Allotment Update: End of May 2010

As the sun sets on May and June ebbs in to announce the 'official' months of summer, gardeners everywhere are looking forward to a solid 3 months of predictable, dependable British weather. OK, so perhaps there is no such thing as a reliable British summer, but nevertheless, now is the busy season – and here's how things currently stand on the London Vegetable Garden allotment...

Potatoes – a lovely row of plants that will soon be covered up to encourage more potatoes to grow from the plants!


Bag potatoes – planted a few weeks after their cousins in the ground, these bag potatoes are sprouting nicely.

Onions – currently sending up shoots that are as long as my forearm!

Tomatoes – shop-bought plants starting to flower.

Pepper plants – shop-bought once again, but establishing themselves nicely in the ground.

Strawberry plant – just the one, so purely for effect (and a few strawberries for the missus), but the plant has taken nicely and is starting to form baby fruit.

Radishes – only planted last week, but up already.

Salad leaves – again, like the radishes, only in the ground a week, but up already.

Carrots – one of the allotments longest residents, and one of its infants. Feel as if I'm going to struggle to produce some crops in this bed.

Peas – 8 pea plants split from one pot – establishing very well in the ground.

Courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes and basil - seeds growing in pots at home.

Slug Solutions!

The London Vegetable Garden has been a quiet gardening blog over the past few days, chiefly due to a long visit to Yorkshire with my other half. However, posting activity has also been quiet as I've sat back and waited to see how Wednesday's 'slug defences' have fared...

Well, upon yet another Bank Holiday visit to the allotment (these have been frequent in recent weeks!), the first thing I did was to go and cast my eye over the stricken runner bean crop – and see whether Wednesday's defences had had any effect.

Upon looking at the patch and more specifically, the beer traps, I was rewarded with the very gruesome fruits of my labours:

As you can see, this is just one of the beer traps, but its result is beyond doubt. Not only has this proved to very effective in the fight against allotment antagonists, but has also shown that slugs were indeed the responsible protagonists.

So, whilst my fledgling runner bean plants will not win any prizes for appearance, they are, however, starting to grow a bit better and establish themselves.

I may have won this particular battle, but there still remains a whole summer of garden warfare to be concluded. The slug defences seem to have worked, so the ants get a reprieve – for now...

Rocket Gardens – a Fortnight Away!

More regular readers of the London Vegetable Garden blog may remember that a few months ago, I sent off for a 'Rocket Gardens' pack of baby vegetable plants. Well, this week I received an email from the Cornwall-based company stating that my baby vegetable plants would be delivered within the next 5-10 working days.

As always, all progress will be reported here, on the blog, the minute it happens, so watch this space! Once the baby vegetable plants arrive, the allotment will look a very busy place indeed!

Agony Ants

There's a famous adage that reads 'leave no stone unturned' – and I'm glad I took heed of this maxim. The other evening, I knocked over one of the many bricks that lines the London Vegetable Garden allotment plot and discovered this:

Now, my immediate reaction was one of pure guilt. For the past 2 weeks I have been cursing slugs and snails for chomping up my crops, when in actuality, these creatures are the much more likely culprits – a thought solidified as I started to observe them crawling all over my plants! My second reaction was one of pain and irritation, as I was foolish enough to kneel down and receive a couple of bites – I guess my knee is much more tastier than pea plants!

Anyway, I know have a new – and pressing – pest problem. I turned over a few more bricks and this is not the sole instance on the allotment. If you have any tried and tested tips for getting rid of ants (organic only to start with), please let me know! I'd hate for my crops and all of my efforts to be wasted by these pesky creatures.

Answers on a postcard – or even simpler, in the comments box below!

Copper, Coffee & Beer...

Armed with a bag full of copper tape, cans of bitter, plastic bottles and a steely resolve, I set off to the allotment after work last night fully geared up for urban gardening warfare. My runner beans have been taking such a battering over the past couple of weeks that I decided to raid Google and the London Vegetable Garden's various Social Media outlets for advice on dealing with my mollusc menaces.

Now, in keeping with the organic theme of my urban gardening project, I do not want to use any chemicals or slug pellets yet. With this in mind, I asked followers of the London Vegetable Garden's Twitter account for their organic remedies, to which copper tape, beer traps and coffee grounds emerged as the popular consensus – a huge thank you to everyone who helped me.

So, upon arrival at the allotment last night (a 4-mile run all round), I knelt down on the grass and started constructing plastic bottle shelters for the baby runner bean plants. I attached a ring of copper tape to each bottle top, as shown below, and then fixed these into place with bits of old bamboo cane.


Now, for those of you not au fait with the merits of copper tape (and admittedly, nor was I until I sough the advice of various gardeners), a slug's mucus (slime) reacts with copper to cause a tiny electric shock, which understandably, causes the slug to give up on its quest for your crops! Whilst this has left part of my allotment looking like an episode of Doctor Who, I'm now hopeful that this will deter any slugs from munching on my plants!

Another age-old technique for deterring slugs from your crops is to lay out beer traps. The premise is simple: attracted by the smell of the beer, slugs and snails will first seek this out, crawling into the trap and not being able to climb back out again. At least they die happy! Using a knife to cut out the bottom halves of water bottles, I sunk these into the soil so that the lip was level with the topsoil and then proceeded to fill these up with cheap beer. I used Tesco value bitter (4 cans for 97p) and hope to check back in a few days to see if I've had any visitors to my pop-up pub!

Finally, I have been collecting coffee grounds from the coffee machine at work, storing these in a plastic bag ready for the allotment. Needless to say, what with this activity, and purchasing cans of Tesco value beer in Richmond, I have been receiving some very strange looks this week! Anyway, I ringed the runner bean plot with old coffee grounds, as apparently slugs detest these too, so I'm hoping that now I have taken more than enough precautions!

Let battle commence...

P.S. Any slug solutions you have had success with would be gratefully received! Simply leave a comment on this post for all to see, join the conversation on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or join the brand spanking new Urban Gardeners' network.

Home-Grown Heroes

Another day, another seedling update. As you all know by now, I'm growing tomatoes (2 varieties), courgettes and cucumbers from seed at home in the flat, ready to transplant to the allotment as soon as they're big enough.

It's now been 10 days since I planted the seeds and the weekend's cucumber and courgette arrivals have now been joined by both sets of tomatoes – and the basil too. I'm not sure how long it will be until these plants are big enough to plant out, but I presume it will be another few weeks yet.

Plant Press & PR!

I'd like to say a huge thank you to Isabelle Palmer over at The Balcony Gardener website for featuring me in her latest blog post. As the name suggests, The Balcony Gardener is a fantastic gardening website dedicated to everything from plants to garden furniture – everything needed to make your outside space special, whatever it's size – which is something I relate to!

Anyway, in the latest edition of The Balcony Gardener blog, Isabelle talks about my new social network site for urban gardeners, the aptly named Urban Gardeners! Have a read of the blog article by clicking here – and why not have a look around the site while you're at it – there really are some fantastic things to buy for your balcony, patio and garden!