Allotment Reloaded - Revenge of the Frankencarrots

 With the year end approaching, it’s time to reflect on what went well and what went badly in the allotment in the last season, try to learn from your mistakes and do better next year.

Programmes featuring celebrity gardeners like Alan Titchmarsh make gardening appear easy, and you might think that all fruit and vegetables turn out perfectly as planned. The reality is that gardening, especially edible gardening, is hard work and there are lots of mistakes and failures along the way. In this blog I’m going to concentrate mostly on the failures and see what we can learn from them.

I’ve divided this year’s plantings into five categories:

  • Turned out perfectly with minimal effort
  • Turned out well but could do even better next year
  • The jury’s still out; too soon to say
  • Turned out badly but may be salvageable next year if I do things differently;
  • Complete waste of time: don’t bother even trying that again

Turned out perfectly with minimal effort

Onions, potatoes, rhubarb and main crop strawberries (Elsanta fragaria). Grew like weeds in the moderate, damp Isle of Man climate with minimal care. Not much more to say about those.


Perfect onions

Turned out well but could do even better next year

Peas. I learned from my mistakes last year, and instead of sowing them directly into the ground (where very few of them germinated) I germinated them in damp tissue paper, then transferred the germinated ones to small pots, then planted them out when they were ready. A bit of a faff to start with but I got a good crop of peas which the kids enjoyed picking. However, I made the mistake of planting them first and then trying to construct the pea supports and netting around them which ended up looking rather shaky and Heath Robinson-ish. Next year I will construct the supports first then plant the peas around them.

Brussels sprouts. I got an excellent crop over several weeks, having learned from previous mistakes. Last year my entire crop was wiped out by cabbage root fly at about 1 month old because I failed to put brassica collars around the bases of the plants. This year I put the brassica collars down straight away, and because they kept blowing away, put a polytunnel over them as well. The plants grew like rockets and produced such a big crop of sprouts that a sizeable portion was wasted because I didn’t pick them in time and I ended up with a lot of “blown” sprouts (sprouts which have got too old and turned from tight buttons into loose cabbage like things full of slugs and earwigs). Next year I will start picking early, try to pick at least twice a week, and give away any that I can’t eat myself.


"Blown" sprouts

The jury’s still out; wait and see what happens next season

Soft fruits, apples and asparagus.  In an effort to cut down the workload of looking after the allotment, I planted a lot of perennial plants in January including raspberries, thornless blackberries, apples, asparagus, tayberries, loganberries and blueberries. I got very few fruits this year, but then I wasn’t expecting to because this is a long term investment and you don’t get any significant crop for 2-3 years after planting. Fingers crossed for next year.

I also planted a herb garden with mostly perennial herbs like mint, rosemary, sage, thyme, chives and oregano / marjoram. The plants were too small to harvest from this year, but seem to be doing well and should give a great crop next year.

Turned out badly but may be salvageable next year if I do things differently

The maincrop strawberries, as I said, did very well, but I also planted a late flowering and fruiting variety (Loran) which produced hardly anything because the flowers and fruit came so late in the year that the fruit wasn’t able to ripen. This variety would probably do well in a more southerly climate, or in a greenhouse, but not out in the open in the cool climate of the Isle of Man. So for next season I’m going to gather all of the late fruiting strawberry plants together, put them under a polytunnel from September onwards, and see if I get some fruit that way.

These strawberries look fine - but they were
photographed in December and will never ripen

I got a great crop of sweetcorn and was really looking forward to eating it but the mice got to it first, and as soon as it was ripe and ready to eat it was all gone within a week. So I have been collecting empty plastic pop bottles, and next year I am going to protect each cob by growing it inside its own pop bottle. Sweetcorn doesn’t grow naturally in the Isle of Man because it’s too cool – the farmers around here don’t grow it commercially – and the pop bottles will probably also help it to ripen. Again, a bit of a faff, but I like fresh sweetcorn so much that I think it’s worth it.

What was left of the sweetcorn after the mice had it

Complete waste of time: don’t bother even trying that again

There are some things which are best bought from the shop, and to hell with the 1,000 mile long food chain…

Tomatoes and peppers – don’t even think about growing them in the Isle of Man outside a greenhouse.

Spinach – we had a very dry spring and the spinach “bolted” (shot up flower spikes) almost as soon as it had germinated, which is what it does when it doesn’t get enough water. Once it has bolted, it produces few leaves, tastes bitter and there is nothing you can do about it.

Carrots – unless you prepare the ground really well you end up with “Frankencarrots” like the ones in the picture. They are quite edible, but badly deformed because I didn’t dig the vegetable plot properly and left big solid lumps of clay under the ground, and instead of drilling through them, the carrots took the easiest route and went sideways. Trying to serve up something like this doesn’t help your credibility as a gardener.

Frankencarrots.  Not genetically modified; just pretending.

Califlower and broccoli – easy to grow (provided you remember those brassica collars, see “Brussels sprouts”, above) but I found the main problem for me was harvesting. You have to catch them at just the right time, when the florets have formed but not yet turned into flowers, and the heads have formed but not yet broken up, and to do that you need to inspect them every day. I’ve only got time to visit my allotment once or twice a week so that doesn’t work for me.

I’ll report back in 12 months with an update…

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin


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