Allotment gardening

I get the chance to go down to the plot and crack on with the strawberry bed. I begin to trim up the second row, digging up some of the runners that have grown in the way of my lovely three rows of 10 plants. I hadn't done much when my mobile rings. It is my wife who says the car has broken down in the middle of Morden and can I arrange a tow-truck to come and pick her up. The strawberries will have to wait until another day.

Despite an impending visit by some friends, I find the time to go down the plot and carry on with Operation Strawberry. While my two lads run around playing hide-and-seek I try to finish pruning and weeding the whole of the first row of 10 plants. It is a big job and takes me an hour-and-a-half. I now reject the smaller runners with undeveloped root systems as I have so many plants I am going to struggle to get them all in the greenhouse. I fill in the holes in my original row of 10 plants with two of the biggest of the plants produced by runners. The rest I take home to pot up. My plan is to put in another row of 10 plants at the plot so I have 40 in all, and then to have 20 in the greenhouse which would hopefully guarantee me a strawberry crop from May to July. When I finish the tidying, the first row of 10 looks a lot better - weeded and well-ordered. Just two more rows to go. I pot the remaining runners up in the greenhouse - I am already running out of room on the greenhouse staging. I imagine that quite a few of the younger plants will not survive the winter in the greenhouse. I hope so because otherwise, when I've finished the next 20 plants at the plot, the family might have to move out of the house to make way for the strawberry plants.

The time has come to try and bring some order to the strawberry plants. The bed is a mess with loads of weeds and lots of strawberry plant runners that are already firmly established. I hijack a family outing to take in a garden centre where I buy 150 overwintering onions - Senshyu Yellow and Electric - a nice red-skinned variety. I also get some rooting gel and potting compost with the idea that I can pot on all the runners that I cut off the strawberry plants. Rain thwarts my plan to go down in the afternoon but it brightens up in the early evening so I go down to try and put in half-an-hour's work. The plants are in an unbelievable state having been neglected for so long. I cut back some of the foliage on the first three plants in the first row and pull up some of the runners and do some weeding. At the end of it I am left with a bin liner with about 30 new strawberry plants in it. At this rate I'll have about 200 new plants when I have finished taming the whole bed of 30 plants. When I get home I pot on about half of the new plants before the light fades sufficiently for me not to be able to see what I am doing. The rest of the plants will have to take their chances in a bin liner over night.

Today I get the chance to go down to the plot for three hours. The first job to tackle is the tomato plants. They have been hit by blight and so I cut off all the affected fruit and branches. It is a huge job and I soon have a large pile of pruned tomato plants next to me. I also weed among the plants and end up with a much slimmer but healthier-looking tomato bed. There are still quite a few tomatoes left - I pick about five ripe ones to take home.



I then weed the potato mounds. I have already cut off all the haulms but I quickly weed out all the bindweed and thistles to make the bed look a bit better. I then do a bit of weeding in the carrot and parsnip bed. At the end of my efforts the first three beds in the plot look a lot better. I then feed the tomato plants and water the potato bed and the onion seeds. The next job to tackle is the strawberry bed. It needs a serious weeding but there are also a lot of runners that have produced new plants. On Saturday I hope to come down and cut the runners off and get a whole new set of strawberry plants. I pick some more spinach beet, which continues to thrive, and we have it for dinner along with some of the tomatoes.

Rain means I can only go down to the plot for half-an-hour late in the day. My wife Cath picks some of the tomatoes that haven't been affected by blight - quite a few in fact - as well as a courgette and a couple of squashes. I cut off the remaining haulms from the potato plants as I think I should dig them up in a couple of weeks. We actually dig one up now just to see - there aren't loads of potatoes and they are quite small but at least they are there. Cath then makes a ratatouille for dinner using the onions, courgette and a squash and it is very tasty indeed. The whole meal probably only cost a couple of quid. Great.

I haven't been down to the plot for a week as I have been preparing for a job interview at work. My wife asks me to pick up some spinach beet on the way home from work. I cycle in and immediately notice how the weeds have successfully fought back after my efforts to tidy the plot up a fortnight ago. It's always disappointing to see how quickly they reclaim the land. The other thing that stands out is how many of my tomatoes have blight. I need to come down as soon as possible and pull up the worst affected plants and pick some of the edible tomatoes. It's a real shame as I don't know what caused it and was looking forward to eating tomatoes for weeks to come. Ah well.

I have been at work for four days in a row this week and so haven't seen the plot since Sunday. This weekend we will be away at a wedding so I have to limit myself to dashing down in the afternoon. It is time to feed the tomatoes but as I begin to water them, I notice they have got some sort of blight. My neighbour Jim lost all of his to blight but he said that was because he had planted his too close together. I followed the instructions in the book to the letter when I laid my plants out but they seem to have fallen victim to the same problem. I pull up two plants that are really badly affected. My wife thinks we won't lose the whole crop but I am a bit more pessimistic. I cut off all the worst affected parts of the plants. We will just have to wait and see.