To Autumn

All too quickly, summer is spent. The intensity of the heatwave at the start of the month seems to have exhausted the season and we are now suffering from early onset autumn. In the vegetable patch, the lettuce has bolted and the courgette plants have stopped offering up fruit; in the greenhouse, the tomatoes have all been harvested and the cucumber plants have collapsed. In the hedgerow opposite, the blackberries are already ripe and are being rustled by a cool north wind. At home, there has already been mutinous talk of lighting the wood burner but there are no logs yet and it seems heresy to wear a jumper in August.

Usually, I would embrace the arrival of autumn and the sharp focus it brings after the hazy wide-angle sprawl of summer; but I am in denial and want to put off its arrival for as long as possible: because not everything is normal and not everything is early. Some things are late or not happening at all: the familiar marker of the football season is delayed and mass music events have been cancelled. Usually at this time I would be preparing for End of the Road, the final fixture in the festival calendar; but this year my tent is staying in the shed and I will be watching an online stream from an audience-free Larmer Tree Gardens.

Mostly, I want autumn to wait in the wings a bit longer because of what it may bring. With schools attempting to return to normal, office workers summoned by the clarion call to save the sandwich shops and a stubbornly unmoving R number, we can only wait, watch and wonder while autumn's 'barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.'

The Courgette Cornucopia

A few years ago, a friend of ours started to behave strangely. Towards the end of the summer term, she would hover around the gates at school pick-up time searching out faces she knew and then thrusting packages into their hands. We would often open our front door to find these packages left, unbidden, on our doorstep. In the summer holidays, even our kids would return from playing at her house with her children, laden down. We would catch sight of her in the village 'cooeeing' friends from a distance as they scuttled into homes and shops. People started avoiding her. We started avoiding her. The thing is, you can only have so many courgettes - and we had enough of our own. What our friend had done was start a vegetable garden at home and, being a novice, plant twelve - yes, twelve - courgette plants. Unable to keep up with the courgette cornucopia, she had been pushed to the brink in trying to find good homes for her produce.

It is a familiar feeling for even experienced home or allotment vegetable growers. A glut is always a risk in a good growing year and courgettes, in particular, have become something of a standing joke. However, getting the plants up and running is not always straightforward. Courgettes can sometimes suffer from germination problems but, providing seeds are not too old and are not subjected to extremes of temperature or moisture, it's hard to fail at this stage. So already there are too many plants and the temptation is to plant out more than are needed to insure against failure. Poor weather, especially high winds in May, can damage young plants and dry spells present difficulties, too: courgettes require plenty of water as well as sunshine to succeed. Pollination can also be a problem when honeybees are not as active in bad weather. One year, I had to hand-pollinate my courgette plants by rubbing the pollen-bearing anthers of a male flower into the centre of a female flower; I didn't know where to look.

This year, we may think we are having a rubbish summer because of the poor weather of the past few weeks but we had a warm May and a flaming June and above average rainfall in both and, as a result, courgette plants are thriving: we currently have a continuous crop from the three plants in our vegetable garden that is just about right for a family of five - but it still feels like we are eating a lot of courgettes. Regular harvesting and consuming is the key and, to get the full benefit of the fruit's flavour, courgettes should be picked when they are not much bigger than a Mars bar. We stumbled across a recipe book by Elaine Borish a few years ago called, What Will I Do With All Those Courgettes?, which has proved invaluable. At the moment, we are eating a lot of vegetable curry, which utilises the courgettes and some of our second early potatoes and also takes care of that other glut we are trying to manage: runner beans.

The Greenhouse Effect

Nestling at the bottom of the garden, squashed between the fence and the vegetable patch is our greenhouse. It’s been through quite a bit in the time we have had it - footballs smashed through it, glass blown out during storms, numerous coats of Coolglass applied and removed – and it’s looking a bit worn these days: one pane of glass is held together by tape and the door has to be practically picked up to get in or out; but it is probably the most valuable piece of technology we own.

If a vegetable can be started off in the greenhouse it hugely reduces the risk of failure due to frost or pest, so pretty much everything we grow starts here: carrots, leeks, beetroot, sweetcorn, pumpkins, squash and brassicas begin life in trays or pots before being planted out at the allotment. Potatoes, garlic and onion sets are obviously sown straight into the soil, as are parsnips which never survive transplanting. And crops for the kitchen garden at home – broad and runner beans, peas, courgettes, lettuce – all start out on the greenhouse shelves to keep them clear of mice and slugs in their early days. Only radishes, rocket and spinach are sown into the soil.

Once the seed operation of late winter and spring is over, the shelving is cleared and the greenhouse becomes a jungle of summer produce. There was a time when we planted sweet pepper, aubergine and plum tomato plants but, even in the greenhouse, their fruits were slow to reach maturity and we decided to concentrate on faster growing plants – cherry tomatoes, such as Sweet Million, and several varieties of cucumber – that we could eat at the height of summer, rather than in September. A small corner is given over to Cayenne pepper plants to feed the family chilli addiction.

I cannot remember how much our greenhouse cost but I know that we got it at a cheap price in the winter from an ailing DIY and garden chain. It was a painstaking process assembling it, and it is a job for more than one person, but it has been worth it as the heart of our vegetable growing for the past eight years.

Greenhouses are generally available at no cost on Freecycle or the Friday Ad if you are prepared to dismantle and re-assemble yourself.

Slugging It Out

This year has been the worst year for vegetables since I began growing my own. The persistent rain throughout the early part of the summer had a catastrophic effect on the crops. The result was twofold: many plants struggled to establish themselves and those that did, fell victim to a rampant slug population. The vegetable patch at the end of the garden seemed to be slug-free but at the allotment, it was like a black slug version of Hitchcock’s, The Birds. I have never seen so many big, fat Arionidae.

My usual method, the beer trap, was hopeless. I caught more of the slugs’ predators – the beetle – than I did black or brown slugs. For a very fleeting moment I considered slug pellets, but if you are taking the trouble to grow your own produce it seems pointless to then shower the soil with chemicals. I might as well jog off to Lidl and buy my veg cheap and pesticide-packed. So I tackled the slugs by hand: hunting them down and drowning them. Not able to get on the allotment every single day, however, they won.

The brassicas suffered most: my new large tunnel cloche, constructed from water pipe and a pond net to protect against pigeons and cabbage whites, was pointless. The slugs annihilated cauliflower, kale and cabbage plants before the birds and the butterflies had even noticed them. The slugs also destroyed the courgette crop (although a summer without a glut of courgettes felt strangely liberating) and stripped the potato plants. I do still have a potato crop – although it is a greatly reduced as a result - and beetroot, garlic and sweet corn seem to have escaped unscathed. But so great is the slug population, and so little is there left to feed on, that they are now on the brink of a crisis. Just this week, as I was harvesting the rest of my crops, I found slugs reduced to trying to eat the onion scapes. I enjoyed some petty revenge with the strimmer.

The produce in the garden has been relatively successful. Peas, broad beans and runner beans have been late but eventually abundant. And despite the wet weather, the tomatoes have not fallen to blight and have been heroically prolific. But, apart from gooseberries, soft fruit has been a disaster; I cannot recall a single strawberry managing to ripen in the June monsoon.

Back up at the allotment, I am already looking forward to the next growing season - it cannot possibly be as bad as this year. But if it is, I will be ready with bigger beer traps, a barrier of oyster shell and, my trump card, a pond. Freshly dug with child labour, a liner and a filling of winter rain will help to attract those pond-life predators. Come the spring, I will be slugging it out again.

Yes Honestly

The weeks of wet weather during April and May were welcome respite for the dry, parched soil and a change from the previous two springs when planting time also meant an arduous watering time. However, the lack of sunshine meant that, although allotments and vegetable gardens were well irrigated, plants were not moving on in their growth. Lettuces that I planted out in mid-April were barely any bigger in mid-May; but that has all changed now. Over a week of continuous sunshine has meant that the watering cans are out again, early crops can be harvested and ‘honesty tables’ are being stocked again.

For the uninitiated, an honesty table - or honesty box - is a way of selling surplus fruit and vegetables by leaving them outside your house at the roadside and relying on the integrity of passing customers to leave money for what they have taken. The honesty system is ubiquitous where I live, ranging from farms and smallholdings selling their produce direct to the public, to householders with a glut of seasonal vegetables, jams or pickles. Sometimes actually a table, more often than not they are a covered shelf that looks a little like an open fronted rabbit hutch. Invariably, there will be a small hand written price list and a pot to put the money in. There are rarely abuses of the system and when friends visit from London they often do a double take and have to be reassured that, yes, produce and cash are left unattended and, no, passersby don't help themselves to both. However a few sellers are more security-conscious: one honesty table near me has a metal moneybox clamped and padlocked to the shelf, and at another you have to put your money in an angled length of pipe that is then sent down through a hedge and securely into the cottage garden.

All the year round, some honesty tables sell eggs that you can guarantee will be fresher than any in the supermarket; but it is as Spring matures - and the primavera appear - that I get very excited when I approach an honesty table as I barrel around the lanes of the Sussex countryside. For two weeks now, we have been able to get asparagus - cut that morning - from a local table, as well as lettuces and giant radishes; and the first broad beans, courgettes and carrots will be appearing soon. As Summer draws on, tables will be laden with runner beans and tomatoes - a dish in itself - and in the Autumn it will be fruit and squashes. If you cannot grow your own, or do not have the space to grow as much as you need, honesty tables are an essential part of a life of sufficiency. They exist outside of the system, they are a way of ensuring that food is not wasted and they put the freshest fruit and vegetables on your own table. Mind you, you could just give your surplus away for free.

That's Your Allotment!

In 2006, a group of friends who would become the nucleus of the Herstmonceux Allotment Association (HAA), wanted to be able to grow vegetables beyond the limits of their back gardens. The one significant problem they were faced with was that the village had no allotments. When it became clear that there was no publicly-owned land available, the HAA enlisted the support of Herstmonceux Parish Council in trying to find some local land that would fit the purpose. They also contacted the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardens (NSALG) for advice and guidance.
The parish council approached local landowners to see if any would be willing to lease land for use as allotments. Several possibilities were explored but poor soil, public access or potential legal difficulties meant these opportunities did not come to fruition.
Then a local fruit farmer came forward; he was keen to support local people involving themselves in food production, he had a two acre orchard of apple trees coming to the end of their natural life and was willing to make the site available. The parish council entered into a lease of the site and in July 2008, the HAA held an open day at the site to begin recruiting members and potential plot-holders.
In February 2009, after the trees had been removed and the parish council had provided fencing to enclose the site, Root Collecting Day was held when HAA members carried out a ‘forensic sweep’ to remove the last traces of apple production. Fifty-two plots were subsequently marked out and allotmenteers took possession the following month. All-important water tanks were also installed at key points on the site. In the summer, there was an official opening on a gloriously sunny day with allotment-holders, parish councillors, the NSALG, a barbecue and a barrel of cider all present.
Plots are rented from the parish council at a cost of £25 a year, with some allotmenteers renting double plots. The site was fully occupied for the first growing season; a lot of digging was taking place but everybody got some food out of the ground. According to the NSALG, 30% of new allotment-holders give in after the first year; at Herstmonceux, only one person hung up their trowel. Two years on, some double plot-holders have downsized to single plots but the site is still fully occupied and there is a waiting list.
Although the parish council manages the site, the HAA takes responsibility on the ground. The site needs to be tidy and plots need to be within the terms of tenancy agreements. But it’s not all about regulation: there is an Apple Day every October where members pick juice apples elsewhere on the fruit farm to raise funds for the HAA and the barbecue and cider barrel appear again. Membership of the HAA is not compulsory for plot-holders but £5 a year provides discounts with local nurseries and seed merchants and involvement in the way the site is run.
What is most impressive about the Herstmonceux allotments is the sense of togetherness. There are no competitions to intimidate you over the size of your carrots and cucumbers. And the variety is incredible, in terms of people, plots and produce: mature, experienced growers to young families and everyone in between; symmetrical order to ramshackle chaos; spuds to salsify and onions to okra.
An allotment requires a bit of hard work, though. When I was there one freezing cold Sunday morning in late February, there were quite a few hardy souls bent to the soil, like peasants on the Russian steppes, in a chill east wind; but such dedicated preparation brings rewards in abundance later on. So, if you wish you had an allotment but there is not even a site where you live, don’t be put off. It might take a bit of time but remember: growing veg is not just a one-off, it’s for life.