I’ve been out of action with covid for most of this week – I was fortunate not to get seriously ill with it, but blimey it’s pretty shocking how much it knocks the wind out of your sails.
Yesterday I felt much better and had tested negative for 2 days running, so decided to spend some time out in the sunshine and fresh air at the allotment. I was very short of breath and coughing a lot, but actually feeling relatively ok in myself, and i thought the fresh air would do me good (it definitely did).
It was so lovely to get outside and have a little bit of energy back after being stuck in bed and absolutely exhausted earlier in the week. It really did me lot of good and lifted my slightly tired-out spirits.
I’m paying the price today a bit, as I’m back in tired out mode and not feeling up to doing anything much at all. Still, it was worth it to get some fresh air, get my hands dirty and catch the last day of the lovely warm sunny spell we’ve had here.
At the allotment
The daffodils have finished flowering now; they’ve handed the baton to the wallflowers which are out in force all over the plot, and the tulips which are just coming into flower.
The strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackcurrants have started into growth – I’m not expecting much fruit from them this year but am secretly hoping for at least a little bit of a harvest in this first year.
There had been a lovely big delivery of tree prunings at the site – perfect for pea supports. I spent a happy while constructing supports for my sweet peas, podding and climbing peas, and planted out a few small plants of each that I’d grown at home.
The plan is to sow a few more pea seeds every 2 weeks or so, so we can have a long period of harvest through the summer. I’ve never had much success with peas but I’m hoping for better results this year (based on nothing in particular other than the ridiculous optimism that this time of year tends to inspire!).
I’ve never managed to source pea sticks before as I don’t have trees on the plot and they don’t tend to come up for sale in city garden centres. So I was pretty excited to find this treasure up at the plot just at the right time of year. I love the way nothing goes to waste on allotments – there was something incredibly satisfying and grounding about making use of someone’s discarded tree prunings on the plot.
There was also a delivery of woodchips, dropped off by a local tree surgeon for allotment wombles like me to make use of. We used it to mulch the paths between our beds to provide a nice clean surface to walk and crouch on whilst tending the raised beds, and to protect the soil and feed the fungi. The idea is that we should get the benefits of the fungal activity around the woodchips in the adjoining beds as well, which in turn should help keep our plants healthy and happy.
Last year’s kale has gone to flower now so I cleared that away and harvested some more PSB from the plants next door to them. There are a few over-wintered lettuce almost ready to harvest – once they’re done and the PSB is finished, this bed will be ready for a good layer of mulch before the tomatoes go in at the start of May.
I’m trying to get much better at always having something ready to go in the ground as something else comes out – I’d really like to try the method of inter-planting new small plants before a crop is finished, to get a head start, having seen that technique on some Charles Dowding Youtube videos. I like the challenge of really getting the most out of the growing season and the space available, and trying to do better at it each year.
There are a few signs of seeds germinating from the sowings I did straight into the ground a couple of weeks back: the mooli, carrots and radishes are all starting to come up. No sign of the parsnips or kohl rabi yet though.
I had a few plants ready to plant out, so they’ve gone in:
- beetroot, under fleece
- a few winer salad plants that have been over-wintered in the cold frame and should hopefully grow away quickly
- climbing peas, podding peas and sweet peas
- chitted charlotte potatoes
At home
Meanwhile, at home in the VegTrug planter, the winter salad leaves have really shot up and need eating before they flower, and the seeds I sowed at the end of Feb are now all coming up – radishes, peas (for shoots), beetroot, spring onions, kohl rabi, chives and coriander.
The idea is to eat the salad leaves over the next few weeks and then replace them with tomato, pepper, cucumber and aubergine plants which are currently growing indoors – all small-ish varieties chosen to be suitable for a planter.
I cut my first bunch of flowers at home this week. Doing this makes me deeply, disproportionately happy. I don’t care how messy or uncoordinated it looks. To me it’s absolutely beautiful in a way that flowers from the shops simply cannot compete with. I love it.
Seeds
Whilst sat at home this week, I stole a march on some more spring sowing:
- Night Scented Stock Starlight Scentsation
- Erigeron Karvinskianus ‘Profusion’
- Onion Early Paris White
- Beetroot Chioggia
- Beetroot Golden Detroit
- Radish Amethyst
- Fennel Mantovano (a variety that’s bolt-resistant and so can be sown earlier in the year)
- Celery Golden Self Blanching Aurora
- Celeriac
- Lemon Basil
- Cinnamon Basil
- Ammi Majus
Where possible I’m trying to sow a little bit of each thing, successionally, rather than a lot in one go. For example this is my second sowing of beetroot – one has just been planted out, and when these ones are ready to plant out I’ll sow another small batch. I love having small amounts of lots of different things on the allotment so there’s always something interesting going on and plenty of variety to choose from and enjoy. And I really want to extend the cropping season for some of my favourite veg, of which beetroot is definitely one!
I’ve been inspired by Charles Dowding (I’ve watched a lot of his videos whilst down with Covid – I highly recommend them for a cheerful and very informative set of bite-sized lessons!) to try multi-sowing. This is where you sow multiple seeds in each module of a seed tray and plant out in clumps rather than individually as I would normally do. He reckons plants are happier and more productive per square metre this way, so although it feels very wrong / counter-intuitive, I’ve given it a go.
Things that I’ve learned like growing like this include onions (8 per module for salad onions, 4 for bulb onions), beetroot (I’ve gone for about 4 per module), herbs 2-5 per module depending on the herb), spinach (6), chard (4) and salad leaves (4), so I’ve tried multi-sowing with all of these to see how it works out on my plot.
Also inspired by Charles Dowding’s videos, I ordered some of the seed module trays he designed. They arrived this week – they’re lovely sturdy little things that look like they’ll last a lifetime (I was convinced to buy some when I saw him in a video demonstrating that you can happily stand on them, which is definitely not the case for any other modules I’ve tried!), and have big drainage holes to make it much easier to poke the little plants out with their root balls intact when the time comes.
So, despite spending most of this week in bed, it turns out I’ve done quite a lot of stuff just by doing a bit for a few minutes at a time whenever I had the energy.
Dreaming of a future outside London and outside the office
I also spent a lot of this week dreaming about a future when I don’t have to do the sort of stressful job I’m doing now. I reckon I have about 3 years more of this job to do, and then I’m planning on taking a break of some sort, moving somewhere outside the city and working part-time or returning to contracting.
It’s 25 years since I took on my first graduate role here in London, and since then I’ve jumped from one stressful job to another. For a long time I thought it was the roles, but I’ve come to realise the common denominator is me: it’s how I work; I throw myself into what I’m doing.
I enjoy and get a huge amount of fulfilment and satisfaction from my work, but I’m tired, have a different view of what’s important these days and just don’t really want to do it any more. I’m tired of being exhausted and stressed, spending so much time in meetings and doing emails and not having any emotional bandwidth left for friends, family or community.
I want my life to be wider, more socially connected and less stressful and exhausting. I’d like to have more time to do the volunteering work I love doing, connect with my local community and be outside with nature and my plants.
I’d dearly love to be less immersed in office-based work and more able to spend time outside, growing flowers and veg. It’s calming, grounding and joyful for me in a way that nothing else can really match. So the plan is to buy a place with an acre or so of land, and turn the land into a beautiful garden (including a decent sized vegetable and flower growing area and a large greenhouse or two….).
I need to see this job through for about 3 more years. At the same time, we need to finish refurbishing our home (we bought it as a do-er upper, made some great early progress and then stalled as pressure of work took over) so we can sell it on. And we need to save up as much as possible to give us as many options as possible when it comes to moving house and working out exactly how I’m going to generate the income I’ll still need but in a more sustainable way…
Keeping the Plot 