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Early-Spring Gardening

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I love every season, but I think Spring has to be my favourite. There’s just so much anticipation in the air, from the first bulbs of early-Spring to the luscious blossoms of mid-Spring and the definite ‘no-turning back’ growth of late-Spring. Everyone and everything has an extra spring in their step….

This is the first of three posts about the joys of springtime gardening on our allotment. It started out as one post, but was just getting crazily long, so I decided to split it – early, mid and late spring. Happy days and happy gardening everyone….

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Wild garlic soup

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It’s that wonderfully smelly time of year again, when garlic is wafting through the woods! Wild Garlic or Ramsons grow in shady, damp woodlands and along hedgerows and usually start appearing in early Spring.

Although the smell is strong and garlicky, the taste is milder and not as pungent as ‘normal’ garlic. You can eat the bulbs and flowers, but we really love the leaves because they’re seriously tasty, very good for us and don’t cost a penny! Hooray for delicious free food.

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Creating a Garden Pt 2: Clearing Weeds

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What is a weed? There are some weeds that I really love, like nettles and others that I’m definitely not so keen on, like bindweed! Weeds are really just vigorous plants growing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if they’re in the way then I’m afraid they have to go. Sorry weeds! However, this can be easier said than done, especially in an organic/biodynamic garden where no chemicals are used. There are other more natural ways to clear weeds that involve a little more work and a little more patience! In our case, we chose to clear the weeds by hand before we could begin planting.

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Free Range Children

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Footloose and fancy free….

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‘Free range’ children? What ARE they? I put this question to a group of parents, who said it conjured up images of children running around in the fresh air, nature, fun and laughter. And yes, I wholeheartedly agree. I think being a free range child is about fresh air, connecting with nature, rain, sun, mud and water, but I think there’s more to it than that. For me, free range also means FREEDOM. Freedom for children to think for themselves, freedom to be themselves, freedom to discover themselves and their place in this complicated world and, crucially, freedom from the concerns and worries of adulthood. So how can we as parents support and encourage this type of freedom?

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Walnut and Goji Granola

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This is such a great way to start the day and will give you loads of energy for hours. Packed full of nuts and seeds, with the natural sweetness of dates and the massive nutritional benefits of goji berries. We have it with homemade almond milk for breakfast, sprinkled on yoghurt for dessert or a sneaky handful grabbed as a snack! I guess you could have it for lunch too if you wanted, so it pretty much covers all bases…..a brilliantly versatile recipe.

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Winter Gardening

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I love the allotment garden in Winter. I go down every day to feed the chickens, collect eggs and gather winter greens to eat or juice and always enjoy the feeling of quiet hibernation in the garden. It’s the only time of year that I feel as if I’m on top of things! Of course there are still jobs to do and the over-winter crops to care for, but there isn’t the fabulously frenzied planting of Spring, the constant tending of Summer and the busy harvesting, storing and preserving of Autumn.

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Ready, steady, grow

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Aren’t gardens amazing places! Full of vibrancy and colour, intoxicating smells and hardworking veg, chickens and wheelbarrows, fresh air, fun and full of wonder. There really is something magical about seeing the first tips of spring bulbs appearing in the depths of winter or planting a seed and watching it grow – so much awesome potential in such a tiny thing! Picking peas, eating them fresh right there and then, harvesting greens for supper, juicing homegrown carrots. Nothing beats it!

I’ve been growing things and gardening for years. Window boxes in gardenless flats, pots on tiny balconies and then ‘proper’ gardening at home and on the allotment. There’s loads more info on my blog about our organic allotment garden, as well as building a garden from scratch and the principles of biodynamic gardening.

Happy reading, happy gardening, happy growing!

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Allotment garden planting plans 2015….

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I think this is my favourite time of year! Sitting around the kitchen table with my family, chatting about what everyone wants to grow in the garden….perfect. So here we are. We’ve pretty much decided on our planting plans for the allotment garden 2015 – lots of old favourites and some very exciting newbies. We saved loads of seeds from last years crops and still have many left over that we bought, so we are in fact buying very few this year, which is brilliant when you’re on a budget and exactly what being self-sufficient is all about.

As many of you will know, we garden organically, but have also been experimenting with biodynamic gardening techniques for many years. If you’re not familiar with the concept you can read a post about it here. Our seeds come from a biodynamic company called Stormy Hall, but if they don’t have what we’re looking for then we use Tamar Organics or the Organic Seed Company. All excellent suppliers and their details are here.

We group our plants into 4 categories – leaf, flower, fruit and root, similar to regular plant groups, but with a biodynamic twist! We have 9 raised beds on our allotment (including 2 new ones for 2015) and every year we rotate our crops for the health of the soil. We’re also great fans of companion planting, so you’ll see lots of herbs and flowers in our crop lists. So here goes……

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Creating a Garden Pt 1: First Steps

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Neck high brambles, rampant bindweed, stubborn grass, broken fences, piles of rubbish and a random turf mound! Sound familiar? That was the state of our allotment garden when we got the go-ahead from our local council in April 2014 and it was very daunting to say the least. Where to begin? It was already mid-Spring and ideally, we wanted to use the space that year as a productive fruit, vegetable and flower garden.

We already had one allotment tucked down at the end of the row, surrounded by fields and opposite an overgrown patch of woodland, but we decided, very much against common sense, that we’d like a bit more space for our chickens to roam and to plant more veg! Hence the request for a second ‘plot’.

In the coming months I’ll take you through the practical ins and outs, the ups and downs, the highs and lows of creating a beautiful organic fruit, veg and flower garden from scratch. As well as this being a personal record of our sweaty endeavours(!), I also hope that you can find some little nuggets of inspiration and learn from our mistakes!

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In the beginning…..

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We got our first allotment in April 2011 because our own back garden was being outgrown by children, fruit, vegetables, chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs! It was a 5 minute walk from our house, which was perfect as we needed to keep things as simple as possible. And if I wanted some lettuce for my salad I wanted to be able to run down and pick it, almost as easily as if it were still in my back garden! We decided to move all the fruit and veg growing down to the allotment, plus the chickens and got stuck in straight away.

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Pumpkins

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Pumpkins are such fun to grow. Every year we plant different varieties for size, taste and colour. This year we inter-planted the pumpkins with our sweetcorn, which looked lovely. The tall fluffy fronds of the sweetcorn and the low-growing sprawling mass of the pumpkins appealed to my ‘good-use-of-space’ aspirations! The idea came from the Native American Indians, who went one step further by letting beans climb up the stems of the sweetcorn – maybe we’ll try that next year! It’s called the ‘3 sisters’ and is a classic example of companion planting – the climbing beans use the corn stalks for support, the low-growing pumpkins and squash smother the weeds and the beans provide nitrogen to keep the soil in tip top condition. Perfect!

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Allotment juice

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I call this our ‘allotment juice’, because it’s such a great way to use up our delicious homegrown veg! Obviously at certain times of year it becomes ‘organic farm shop juice’ (oh how I’d love to be growing big, juicy cucumbers in mid-winter)!

Whatever you call it and whenever you drink it, it will always be incredibly good for you. Yay!

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Healthy hedgerow jam

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This is the most amazing jam made with rice syrup instead of sugar and packed with Vitamin C, antioxidants and natural anti-inflammatory properties, so a healthier version of all the usual sugar-laden jams. Hooray!

We had such fun collecting all these goodies from the hedgerows and trees in the fields and woods nearby – crabapples, elderberries, hawberries, blackberries, rose hips, beechnuts, sloes and rowan berries.

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