Sunday, July 7th, 2002

More beautiful raspberries, today.   And a quarter of the french beans have finally poked their heads through.   Peas and broad beans - we're looking for a great crop very soon.  

I dug in the spinach as green manure - will need to sow some more.

Still no slug damage (or at least VERY little) on the brassicas.   And the lettuces I sowed in between them to keep the slugs happy - even they are untouched!   Most of the brassicas look good - except the calabrese, with tiny heads all going to seed very fast; for all that it's been mainly cool and wet up to now, I suspect I didn't water them regularly enough through the earlier dry spells.

It'll soon be the school holidays - and it looks as if we'll have good harvests, just in time this year.

Watch this space!   It is just possible that Channel 4 will be coming up to make a five-minute film of the kids on the allotment later this month.   Now that will be interesting - but I'm going to have to spend a couple of days trimming the grass paths and clearing the untidy looking bits of my patch.    More to go on the compost heaps!

Saturday, July 13th, 2002

A real "first fruits" weekend this - tucked into calabrese, new potatoes, the first peas and beetroot; spinach, lettuce, borage, and nasturtiums into the green salads.

The kids had great fun digging up the first earlies, and we got Halla's potato bed loaded with compost and Tamanna's leeks planted out.   The Kids had great fun taking lots of photos with the camera Channel 4 lent us to take some stills - they've managed to take photos which cover what our plots looked like before we started, preparing and digging compost and beds, planting and sowing, and harvesting -- not bad for one day!

Impressed with the yield of the Pentland Javelins - and they are beautifully clean tubers, undamaged by scab or slugs.But I still prefer the taste of the Red Duke of Yorks - that will be again my choice for next year.

And I am very impressed with the Alderman peas - the plants look good, with their height.   And the crop is superb - better tasting than the onward I used to grow, and a much better yield (and more robust plants) than the greenshafts.

The weather's gone very dry though - watering again in the evenings.

Sunday, July 21st, 2002

First fruits last week - glut this week!

Apart from the french beans - another sowing which has done nothing - everything else is looking superb.   Pushing the overloaded barrow back home was a bit of a trial - laden with peas, broad beans, potatoes (the second earlies, and I've lost my bit of paper which tells me what they are), calabrese, salads, beetroot, spinach, herbs . . .

Boiled new potatoes, with a substantial "dollop" of mayonnaise mixed with poached yellow fish, spring onions, and parsley - a dish to remember!

The allotment conversations this week are again on vandalism.   Karl had his runner bean supports ripped out - with his plants; he's apparently decided for once and for all that this is all too much for a man in his 80's.   Halla's sunflower canes were removed - but without damaging the plants, fortunately.   And there are a few other bits of wanton damage around the place.   Bastards.

The other bit of conversation is our peas - three people asked me about our six-foot high peas, the weight of the crop so strong, it's pulling the supports over.   Peas like we remember from our childhood - and they taste good!   There will be a few more allotmenteers sowing Alderman next year.

We spent a lot of the day getting beds ready for Channel 4's visit this week - identifying good compost to go on the new potato bed into which the leeks will be transplanted; clearing a place for the winter brassica seed bed; and tidying up the path edges.

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2002

What a day - the kids are exhausted, and I am .......ed.   It has been fascinating watching the Channel 4 team put together a five minute film of the kids on the allotment, I grant you.

But since it's part of an international project, with different countries each producing 5-minute slots - there's no talking involved!   The "story" of kids doing something they're proud of and involved in has to be entirely visual - and that means it took nearly three hours to film them getting their boots on, walking down the stairs, loading the barrow, and doing the ten-minute walk to the allotment!

God bless them, the children were getting very impatient - but didn't show it.   Just took it in their stride - and the nearer we got to the plot, the more relaxed they became; "now we'll get to do what we've been wanting to do all day!"

Except . . . when we got there, we disturbed three teenagers trashing our strawberry plot!   Not picking a few strawberries, and running off, but destroying fully half of the plants!   Ripping them out, and shredding them!

Fortunately, we arrived before they'd done much more damage to our plot, and none to anybody elses's - they had run through our main crop potatoes, flattening some of the haulms, and pulled only a couple of the brassica, - and two of Halla's parsnips of which she is so ferociously proud (isn't it interesting what catches the interest of six-year-olds!).   And these b.....ds ran off through the hole in the "fence" and sauntered off, casual as you please!   Damned cheek!

But we had a lot of fun after that - after I'd cooled down a bit!   Harvesting some beautiful garlic, Halla watering her flower bed, Ayman shifting compost - and there's a lettuce story in there which I'll keep to myself!

Tamanna's idea of TV has changed a little bit, however.   She'll not believe anything she sees again!   She'd dig the fork in, lift a bulb of garlic, and lay it on the grass - only to be asked to put it back into the ground and do it again!   Three retakes?   She tried discreetly tramping the soil to make it look undisturbed for the retake - but this only pulverised the weeds.   By the end, the weeds were a vaguely greenish soup.   Meanwhile the garlic bulb is walking off in a huff!   "Are you going to dig me up, or are you going to leave me here - make up your mind, woman!"

And poor Ayman, twelve years old, determined to handle a man-sized barrow of compost, trying to tip it into a bed under full control.   I'm not complaining - because it took a couple of takes, I got twice as much compost into the leek bed as I'd expected!   And Ayman got to dig to his heart's content.

Hey - the kids had a ball; but it's been a long six hours!

And more filming tomorrow!

Wednesday, July 24th, 2002

Perhaps the less said about today the better!   I'm not at all sure whether I respect the durability and patience of people who put themselves on TV - or are they complete idiots to put themselves through it!

A hard day for the children - but they kept up their good humour almost all day.   Even if it did mean running a little competition between themselves to see who would have most retakes!

Result?   Ayman had two retakes of tipping a barrowload of compost, and five retakes of pulling a lettuce plant; while Tamanna had four retakes of pulling a garlic bulb, and four retakes of planting the same leek.   So honours equal!

Ayman finds it hilarious that the story line meant he'd sow kale and spring cabbage and be dreaming about the spring crop - after months of eating the d... stuff, nightmares might be a better word.   He was glad to see the back of it.  

And as for the way this will be shown in the film, that has him rolling around the floor; they bought a super-market cabbage, took it out of the clingfilm, stuck it in a vegetable bed, and filmed it - this to be Ayman's "vision" of his expected results!   With all the burgeoning goodness bursting out of plots all around us?

It's not fair only to remember these bits, though - gruelling though it was, there's great stuff of the kids enjoying their allotment, and doing things well.   Both Tamanna and Ayman realised just how much knowledge they have themselves of growing veg - and their enthusiasm must have been a little infectious; Tony and Rob (the camera and sound men) are going to get their own vegetable gardens going as a result.

That's five minutes of their allotted fifteen gone.   I wonder what the kids will do for the other ten!   Back to a bit of cold reality now - freezing the peas and broad beans, bagging the potatoes, pickling some beetroot, and cleaning and drying the garlic crop.

Making It - yes, it really did happen!   And it really was shown on Channel 4.

Saturday/Sunday, July 27-28th, 2002

Didn't do any gardening this weekend.   With such good weather?   How could I avoid it?

Easy - I'm still buzzing after my beekeeping course!   A taster really, with a bit of theory and a bit of reality - extracting honey stands out as a bit of hard reality!

But the few moments which stand out - lifting out as gently as possible the frames of a hive, with an experienced beekeeper beside me talking me through it, and gaining a brief insight into another world.   The bee suit gives you security - instead of panicking about possible bee-stings, I'm all cool and calm, dealing with a fantastically well-organised and sensible wild animal.   I am hooked!

Come next May, I am installing a hive on the allotment.

Monday, July 29th, 2002

Bassem's in hospital this morning having an operation to remove a cyst on his neck; his mother's with him, and I have the three younger children, babysitting.   How to keep their minds off their worry about their older brother - yup, guessed it in one, up to the allotment!

"Clean-picked" half the alderman peas (and had another couple of allotment holders wanting to know about good old high-growing varieties).   And then the kids got involved in their own private games.

Lifted all the shallot.   Pulled a few beetroot - and how's this for a simple recipe?   Grate a couple of raw beetroot, and grate an apple; mix the two together, and you have a gorgeous mixture of earthy and sweet!   Thank you, Elsie!

Otherwise spent most of the time clearing beds which had got neglected in the last few weeks of the school term, and sowing more salad-type stuff.   And commiserating with others about how the vandals had used different vegetable harvests as toys, to be smashed up!