“To everything there is a season, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…. a time to break down, and a time to build up…..a time to weep, and a time to laugh ….a time to get, and a time to lose…..” (King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

Food growing, allotmenteering: a science or an art? Or a bit of both? What kind of knowledge do we need to acquire in order to be effective ‘good’ gardeners? How do we know when to start sowing this new season? How do we learn from our mistakes and other people’s successes so there is more laughing and satisfaction and less weeping and frustration?

So what is the ‘right’ time to get started in this new season? What should you be doing first? Hopefully you got all your ground preparation done last year, and your gorgeous soil is ready under cardboard or mulch, just waiting for some warmth (aren’t we all….). Maybe you sowed some sweet peas and broad beans last month; that often works well for crops a few weeks earlier than those sown next month, but this year the last weeks have been so cold their growth will have been checked and you risk them dying, or struggling and getting too leggy. Maybe you are having pangs of regret for what you haven’t done! If you still haven’t pruned your soft or top fruit you will probably be aware that you are really (too) late now! Early spring isn’t the time; that’s when scientific knowledge comes in. Bushes and trees will already be putting on growth so you’ll be pruning away all that new energy that would otherwise be going into fruit buds. Similarly, if you never got around to cutting hedges and pruning hedgerow trees, you’re fast running out of time. We share our plots with other living beings and from the beginning of March birds are prospecting for nests. ‘Wild birds’ nests are protected from intentional damage, destruction or removal when they are in use or being built’ (Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981); ie. you’re breaking the law to cut now if there’s any signs of activity! There are five months of the year available for hedge and tree work, so plenty of opportunity for timely work. And likewise, if you didn’t divide your pond plants and scoop out dead leaves over the winter, it’s too late for this season as all those watery beings will be getting busy in their home there.

Observation is key. So keeping records of when you sow and plant and how productive those efforts were begins to form your own almanac of what to do when. But of course the seasons are not what they were even five years ago; our climate is changing, is less predictable, and shows less of a knowable pattern. Will we endure another cold March? Another soaking April? A drought in July? Nonetheless, your own observation of your own patch of earth, your allotment, is still a better guide to what to do when than the books you might read, or the instructions on seed packets (how can they be right for the whole of Britain….?). If you keep a record of your losses as well as your gettings you’ll be able to adjust year on year and learn what works in your location.

Other observations are helpful guides too, and let us feel more connected to our own little plots. Once annual weeds start to show, it’s an indication that green life is emerging out of the quiet of winter. Cleavers, or goosegrass as some call it, is one of the first to show, and incidentally provides a tasty addition to scant salads at this time of year. The first ladybirds are a sure sign of spring and tell us that other invertebrate creatures are, we really hope, also getting out and about. The first nettles show an intense deep green that just shouts their high vitamin and mineral content; so root them out if you need to, but make sure to enjoy a few fresh delicious nettle soups as a spring tonic for your system.

Views expressed in Plotlines are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of YACIO.

The difference between spindly pest ridden crops and strong vigorous productive ones lies in the quality of your soil, the micro-organisms and trace elements in it and the plants’ ability to take up nutrients. So as previous episodes of Plotlines have emphasised, tending your soil and making abundant compost on your plot are absolutely essential to good growing. That also, of course, means more nutrients available in your crops for your own good health; so much food grown with chemicals lacks essential minerals (not to mention so called food that is processed in a factory and not grown at all).

Some gardeners are happy to use manure believing it will ‘enrich’ their allotment land. (It’s worth remembering that by the time it has sat in a heap on your allotment site for a few weeks most of the nutrients will have washed down into the ground – old manure sites grow fab nettles as a result!) What manure offers is nitrogen, which is helpful for leafy crops, less so for fruiting ones like courgettes and beans and squash. And of course it comes from animals, which you may want to avoid in your food cycle; after all, what have they (usually cattle or horses) been fed? How have they been cared for? What antibiotics or other drugs have they been given? Are they farmed organically? Many farm animals are regularly dosed with vermicides, for instance, to kill off any worms in their guts. So if you spread contaminated manure on your land, bang go your precious worms! Or a herbicide, aminopyralid, may have been used on their feeds and be present still in the manure so when you apply it you are killing growing plants on your plot. The same is true of clopyralid which is in lawn weedkillers and may be present in municipal ‘green’ waste. Traces of such drugs can well linger – neither your allotment association nor the farmer is going to be testing to be able to reassure you there is no residue. A better bet might be to use bedding from pet animals that are vegetarian, like guinea pigs and rabbits bedded on straw; ask around……

You can get very scientific about your food growing and work out the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus needs of different crops and their availability in your soil. But really all you need to do is practise good organic cultivation, by composting using readily available materials like household kitchen waste, fallen leaves, dilute urine, unprinted brown cardboard, wood ash, annual weeds, straw, grass cuttings, leafy prunings and hedge and tree shreddings. Seaweed is a wonderful addition, but we’re forty miles from the coast here and it’s not legal to remove seaweed from the Crown lands which are our foreshores. Composting is a biological process so heat is not vital unless you want to speed things up or kill weed seeds.

Other good allotment sources of fertility include using green manures, especially quick growing flowering crops which will also attract pollinators, making liquid feeds from comfrey (the wonder plant) and nettles, and mulching crops so nutrients aren’t washed away and the soil is protected. Biodynamic gardeners use a variety of preparations, which you can make rather than buy, using herbs you may already be cultivating. You can find out, too, which plants complement each other’s growing; the classic example is beans, squash and corn, although the success of that trio does depend on the weather and subsequent timings. But you can learn to plant in guilds, as companion plantings: groups of crops that favour each other and provide a miniature eco-system, providing nutrients, out competing weeds and keeping pests at bay. Good productive food growing is a holistic sympathetic process that you as the gardener gently coax into being and learn from.

Views expressed in Plotlines are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of YACIO.

Permaculture

Wade Muggleton’s back garden, shown in the picture above, has been designed using permaculture principles. He collects rainwater, uses vertical space for growing food to get the most out of his garden and incorporates a wide range of plants and varieties.

The basic key principles of permaculture are probably the best place to begin to appreciate what it’s all about; it’s from those ethical principles that the twelve design practices are developed. It’s not just a way of gardening holistically with ecological sensibility, it’s a system of permanent cultures for sustainable living. There are just three principles, which are themselves common to so many philosophies and peoples over the world, but grounded in practicalities – and they seem to align quite closely with elements of allotment practice:

• Earth care
• People care
• Fair shares

Earth care

Care for the earth means observing and reducing the impact of our activities; a third of our ecological footprint derives from food, so of course it makes sense to grow as much as we can ourselves, which is the fundamental basis of allotmenting. At the same time we look to nurture and encourage a rich biodiversity above ground and below, to recognise webs of life and what can grow around us. So many of our sites are hugely valuable habitat with extensive tree and hedge margins, within urban settings.

Permaculture design uses nature’s own principles, of diversity, zones, complexity, layers and relationships among plants, humans and other creatures. Many allotments reflect that diversity – even if individual plots are sometimes regimented and bare, others are richly abundant, so that the mosaic of sites, and then the bigger picture of all our city wide sites together, make a valuable contribution to caring for the earth. Time was, allotmenteers used chemical fertilisers and pesticides and regularly burned their prunings; happily most have recognised the appalling damage those practices cause and YACIO tenancy agreements reflect that better.

People care

People care is basically about the power of community, which is so vividly present across and within our allotment sites. We have to get on with our neighbours – even when we disagree with their choice of cultivation practices! Most sites have generous informal systems of sharing: produce, knowledge, tools, time, seeds…..a gift exchange that sustains and forms bonds.

Our allotment movement has got better in recent years at responding to the different needs of different people, which is another expression of people care, asserting equity in the right to the benefits of growing your own food. We could do better still to establish caring relationships with our wider community, like growing for neighbourhoods, teaching skills and donating produce to food banks.

Fair shares

The history of the allotment movement in Britain is closely aligned with the idea of common people having a share of the wealth of land, after the Enclosures of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took away access to local land for cultivation. The General Inclosure Act 1845 made rudimentary allotment provision for the ‘labouring poor’ mandatory – but it was not common land and remained part of the feudal hierarchy that still pertains in our county now. But a social movement gathered momentum and eventually (crazily concise summary this!) in 1922 the Allotment Act made provision available to all ‘where a need was shown to exist’. But there was never that sense of a right to ‘fair shares’ of access to land which characterises permaculture.

But we also need to recognise fair shares at the non local level. The industrial growth model is shaped to ensure some are winners and most are losers with no respect for the exploitation of people and the earth’s resources. So permaculture ethics invites us to look at our own consumption patterns in the broader context: what is the embodied energy involved in buying new tools, or new timber for some classy raised beds?

Our allotments can be a manifestation of these key ethical principles. A new year, a new resolution to live and grow more sustainably.

Views expressed in Plotlines are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of YACIO.

Do you love a gadget or a new bit of kit? Or are you using your parents’ old tools, or some you picked up second hand? There is a range of choices and decisions to be made between those options, but if you’re committed to low carbon, sustainable gardening on your plot then you need to think carefully about how and what you choose to use.

Of course, there are gardeners whose injuries or disabilities or age mean they need to use power tools for ease, efficiency and comfort. And if you have a long hedge and not much time you may need to use an electric hedge trimmer, once a year. But there are many occasions when plot holders are using expensive powered tools unnecessarily. Expensive not only because they cost a lot of money, but because they cost a lot of carbon. Your battery charged strimmer may claim to be ‘no emissions’ – but that is wholly disingenuous. The embodied carbon that is involved in mining the materials, transporting them to a factory, using high temperature high energy processes in their manufacture, then shipping them to where you probably drive to shop, is highly significant. And what of the labour conditions for the people involved in acquiring those raw materials or working in those factories?

A more sustainable option is for allotment sites to run tool libraries where you can borrow a power tool occasionally without having to own it. Or to borrow and share among your plot neighbours. The same is true of ladders that tend only to be used at harvest and pruning times of year. If you think you need a strimmer or a mower for the grass on your plot, then maybe you’ve got too much grass anyway and could convert some of that area for cultivation. And really, who needs a blower for leaves when you can meditatively rake and gather them to make your precious leaf mould?

Maybe you’re paying for an expensive gym membership as well! How about being active on your plot, using hand tools that work out your arm and leg and core muscles? Cutting a hedge, or even small areas of grass, with a pair of shears is not such hard work and encourages careful management of the hedge for wildlife rather than reckless speedy demolition; learning to scythe or using a Chillington ‘slasher’ to keep down the nettles once the butterflies have pupated is easy and pleasing when you find the rhythm of the action.

This is a good time of year to spend some time looking after your precious tools: cleaning and sharpening blades and cutting edges prolongs their life and enhances their effectiveness. Putting tools away dirty is never a good idea anyway! Clean wooden handles and lightly oil them so they don’t crack or split. If a handle breaks, you can usually replace it without having to replace the whole tool. Ash wood is lovely to use and grows smoother as it ages (although if you struggle with sore shoulders you might want to choose lighter aluminium handled tools.) Learning to use a sharpening stone is very satisfying and improves the ease of tool use considerably. Good quality secateurs will have the option to replace worn or damaged blades without chucking the whole thing out and buying new.

So what is your favourite tool to use? The mattock pictured above has so many varied uses, as a hoe, for trenching and earthing up potatoes, for cutting through wild edges when seeds have set, for loosening the surface of soil before planting.

Does it seem an odd time of year to be thinking about seeds? Isn’t that a spring thing? In fact, now is a great time of year to do two seed related activities: save seeds from your harvested crops, and make a realistic list of seeds you will need for the next season, while this season with all its flaws and glories is still fresh in your mind.

So, what grew well, what didn’t (and was that because of your neglect or error of timing, or the weather and the slugs?), what did you enjoy and what wasn’t so popular? What crops did you covet that your plot neighbours were growing? What didn’t you have enough of, or annoyingly forgot about altogether?

There are some important considerations that you might like to dwell on now you have a bit more time. When it comes to buying seed, if you go for a F1 hybrid with allegedly enhanced qualities (straightness, uniformity, easy to pick) you’re spending extra money on summat the big, international seed companies and commercial growers get the profit on. And you can’t save seed from those varieties – it may well be sterile and if it’s not, it won’t come true. Basically, using those seeds takes control out of the small growers’ hands and favours industrial scale production. Not allotmenteers.  And of course it’s in the big international seed companies’ interest to get you buying so called ‘fresh’ seed every year. Local strains have been lost in the last fifty years or so, but we can choose reputable open pollinated seeds from small ethical companies trading in ‘real’ seeds, save and swap our own seeds to perpetuate varieties that have done well on local sites, and be part of millennia of caring for plants and the land.

So how do we save seed? There is still time this season to harvest and dry and keep seeds from many of your favourite crops. It’s a good idea to tie a bit of twine around plants that have done well or given you a tasty crop, so you can identify them as to be saved for seed rather than eaten. Peas and beans are really easy ones to start with: let them mature and dry on the plant, turning dark drown, dry & wrinkled. Then pick and shell them out and make sure they are completely dry before storing somewhere cool and dry. If it’s a wet season, pick them and dry them on a window sill or on your greenhouse staging. On an allotment scale you don’t really need to do much more than that. Except remember to label them!

It’s also easy to save seeds from the brassica family: salad crops, kales, cabbages, radishes etc will all make seed pods after they have flowered – so you have to be patient to wait for that stage of development. The pods can then be dried and shelled out, and you can even take a short cut by just shaking a few dry plants out over a hoed and raked bed, where they will likely germinate readily. Lazy/patient growers may even find plants self sowing – which is to say they drop their seed near the parent crop, giving you a little forest of seedlings to plant out, share and give away, or eat as trendy ‘microgreens’ in salad.

One other plant is worth specifically mentioning in relation to seed saving: parsnips. Notoriously tricky to get to germinate, using fresh seed saved from a plant you let flower and go to seed is far more successful. Many seeds can be stored for years, but not parsnips. Parsnip flowers are tall and elegant (a member of the Apiacae family) and as their family name suggests, hugely attractive to pollinating insects. Let the seeds dry on the plant and then harvest them into dry brown paper bags, label and store. The same system works well for many flowers on your plot too: calendula, hollyhock, foxglove, feverfew and others.

Happy harvesting……

The showy time on the allotment is over; it may have been a good season for you, or it may have been a disappointment, with slugageddon and drought stressing you and your crops. There’s still top fruit to pick, still some beans and corn and squash, and hopefully you’ve got plenty of winter crops growing steadily to see you through the dark months. But it’s time to get on with the real work and what really matters – and what will make a huge difference to your showy tasty crops next season. The soil. Are you taking it for granted? Disrespectfully calling it ‘dirt’?  The web of soil life underpins all life on earth and our responsibility as plot holders is to nurture that soil life in every way we can.

In a teaspoonful of healthy soil there are up to 5 billion anaerobic archaea and aerobic bacteria, over 1 million protozoans, thousands of nematodes, hundreds of microarthopods and around a kilometre of fungal hyphae. So what? Here’s why: together they create plant growth substances, they fix carbon and nitrogen cycles and make nutrients available to plants. And you thought you were doing all the hard work! Actually, it’s this world under your feet that sustains growth and life on earth. And every time the soil is disturbed, or artificial fertilisers and pesticides are applied, soil life is killed and soil structure compromised. Then we get soil erosion, water and nutrients are leached out, and pests and diseases follow.

If your plants look stressed – wilted, yellowing leaves, infection or insects eating away at them – then it’s likely that your soil life is depleted. In other words, you’re not providing enough nutrition for the bacteria and fungi. That soil food comes, in part, as you no doubt already know, from regular addition of home-made compost as a mulch, which provides the carbon sugars that are needed.

So the key activity at this time of year is to make sure your soil is not bare. There are various ways we can do that. Now we’ve had some rain, and the soil is still warm, sow some fast green manures. Don’t choose ones that are deep rooted (tares, alfalfa, rye grass, field beans) as you’ll have to dig them in next spring, which disturbs your soil structure; phacelia, clovers and mustards are all ideal over the next month. Spread your compost over the surface of other beds as you clear them. Or just cut down beans and peas and leave the roots in the ground to help fix nitrogen for brassica crops next spring, and cover the cut down foliage with big sheets of brown cardboard. And make compost. Gather as much material as you can: annual weeds, nettle and comfrey tops, soft prunings, torn up cardboard, your neighbours’ lawn mowings, food waste, rotten apples and pears….as much as you can get hold of.

And let’s not forget this: the parallels between soil and human health are too obvious to ignore. In the same way that those bacteria and fungi and archaea promote and protect soil health, so the beneficial microbial flora in our guts (our microbiome) are essential for promoting and protecting our digestive health, and our immune system. Soil is the source of life and health so use the autumn months to look after the earth on your plot.