Getting into the swing of things

So 2013 has produced the coldest March since 1962 and the coldest Easter on record, and March was actually colder than the preceding winter months. We experienced snow on the 4th April so we had plenty of excuses to delay planting and sowing.
Despite this, I did put Maris Peer into the ground around Good Friday. I also popped Charlotte into a potato sack on our house steps. Hopefully the snow didn't ruin things but being close to the house means plants generally are a little sheltered from cold temperatures.
Now, mid April it is finally warming up (with 22 degrees on 14th) but last week coincided with a heavy work load and rains so the pressure to pull a finger out is growing.
I managed to plant a row of Pentland Javelin on the morning of the 15th before work.  It wasn't a full row so I have room for a couple more on the end. I plan to finish off all rows this week - a little at a time I will get there...  As part of the plan I will also finally plant out the pea plants which are taking on triffid proportions.
In my flying visit I noticed that someone has instigated a system for our pony poo pile. - it is now pinned in by a wall of bags with the good stuff all ready for scooping into wheelbarrows. Now where did I put my barrow?
I also noticed that the tidy raspberry lady has cut her raspberries down. This indicates hers are autumn plants. I'm not sure what mine are (though I suspect they are summer) so I might hedge my bets by cutting some nearest the water butt down to experiment.
I went to a Common Growth workshop at weekend up on Telegraph Hill on sowing and growing from seed.  Which, despite the rain, was very inspirational.  Not only do I completely promise to repot my plug plants but I also got a parsley plant, sowed some Red  Turks squash, zinia, and got a yellow tomato seedling.  Lovely.

Lest we forget

The yearly allotment meeting is coming up and we are being encouraged to grow more winter crops. In theory this is a good idea except that the plants take up a lot of space for a very long time and aren't that exciting in terms of flavour or money saving.  Honourable exceptions, in my opinion, are cavollo nero and psb. I say that however last year my cavollo nero failed and only 2 psb plants made it through the dreadful winter/ summer. And those two plants, so full of promise a few weeks ago, seem to have been pigeoned. Damn.
We even had a slight snow shower on Easter Saturday. The plug plants remain indoors....
Just so that I remember, the seeds that I sowed on the 18th March were:
Tomato - Gardener's delight, Black Cherry
Early psb
Lemon basil
Pea Carouby de maussanne (purple mangetout)
Cosmos mixed
Verbascum
26th March and the mangetout and the psb are starting to emerge. March declared joint 5th coldest March since records began. As is traditional, I sowed some of my chitted potatoes on the plot (Maris Peer, a first early variety) and Charlotte potatoes in a bag at home. I also sowed 3 types of chilli and some cutting flowers.

Delicious ideas from a pop up restaurant

Mike and Ollie are a favourite in my area - they can be found at the excellent Brockley Market and there is also a pop up restaurant.   Wonderfully seasonal (though mackerel, beetroot and pork belly seem to have featured every time I'e been!) and often featuring foraged finds, this was my third visit to the pop up restaurant. The venues vary - once in Deptford Project's train cafe, once in live work units in New Cross Gate and this time in the badlands of Camberwell, my old stomping ground.

You know the drill, 20 or so people are entertained with amazing food (4 courses and a cocktail) supplemented by copious wine all for the price of a blow out meal at La Strada. What's not to like?

The food was great and I will definitely be trying to recreate the sweet pickled heritage beetroot (white, golden, chioggia and 'normal'). I was also really impressed with the delicious and almost portable scallop served in its shell with roast new potatoes, peas, wild garlic, butter and hollandaise sauce.

It is by reaching out and trying new things that you discover better or different ways of doing things. A volunteering stint at the Telegraph Hill Festival introduced me to someone who does French speaking evenings, a great jewellery designer which uses old books (trainstopjewellery.etsy.com), made a felted soap (something I had no idea I wanted to make until I saw how much fun it was!) and discovered a simple recipe for a citrus gluten free cake.

Instead of just using the juice of the citrus, you boil the whole fruit up for 2 hours and then take the pips out and blitz the rest (pulp and all). The house smells divine and it adds extra moistness. Perfect.  I adapted the recipe which is for a Clementine Cake on Smitten Kitchen (which in turn is an adaptation of Nigella's recipe) to use lemons and limes instead of the Clementines and added a touch more sugar to balance the added tartness.  Delicious. Even if I do say so myself.

You have more time than you think

It's amazing what you can do in 10 minutes. I took advantage of an earlier than usual start to go to allotment on a sunny but frosty morning before going to work. I only had 10 minutes but it was enough to start on weeding out the creeping buttercup, my arch nemesis on the plot.

I didn't get it all out yet but I've started something I was dreading as being laborious. And it only took 10 minutes. Admittedly I also uprooted some mint and overwintering rocket but they are so hardy they are almost like weeds on the plot. The next part will be trickier as that involves rhubarb and irises that are just getting into the swing of things so I don't want to upset them.

On a later day a miserable rainy day turned sunny unexpectedly and I managed to finish the job off to my boots' disadvantage. I never learn to wear appropriate clothing for gardening.  The potato trenches are now dug and the chitting potatoes have labels (a step forward) so now I need to do it pop them in the ground - only a few days after St Patrick's Day.

In the general scheme of things March is the time gardeners start to feel they are running to catch up and to do lists pile up. My advice is not to stress too much. If it's too cold for you to go out it's probably too cold for outdoor seeds to germinate. It might means things will be a little more frantic later when growing conditions are right but take comfort in the fact nature is quite forgiving. All it wants to do is grow and we just help it along.

Back to winter

After a single glorious spring day which sent me scurrying for the seed packets and planning outdoor activities the temperatures are due to drop from a positively balmy 13 degrees back to 0-3 degrees at the weekend. And snow. Oh good. So no burning of garden debris then.
Other tasks I'm supposed to do now according to the RHS app and weekly garden magazines (with a new magazine format for Garden News):

Weatherproof:
Penstemon cuttings
Sow broad beans
Sow peas inside
Sow tomatoes
Sow sweet peas

Big jobs that I'd prefer to have help on or at least do in the dry and warmer weather:
Fix Raspberry wires (again)
Spread manure (needs to be warm so don't trap cold in)
Cover with cardboard
Burn rubbish (unlikely to happen if the clouds open)

More urgent and secretly satisfying:
Dig behind water butt
Hand weed self seeders
Dig potato trenches
Prune red currants and gooseberries

It's not just in the allotment though. I've decided the garden deserves some love too:
Tie up rose at back
Tidy in general
Cut back jasmine
Burn rubbish
Repot blueberries
Plant fruit bushes in garden
Spray and clean patio (again need a dry day for this)

Indoors the potatoes are chitting well. Once again I have too many to plant on the plot but I will grow the surplus in sacks again this year. I just need to buy vast amounts of compost (or use the stuff in the garden come to think of it). Varieties I have are mainly early as that means they can be out early freeing up space for other crops or a second sowing (I never know whether to move this within a growing year).

The varieties are:
Maris piper - main crop
Sharps express - 1st earlies
Duke of York - 1st earlies
Golden wonder x3 which are looking very manky
Pentland javelin - 1st early
Charlotte - salad
Maris peer - early

Mother's Day and a cracking hangover limited my activities over the weekend of the 10th but I did tie up the rose and cut back the jasmine and bamboo in the garden. A distinct lack of compost put an end to seed sowing plans. Next weekend.....

2 weeks later.... Well it got even colder and on the 24th March we are experiencing the coldest March since records began. It is snowing in zone 2 in London and it's even settling.

Stuck indoors, potting compost was bought and mangetout peas, cosmos, verbascum, lemon basil, tomatoes (gardeners delight and black cherry) and purple sprouting broccoli were sown. I have also bought plug plants for 3 varieties of tomato (baby plum, cherry and money maker), chilli pepper, bell pepper, cauliflower. Now I just need the snow to stop so I can start planting things out.

Can you dig it?

Apologies for 90s throwback reference. But I am a very happy lady. The plot is (almost) all dug over. With the help of Tom the majority has been dug and weeded. The herb/ rhubarb bed needs complete clearing of creeping buttercup which is living up well to its name. And the 'extra bit' by the water butt needs a bit of an overhaul and some thought on what would survive in such an over shadowed and out of the way place.

Thankfully for our insides there weren't that many Jerusalem artichokes coming from the remaining plants. A row of tubers were replanted by the wall and the section by the compost bins was sown with garlic. Shallots went in edging the wall border by the water butt. I did have onion sets too but as space was limited I concentrated on harder to find and more expensive alliums. I might pop them in the garden and see what happens. I have also read that you can grow onions in seed trays for planting out later so I might try that later.

A few patches show signs of self seeding/ overwintering eg chard/ beetroot. If we dug them up by accident the protocol was to apologise to the plant, replant it and hope for the best.   On the whole though I decided not to trust Tom with handweeding the patch as a) it's not a very fun job and b) I wasn't sure he would no pull out the good seedling but leave the weeds. So I still have to do this. Fun.

The weather has been lovely - dry but cold for the year. I don't mind the cold as once your are digging you warm up pretty fast. However the cold does mean we haven't spread out the manure or compost yet as it would not only keep the moisture in (good) but also trap the cold in (bad). I'll just have to wait until a warm midday to try to capture some of the sun's warmth in the soil.

Next steps are to:
- cover the earth with cardboard/ carpet/ manure/ compost.
- Dig potato trenches
- Chit potatoes
- Sow broad beans for succession
- Repot the blueberry shrubs at home
- Sow onion sets into trays
- Give carrots another go but in pots to avoid the troubles with growing in soil. Try coloured varieties.

Looking to the future with an eye on the past

Which sounds like a physical impossibility but I've been in training for my half marathon so am in peak condition...

Looking around the half (well, quarter) dug plot I see signs of emerging shoots everywhere despite the recent cold snap.  Pink noses of rhubarb are poking through the earth and there are signs that the Purple Sprouting Broccoli did not fail completely - the plants that managed to survive the winter and being eaten by birds and other beasts are bravely hinting at the purple joy to come.  The Autumn sown broad beans also seem to be boldly announcing the fact that spring is on its way.

Looking back over last year's entries I see that this time last year we were suffering from overly warm weather whereas now we are at the mercy of the Beast from the East (cold weather that is coming from Siberia) and snow is predicted for tonight and temperatures of around 0 degrees are predicted to last until Wednesday.

As I hunker down under the duvet and avoid the prospect of a long run, it seems the perfect time to review my best intentions and learnings from last year so I can try to avoid the pitfalls this year.

Starting with the old faithfuls, potatoes.  Last year my potatoes were planted on St Patrick's day (20th March). This year St Patrick's day is 10 days early so I might wait to plant them until Easter which is also early this year (30th March).  I still need to dig trenches (which were dug on 27/2 last year) and LABEL the varieties.

Overall jobs I need to do when I venture into the cold:
Mulch and manure
Plant garlic and onions (February is the last month to do this)
Clear up accumulated rubbish
Tie in raspberries
Weeding of perennials weeds

I have also reworked my planting plan to rotate the potatoes, onions and brassicas into new areas. This is tough when space is limited and some crops (eg onions and potatoes take up a pretty big amount of space)

As part of Lent I have toyed with giving up booze (fail fairly spectacularly at least once a week).  An alternative resolution is to use up all the frozen vegetables in the chest freezer by the time Easter comes. This means various bowls of green mush squatting in the fridge inducing guilt in me.  The trusty layers terrrine of vegetables bound together by egg in a loaf tin has been very useful in using up the old vegetables. 

The cauliflower was used up in the form of a cauliflower cheese (weightwatchers recipe but pimped up a bit with extra cheese - oops).

March is around the corner and then things will start really speeding up - with seed sowing and preparations.

Tasks to to in early March:
Sow broad beans - a little deeper than last year
Remember I had some good Jerusalem Artichoke recipes in March last year
Also try out a salsa verde with J Artichokes which tasted amazing at a restaurant we went to in north London - the sharp zing contrasted well with the earthy sweetness of the artichokes.

Deep breaths....