatoes, parsley, basil, garlic
Bed #6: Peppers, onions, nasturtiums

Each bed will be raised about 20 cm and measure about 1m2. In between the beds will be a narrow pathway of woodchips.

At the back of the plot where it backs onto my neighbour I'll grow lavender bushes as a sort of boundary. I'll be planting thyme, marjoram and lemon balm between the other plants.

In the meantime, I need to buy some seeds and a propagator to start them off inside while the weather is still so cold, and spend my time looking at catalogues like the one from De Wiltfang.

Do you have plans for a summer garden? On your balcony, in your garden, in a community garden? if you're unsure whether to plant or not, go and read about Victory Gardens against global warming, maybe it will inspire you!

Please leave a comment if you have plans and satisfy my eternally nosy side which wants to know what everyone else is doing!

Welcome to my garden

In January 2007 I signed our family up for an allotment, or volkstuin at our local allotment or volkstuinvereniging. The allotment is in Amstelveen, on the Nesserlaan and is part of the moestuin complex called de Nesserlaan Tuinvereniging.

This is a journal of our attempts at growing enough food for a family of four, in a gentle, mostly organic fashion.