Allotment Bird Scarers

Not the best photograph in the world, but you can see the problem. At this time of year, when food is scarce, the disgruntled allotment-holder finds him or herself fighting with birds.

Now the crow, bless him, is really not the problem. He turns up from time to time and will hop down ponderously to snaffle a bit of bacon sandwich, but really he’s not that interested in pecking our broad beans, that’s the pigeons.

And this is the scaraweb!

I ‘scored’ this off freecycle at the end of last year, and while it looks like a crash-landing by Santa, it does seem to be working – also, it’s biodegradable.

The problem with any bird scarer is that birds soon get used to it. You can try:




• Toy snakes (should be more than two feet long)
• Toy cats
• CDs on strings
• Bottles on canes
• Bunting
• Windmills
• Plastic shopping bags tied to string


But any and all of these only work because the birds are surprised and uncertain. As soon as they get used to the whatever-it-is then they’ll be back, pecking the tops out of beans and peas and taking the sprouts off Brussels. So what you have to do, apparently, is change your bird scarer system every couple of days so that there’s a constant novelty to the process. I assume this means that by the end of the week your resident birds will have forgotten what they saw on your plot at the beginning of the week, so they have a longer memory than goldfish, but not by much. Our fellow allotment-holders have a plethora of devices, so I’m going to photograph them and share them with you over the weeks ahead …

Labels: allotment-bird-scarers, allotment-birds, allotment-brassicas, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-pests

January Allotment Tasks

While a lot of people seem to think there’s nothing to be done on the allotment over the winter, they couldn’t be more wrong!

To start with, from 235 at least, there’s harvesting: our weekend lunch included the last of the fennel and the first of the purple sprouting broccoli. Wonderful food, as fresh as possible and when you look at supermarket prices for broccoli right now, we’re eating pure luxury.

And on 201, there’s always clearing up – and burning stuff!




I love burning stuff, and now we have a proper garden incinerator, we also have a way to generate lovely wood ash so that we can sprinkle it around seedling plants to keep the slugs off. You can buy incinerators, or convert an old metal dustbin by knocking holes in the lower sides with a cold chisel to allow oxygen flow which gives a faster burn. We’ve been getting rid of perennial weeds, hedge trimmings, and lots of brambles that were creeping into our plot from over the fence.

Labels: allotment-broccoli, allotment-fennel, allotment-incinerator, allotment-perennial-weeds, january-allotment-tasks

Seeds, Apples, Peas, Frosts

I ordered the seeds, exploding cucumbers, celtuce, asparagus peas and all. Even some lemon chilli seeds. And we don’t eat chillis so what I’m going to do with them I don’t know. Still, it’s all in a good cause, because if we don’t keep these older, odder, rarer species in cultivation, they won’t be there when we want them.

This picture shows the last apple on a neighbouring allotment’s tree. It’s Maurice’s allotment actually and whenever I pass it, I remember the old nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear, but a silver apple and a golden pear’. Doesn’t it look lovely, if a little lonely …?

Experimental peas – 14 have germinated, but it’s just too cold to hang around and count which were pre-soaked and which weren’t, so I’m going to give it another week, buy which time any that are going to come up, should be up, and then work out if there was any advantage to pre-soaking.

On the plus side, the heavy frosts are breaking up our newly-dug soil beautifully. On the minus side, they stop us doing any more work because it’s just too damn cold to dig!

Labels: allotment-apples, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-peas, allotment-seeds

Seed Catalogues

Oh hell, every penny I get given at Christmas tends to go on seeds. It’s an addiction, I know but there doesn’t seem to be a Seed Buyers Anonymous that I can call on for help. In fact, just about everybody I know has the same weakness.

The only thing that stops me is not being really sure what I’m doing (and that doesn’t always stop me, I won’t bore you with the years I’ve spent trying to germinate Romneya Coulterii but it involves wood smoke, ash, stratification … and so far, no Romneya!) so this year I’m trying to limit myself. Not easy when himself gets in on the act.

What he wants to buy is exploding cucumbers, celettuce and rainbow quinoa. Now quinoa I’m happy to grow (except he doesn’t eat it, so why does he want to grow it?) but exploding cucumbers? And a plant that looks like a lettuce on top of a celery stalk but apparently tastes like neither?

Why?

Because they are a challenge and a novelty. And no matter how often we sit down and talk about productivity, staple food crops and filling the freezer for winter, we always end up with one or two of these novelties that usually go nowhere but soak up hours of effort. Last year it was the peanut plant which produced exactly nothing for all our labours.

I do rather fancy purple Brussels sprouts, although apparently they are not as productive as their green cousins. And I have a sneaking desire for yellow leeks too, so perhaps we should limit ourselves to one flight of fancy each … but then we’ll go to February’s seed swap and come back with armfuls of weird things that caught our eyes. Honestly, we’re hopeless!

Labels: allotment-seeds, seed-catalogues, seed-swap

And a Happy New Year

... with shedloads of everything an allotment holder could wish for!

Pea seeds – to soak or not to soak …

Do you or don’t you soak your pea seeds before germination? Old wives’ tales say that you should (it speeds up and increases germination) or that you shouldn’t (it breaks through the embryonic seed case and allows disease in) or that you should soak them in paraffin (to prevent mice eating the seeds).

So we decided on a bit of an experiment – and one packet of smooth peas (hardy growers but not as sweet as the later wrinkled peas), a whole bunch of toilet roll inners and some compost later … a test!

Fifty-one seeds were soaked overnight in cold water. Fifty-one weren’t. Each seed was planted in a toilet roll inner and put in an unheated greenhouse. The soaked seeds had a blue wavy line drawn around their toilet roll inner for instant identification. That was nine days ago.

Today – two pea seedlings!

But both, rather worryingly, have appeared in the unsoaked tray. Perhaps there will be a better germination rate from the soaked seeds by the end of the experiment, but right now, it looks to me as if soaking pea seeds might be a waste of time. In the spirit of allotment innovation, I’ll keep you posted as the germination progresses (hopefully) and we’ll see what the final outcome is when we get to plant the seedlings out.

Labels: allotment-germination, allotment-overwintering-crops, allotment-peas

Quick and dirty allotment gardening

Actually, that’s misleading. There’s a lot of dirty but not much quick I’m afraid. The past week has meant every spare minute we’ve been digging. Digging. Digging.

And it’s really tough digging too, as plot 201 hasn’t been worked for at least a year, probably two. Compared to Duncan’s plot, where the soil has been turned and rotovated at least twice it’s like digging through rock when it’s dry and clay when it’s wet, but it will be worth it when we put our early potatoes in.

What do you think of our scarecrow? He’s called The Green Man and I rather like the idea of an abstract bird scarer – whether the birds will actually be scared by a cartoon man is another matter ….

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-potatoes, allotment-scarecrow