Liz’s Allotment Life: Navigating the hungry gap

Harvests and homegrown eating

We’re now well into the hungry gap and have reached the point where my stored potatoes and parsnips have run out.

I stored the potatoes in hessian sacks in a cool, dry, frost-free location, which kept them going until around mid-March. The parsnips I harvested in late February, then blanched and froze, finishing the last of them this week.

Potatoes stored in breathable hessian sacks, helping keep the harvest fresh through the colder months

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

perennial

• salad burnet
• garlic chives
• chives
• the first asparagus (yum!)
• lovage

The asparagus varieties are, I’m afraid, long forgotten, but I do know they were AGM selections. At RHS Wisley‚ we grow several excellent cultivars, including ‘Guelph Millennium’, ‘Gijnlim’, ‘Connover’s Colossal’ and ‘Backlim’.

Asparagus is one of the first crops to harvest in spring, they are ready to harvest once they reach around 15–20cm tall

Crop of the week: Salad burnet

Salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) isn’t as widely grown as it deserves to be, but it’s a brilliant addition to the plot.

It produces fresh, cucumber-flavoured leaves that are perfect for salads at this time of year, and as a hardy perennial‚ it comes back year after year with very little attention.

Later in the season, it produces attractive flowers that help support pollinators and beneficial insects.

I bought my plants from a specialist herb nursery at one of the RHS shows – it’s well worth seeking out good suppliers if you’re looking to try something a little different‚ such as the Kitchen Garden Plant Centre, Incredible Vegetables, Jekka’s or Tamar Organics.

Salad burnet is a hardy, low-maintenance perennial herb valued for its fresh, cucumber-flavoured leaves

This week on the plot

This weekend was a little quieter than planned due to a temporary lack of water on the allotment site. It should be resolved soon, so I’ve delayed a few seed sowings by a week – at this stage, soil temperature matters more than the calendar, so it shouldn’t cause any real problems.

There were still plenty of jobs to get on with.

Planting potatoes
Early April is a good time to get potatoes in the ground, and I’ve gone for a mixture of cultivars, mainly first and second earlies such as ‘Charlotte’ and ‘Rocket’. These earlier cultivars should crop before the main blight period later in summer, helping to reduce the risk of losing the harvest.

I plant them by digging a hole and dropping them in. Potatoes are a fairly easy, low-maintenance crop, but a staple of my diet from June onwards and the flavour is infinitely better than shop-bought.

Weeding
There’s not too much to tackle yet, but I like to keep on top of it by regularly

Hoes are multi-purpose tools for weeding (especially between rows of veg), loosening the soil surface, making seed drills, earthing up plants, and more. There are various types with different shaped blades. Hoeing to remove weeds is best done on a warm, dry day, so you slice easily through weed stems just below the surface.

A seedling is a young plant grown from seed.

seedlings

Germination is the process by which a seed develops into a new plant. It starts with the seed coat absorbing water, expanding and splitting, which allows oxygen and water into the seed so its food reserves can be broken down and used by the embryo for growth. The first root (called the radicle) pushes into the soil to anchor the new plant in place and start absorbing water and nutrients. The first shoot (called the plumule) then grows upwards, out of the soil, towards the light.

germinating

Can refer to either home-made garden compost or seed/potting compost: • Garden compost is a soil improver made from decomposed plant waste, usually in a compost bin or heap. It is added to soil to improve its fertility, structure and water-holding capacity. Seed or potting composts are used for growing seedlings or plants in containers - a wide range of commercially produced peat-free composts are available, made from a mix of various ingredients, such as loam, composted bark, coir and sand, although you can mix your own.

compost

Young lettuce seedlings under cover, kept just moist to encourage strong root development

Lettuce seedlings prior to thinning, growing at high density in the seedbed

Coming up on the plot

Next weekend I’m planning a big push on seed sowing as conditions continue to improve.

I’ll share what’s going on‚ and how it’s all progressing.