DEFRA on the future of food.

Has made it into the Financial Times Westminster blog.  They are not impressed.

“The new food review by Defra promises much but offers little*. As far as I can make out, there is a lot of widescreen chin-stroking (sorry, moral leadership) about future food shortages and the need to get green but nothing remotely concrete – unless you count a new website “Food 2030″ for the public to write in with suggestions.

Instead we are left with loads of vague platitudes and some worthy suggestions.”

The article links to DEFRA’s document, which I’ll have a glance at.  Allotments and gardening made it onto Radio 5 Live’s Richard Bacon programme on Monday night (from 10 PM) which you can listen to on BBC iplayer.  Presenter Matthew Bannister got rather tiresome on the subject of sheds.  We allotmenting blokes only do it to hide into sheds to escape our womenfolk you see.  A line which may have been funny the first time it was used, but not the wat Bannister flogged it.

UPDATE: I have read DEFRA’s document ‘One Year On’.  Possibly I missed it, but it appears that Britons who grow their own appear to have no role to play in future food security.  Possibly a cross-cutting stakeholdergroup is being considered, but nowhere did I see a line enouraging garden veg-growing and stating that allotment may have a modest role to play in providing food.

Go read…

The tragic demise of an organic allotment over at Scattered Gardener.

Aldi seeds…

I did an experiment with some very cheap Gardenline seeds from Aldi more from curiosity than anything else.  Both the Boltardy Beetroot and Spinach Beet did very well, although why you would eat Spinach Beet this side of starvation escapes me.  Cattle food.

The Gardenline tomato seeds did terribly, but maybe that is because I forgot to plant them.

Compost trenching and manure….

was one of my strategies to help the quality of the soil on No 16, especially since I had a limitless supply of peelings.  It seems to have worked, as the soil is much better than a year ago, but I am getting several crops of rogue potatoes that have sprouted from peelings that chitted and grew.  These rogue spuds all seem prone to blight.  Beware.

And don’t take up the ofer of free manure if it’s not well rotted, or you will get a fantastic free crop of weeds too.

Chichi bee home…

from the people who brought you the Eglu, the Beehaus, a modern plastic beehive.  Yours for £465.

It looks and sounds splendid but I suspect that your average allotment holder or urban gardener is going to balk at such a fat slice of the monthy pay cheque going on a hive.

Hope for humble-bees

Allotmentality has long a Thing about bees and wants hives.  The surrounding allotment holders are Not Sure and there has ben Sucking Of Teeth at the idea that no 16 might be home to a hive.  Bees, after all, cannot be boiled and eaten.  Well I suppose they could, but it would a strange thing to do.

Last year there was something of a political fuss when it was revealed that although bees contribute massively to the economy by their busy pollination, and as Einstein pointed out, probably to our survival as a species, the government had neglected to invst in research as to why the bee population is collapsing.

So good to see that come next year (when there will probably be Conservative government – oh yes, Allotmentality calls the ‘10 election for the Tories – bees with have a friend in the corridor of power if this blogpost by Clwyd West MP David Jones is anything to go by.

I’m going to have a hive at some point in the near future.  I trust Mr Jones will occasionally keep his eye on whether or not British agricultural science does right by our humble but important bees, both wild and housed by beekeepers.  No bee was  for comment this morning.

Out they come…

you may remember the horrible onion crop from last year.  Being a noob alotmonaut we bunged in a load of onion seedlings and waited for the football-sized alliums that must inevably follow.  We got five weazened specimens that, when they’d been peeled, were into the new vegetable territory of negativeonion.  This year, after some almost obsessive soil conditioning, the results were better, especially the Japanese overwinter onions which were grown inside a whimsical fence made of hawthorn clippings.  The early potatoes came out pretty nicely too.

What a difference some rain makes.

It’s grow while you watch time….

OK that’ll teach me to whinge about near drought

conditions.

24 hours of rain and counting.  Oh and just in case the air isn’t wet enough with water coming down in lumps, there’s fog too.

Good, in a grudging kind of way.

What joy it is in this spring to be alive.

Everything is growing like crazy.  Including the weeds, obviously, although after this afternoon’s hoeing action (soundtrack Kate Rusby and a compilation from this gentleman)  a lot of them have gone the way of the less popular wives of King Henry VIII.  The purple sprouting broccoli just keeps on giving: a huge bunch of it is going with today’s beef, while cousins, aunts and uncles are getting theirs.  And it’s lovely: steam, butter, sea salt.

The early spuds are peeking through the soil, the shallots (bunching onions in the local tongue) and garlic are coming on, the rows of seeds are putting up -lings in defiance of the coarse clay soil and near-bloody drought conditions of the last month (about an hour of storm shower yesterday, that’s all the rain for month in the north of England – it barely dampened the surface).  Lollo rosso has come through and will be planted out in a raised bed, the sweetcorn are starting to sprout under cover.  Preparing a bed for those tomorrow.

The overwinter onions are there, but straggly.  I don’t think no 16 is good onion soil.  Yet.

Front to back: early potatoes, shallots, cauliflowers.

Meantime, two fellow allotmonats came over and enquired about the Phaecelia.  One thought they were weeds, another pegged them as green manure right away.  One bed I will cut down and dig in, the second I will use the cuttings soaked in water as liqui fertilizer and see what happens.  I’m also going to be interested to see what the roots have done to the verdamt clay that wantons mere inches below the surface.

Phaecelia tanacetifolia AKA green manure.