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.

The beginning of August marks the festival of Lammas (or Lughnasadh in Celtic), the time of harvest. You will likely already have harvested some crops: have lifted the early potatoes, and maybe the main crop too if the endless damp weeks brought blight to your plot; be regularly picking courgettes and peas, while the broad beans are over and the French and runner beans just starting. And salads should be something you can crop any day of the year with some careful planning. You’ll be making sure winter crops of brassicas and leeks and roots are well protected from their various pests, anticipating harvest still to come. Top fruits like apples and pears are still to come too, while plums and blackberries are just starting to be ripe and ready. It’s also time to prune plums, gages, damsons and cherries – the prunus family; if you delay after September and the equinox (Mabon), then you risk getting silver leaf fungal disease which will eventually destroy the whole tree. So for everything, prune in a timely manner at all times!

This is also traditionally one of the turning points of the year: there’s no denying the shortening days and lengthening nights. Growth is slowing down but we are at a time of abundance, hoping to gather and store and preserve what we can for the coming winter. That abundance may also mean you’re able to share what you can’t use yourself, giving harvest gifts to local neighbours or food banks, and perhaps receiving gifts of crops you don’t grow from fellow allotmenteers. We can be self sufficient and generous, cooperative sharers at the same time.

Lammas is traditionally the time of grain harvest, which is the foundation of our diet: the wheat, oats and barley. While you’re unlikely to be growing those on your plot, nonetheless you’ll be aware of them growing on the industrial-agricultural outskirts of York. Significantly, grains are also the seeds of future crops. But every fruit also contains the seed of new life, so part of our harvest celebrations can be to save seed from successful crops for the next season. As your sweet peas, nasturtiums, beans and peas ripen, gather the seed pods, dry them carefully somewhere warm and dry, and label packets of them to be stored ready for spring. You can also easily save seeds from courgettes, squashes and pumpkins, and if you leave a few favourite lettuces, cresses, rockets and kales to go to seed, you can save them too – or they may even sow themselves on any bare ground around the plant. So the cycle of life and cycle of growing continue through the narrative of our gardening.

You might also want to reflect on harvest more broadly: how did plans earlier in the year come to fruition or get pushed off course? What seeds do you want to sow for next year, literally or metaphorically? Celebrate whatever your harvest and keep your intentions viable for another year.

Gorgeous jewels of deliciousness are coming ripe and ready now – red and black and white currants, raspberries, blueberries, dessert and culinary gooseberries, strawberries, hybrid josta and Worcester berries – but if you want to enjoy your soft fruit you’ll need to deprive the birds of that delight. Red fruits are more attractive to birds, but that doesn’t mean your blackcurrants, blueberries and gooseberries are safe at all (though the yellow raspberries do seem to be fairly immune); gooseberries tend to ripen first of the soft fruits and are a real favourite of the pigeons – and they’ve got big bellies! Netting fruit is a tedious job, but a very necessary one, and a real art. You need to make sure it’s weighted down at ground level, that you sew up any holes (nets can be used for decades if you look after them – just as well as the majority are still plastic based), and that there are no gaps where you overlap net on net. Try to have the nets like a cage around your bushes; if the net is just draped over them, birds will happily perch on top and have a feast through the holes. And while keeping the birds out is the main aim, you need to be careful that a bird can’t get in and get stuck and tangled in the net; however vindictive you may feel about pigeons, it’s very distressing for them, and for you, to have a struggle and possible death on your plot. 

Netting cherries is a harder job as the mature trees are quite large; a good tip is to use net bags that your seed potatoes might have come in, or onions and carrots bought in bulk; you can slip these onto a branch like a sleeve and tie it on. Blackbirds adore cherries: if you don’t net them, you won’t get them.

Soft fruit are a really worthwhile part of your plot patchwork of crops. There’s no need to water them unless in a very dry year; if you have weeded and mulched effectively around them earlier in the year, there should be plenty of moisture deep down where the roots can find it, especially after the very wet start to the year we have had. Currants and berries are expensive to buy in shops and inevitably not as fresh as those you grow yourself and pick regularly and frequently. When fruit ages, even a matter of a day, it loses its valuable vitamin C and the antioxidant polyphenol constituents diminish. You can easily pick and freeze your produce to give winter meals a bright nourishing glow. Simply put them into bags of an appropriate size for your eating habits, and stack them on the freezer shelves. There’s no need at all to lay them on trays so each is separate; when they thaw they will be soft and juicy and run together anyway, so save yourself some time at this busy period of the year – use it to crop your beans and thin your carrots (if you’re lucky enough to have had any germinate this terrible year!) and pick off slugs.

Once you have picked all the fruit, take the nets off promptly so the bushes don’t grow through the nets. Although some folk like to prune blackcurrants at this time of year, by cutting out a quarter or so of the older wood with fruit on it, which makes for easy picking, the main time to prune soft fruits is after their leaves have fallen in late autumn, early winter. Make sure you know the different pruning requirements of the different fruits; there’s an earlier Plotlines on this subject.

Enjoy the fruit feast and boost your health while they last…….

It’s been wet, for sure; it’s been wet for months. We’ve probably all had a good grumble about that, and about the slugs having their most successful year ever as a consequence. But water scarcity is equally a feature of the climate emergency we are facing; perhaps the extremes and the unpredictability are the trickiest aspects to deal with.

So through the wet times, are you using systems to catch and store rain water? Some allotment sites make it a tenancy condition to have at least one water butt installed on each plot, to reduce usage of mains water. You may be thinking that there must be plenty of water around in the water network, but you are probably aware too of reports of the leaks in pipes and the lack of adequate reservoir catchments, so saving rain water has to be a central activity for sustainable gardening. And it takes a lot of energy to clean and to direct water into the mains supply anyway. Having water butts on your plot needn’t mean buying an expensive, new bit of specially made plastic kit; you can rig up a down flow from the roof of a shed or greenhouse and collect the rain in any large container.

An equally crucial consideration is how good your soil is at retaining water in order for your crops to grow well. That’s more important than spending time and labour carrying water to your plot – if your soil dries out quickly it’s a sure indication that it’s lacking in humus and in need of compost as a mulch or lightly hoed into the top of the soil prior to planting. And remind yourself to grown some green manures on any empty bed, and as beds are cleared over the next few months. That will help protect soil structure and stop it drying out. If your soil is in good condition, plants can access what they need through their roots. So soil care is, as ever, the prime consideration and the key gardening activity.

Remember that hose pipes should primarily be used only to fill water butts, not to water crops directly. Waving a hose pipe around is fun but incredibly wasteful: lots evaporates before it reaches either crop or the ground, and it’s important anyway to water the ground, not the crop above ground, so that the roots can take up what they need. Water splashing the leaves of crops can spread fungal diseases or cause fungal problems. Watering should be done early or late in the day, not in the middle of the day when a lot of moisture is lost through evaporation and it’s really just a waste of time as well as water. Using watering cans mean you can direct the water where it’s needed, or even make little ring reservoirs round thirsty big crops like courgettes and squashes, and for greenhouse crops that won’t get rained on.

Not all plants have the same needs for water anyway, so prioritise your time and your water. Young plants and transplants need gentle water, from the rose of a can, to allow the roots to settle and take up the moisture and nutrients required for growth. Most established plants don’t need watering unless a long drought persists. And if plants are well mulched then you won’t have to water as much or as often. So you can spend a pleasant quarter of an hour having a refreshing drink on your plot yourself!

The Celtic festival of Beltane is around the full moon at the beginning of May: a celebration of rising energy, growth, and a rushing headlong to midsummer now. And along with all your crops growing, weeds become really prominent on the allotment. Some gardeners get very agitated about this, and work hard to achieve a bare soil look with tidy rows of sown and planted vegetables and fruit with nothing in between. And some allotments look as though they have been dedicated to re-wilding, with rampant weeds covering almost every inch of space and their gardeners struggling to maintain pathetically small little growing patches. So let’s think a bit more about what grows where you didn’t plan and haven’t cultivated, and how to make the best of our plots at this busy time of year.

A common definition of a weed is ‘a plant in the wrong place’. That kind of thinking definitely positions the gardener as a controller, deciding what is right and wrong, where plants can and can’t be. Perhaps we can rather celebrate the resilience of weeds, how capable they are of adapting to their environment, and their use in medicine and as food.

Of course there’s an important distinction to be made between perennial and annual weeds. Annual weeds, like groundsel, herb Robert, speedwell, chickweed, cleavers, can be hoed off and composted in your regular bin or heap. The perennial ones are the most robust and tenacious, now putting on strong growth and reaching out both below and above ground. Hedge and field bindweeds, nettle, buttercups, ground elder, horsetails, couch grass and docks will limit how well your intended crops will grow, and so it is a good idea to dig out any you find – and resolve to cover your soil well over the winter to prevent them spreading. But their strong root systems mean that they are very effective at taking up soil nutrients and minerals, so you can compost them separately from your regular compost heaps, perhaps in old seed compost sacks; in a year they will have rotted to a fine dark material that can be used as a mulch to give back that richness to the soil and your crops. Nettles also make a fine plant tonic, left for a few weeks in a big container of water; the nutrients being water soluble yields a really good boost to crop growth. They also make a delicious soup, or can be added to stews or other dishes where you might add spinach: a risotto, or with pasta. Garlic mustard can be used in similar ways.

Many so called weeds can be eaten, which is really valuable at this time of year, the ‘hungry gap’ between the finished winter crops and the not yet ready summer ones. You need to learn what’s what, using a good field guide, and weeds picked when young and tender are always more tender and flavoursome. Chickweed and bittercress are lovely in a mixed salad. So called weeds might also be known as ‘wild flowers’ or ‘herbs’. Their health benefits can be considerable, and learning what you have on your plot and how to use them, is another aspect of relationship to your allotment.

It is well known that dandelion flowers are an important early source of nectar for pollinating insects – and who can deny their gorgeous sunny colour, especially in the gloomy start to spring this year. Other ‘plants in the wrong place’, like forget me nots and red dead nettle are also valuable to pollinators, and other kinds of insects and beetles relish their homes and food source on your weeds. So it’s worth enjoying all that grows on your plot – while keeping plenty of space to grow your chosen crops.

Compost

It can be confusing for new gardeners to understand how the term ‘compost’ is used, and the different meanings it can have. And those differences matter! Using the right stuff can make all the difference to the success of your crops.

You may be familiar with the garden centre use of ‘compost’: big plastic sacks full of various growing media for sowing seeds, potting plants, or ‘multipurpose’, that they are very keen to sell to you as essential to your gardening, especially at this time of year. Only very recently has the peat-free campaign really taken off; if you’re going to buy the bagged stuff, make sure it’s 100% peat free. Otherwise you’re contributing to the destruction of some of the most valuable, and beautiful, carbon storing ecosystems of the world. Of course, many organic gardeners have been banging on about this for years (and suffered scorn from others in allotment associations for trying to bring about change); at last, the Royal Horticultural Society and commercial producers have got it, and peat free is becoming the legal standard for bagged compost. (Hopefully your allotment association is no longer selling anything with peat in it….) Peat was attractive to growers because of its excellent water retention, the even suspension of nutrients within the medium, and how light it is to carry around. Some producers use coir, coconut fibre, instead; of course we don’t grow coconuts in Britain, and so the material has to be transported across the world for our ease and comfort, which doesn’t seem quite right.

Fortunately, there are plenty of more sustainable alternatives: commercial producers tend to use municipal green waste, shredded bark, or fibres left from anaerobic digesters, but if you’re avoiding the bought product and making your own, we have access to the most wonderful free resource: leaves! They fall in their millions in the autumn and you can collect them up, contain them in a simple wire enclosure, leave them for a year or more, and enjoy the gorgeous soft material, known as leafmould, that results. Leafmould can form the basis of making your own ‘John Innes type’ seed and plant compost; you may need to sieve it if you’re sowing fine seeds like salads, brassicas, carrots or tomatoes. Mix with equal quantities of horticultural sand or grit or vermiculite for drainage, and some fine soil, also known as loam, from your plot beds for a few nutrients – but seeds need barely any nutrients to germinate so they will be fine for a few weeks till you move them on to bigger pots or open ground.

The other key kind of compost is what you make yourself to spread as mulch on your plot beds, to enrich the soil by providing nutrients and bulk which helps water retention. Every allotment needs this kind of compost, and as much as you can possibly generate: alternate layers of green and brown (nitrogen and carbon) and use grass clippings, unprinted cardboard, vegetarian pet and animal bedding (but not cat or dog faeces), partly rotted wood bark or chippings, comfrey and nettle tops, annual weeds, uncoloured paper and kitchen waste. It’s generally best not to include meat, fish or dairy remains in case of rats, but anything that lived will rot of course, in time. You might set up a collection from non-composting neighbours in your street! It’s impossible to have too much to go in your bin, and the more there is the hotter it will get and the quicker it will rot. It will also make compost out of waste more rapidly if you add what Lawrence Hills, the founder of Henry Doubleday Research Association, which has become Garden Organic, described as Household Liquid Manure, or HLM. Otherwise known as urine! Work out a system for yourself…. An efficient composting process will generate useable compost for adding to your beds within six months. You can make a simple enclosure from pallets or scrap wood and chicken wire; there’s no need to buy another bit of plastic that will last lifetimes. When you come to pot on your seedlings, you can add some sieved compost to the leafmould and sand/grit and loam to provide more nutrients as the plants grow on.

Compost is the foundation of your allotment and, apart from your time, its most valuable component.