Charlie Heasman; 12th July 2017

 

It’s been a funny old growing year so far – but then aren’t they all? – and in our allotment we’ve so far had our usual mix of successes and failures.

I’m blaming the cold, wet early summer which only came right a couple of weeks ago.

For instance, the courgettes I planted out in late May just sat there and refused to budge an inch.  Just as I was thinking I’d have to start some more the weather improved and now they’re flying.  Soon we’ll be back to the usual problem, familiar to all allotment growers, of how to give them away.  Eventually people start crossing the street when they see you coming.

BTW, if you’ve alienated all your friends and still have some left (courgettes that is; not friends) try them on the barbecue (again, courgettes: not friends).  Slice in half lengthwise, score the fleshy side with a knife and rub in salt, pepper and olive oil.  After ten minutes of the charcoal treatment they are the absolute melt in the mouth experience.

Our garlic did okay again this year and is now dried and plaited for winter storage.  The winter onions grew well and we were pleased with them also – up until mid-June.

Onions are supposed to grow and swell up until the longest day.  At this point they decide that the job’s done and the necks fall over and start to wither; time to pull and dry them.  But by mid-June we’d noticed that the stalks were developing neck rot while still standing, we put this down to the incessantly wet weather and decided to pull them early.

Unfortunately we were probably too late.  Best guess: we’ll lose half of them in storage.  Every year we manage to grow and store a year’s supply; I’ve a feeling that by early 2020 we’ll be back down the supermarket.

Other crops fared better.

The winter broad beans grew profusely and yielded well, swelling the contents of the freezer in so doing.  We also had a few plants volunteer in odd parts of the allotment; these are currently providing a later fresh crop.

To me that’s one of the little extra pleasures of gardening: something pops up, you leave it to its own devices and reap the reward.  Lazy gardening made even lazier.

But so far this year we are best pleased with our potatoes.

In the first few years we didn’t much bother with them; they seemed like too much work.  Dig the ground, make trenches, plant the spuds, earth them up.  A heck of a lot of spadework and earth moving.

Then we discovered ‘No Dig’.

Any regular reader of this blog will know that we are trialling it for the first time this year.  We have scarcely stuck a fork into the soil at all.  The beans responded well (as did our peas), the onions did well until they developed the dreaded neck rot on account of the weather, but how on Earth (or indeed, in earth) do you grow potatoes without digging?

Answer: dib holes into the soil at the appropriate spacing.  Drop in the potatoes.  Cover with 4″ of homemade compost and leave to grow.  When the plants have reached the stage where they would normally be ridged, apply another 2″ to keep the light off the tubers.  Sit back and enjoy a glass of wine.  Repeat last stage if and when necessary.

When it is time for harvest follow the steps below:

It really is as simple as that.

Because the tubers have developed in the compost as opposed to the soil below they are really easy to get out.  Who out there remembers as a kid ‘lucky dip’ in a barrel of sawdust?  Pulling potatoes proves to be an evocative memory.

The spuds in question are Sarpo Mira, and more about them in a moment; but this year we grew four different varieties.  Here they are:

King Teds are self explanatory: an oldie but a goody.  Pink Fir are one of our personal favourites: a small knobbly potato that looks like the ancestor of all potatoes which you simply wash and cook (don’t even think about peeling them).  Sarpo Mira: more about them to come.  Blue potatoes: no idea, a friend gave us four seeds and that’s as much as we know.

Actually, from the outside they look more black than blue; cut into them and they look like this:

 

What’s more, they stay that colour when cooked.  We know this because we tried them for the first time this evening.  It would be nice to report that they are as delicious as they are exotic, but sadly this is not the case.  For flavour go to any of the other three.

On the other hand we have a family barbecue scheduled for tomorrow evening and blue potato salad should at least prove to be a conversation point.

So what about these Sarpo Mira?

I must confess that I’d never heard of them before this year, but when I did I did what I always do and looked them up on the internet.  This is what I learned:

Circa 1940 the Communist Regime in Hungary were looking for a high yielding, blight resistant, low maintenance potato which did not require a plethora of sprays to feed the masses.  They came up with this.

It was quite probably incidental, but actually it also has the extra advantage of good texture and taste (my opinion).  We like it because it has a waxy texture; the internet tells me that if you leave it in the ground (and I’m sure that ours will yield even heavier if left), it will become floury.  Truly a potato for all people.

Those Crafty Commies might have done the world some good after all.

Leaving Communist Hungary and returning to Skerries Allotments it was our friend and neighbour, Norman Scott, who in a roundabout way introduced us to them.  Last year he gave some seed to another neighbour who grew them, didn’t earth them up properly, and dumped the resultant green potatoes in the bottom car park.

I saw this and, being the parsimonious person that I am, retrieved them and kept them for seed.  The progeny are in the pictures; free seed grown in free compost.  Couldn’t be better.

———————–

So it’s nice to be able to write about something nice.

It’s also nice to be able to report that the dumping of plastics and other non-biodegradables in the allotments has slowed significantly.  Not stopped; slowed.  Fair play to those who now segregate, but there are still some eejits that (and I use the word ‘that’ as opposed to ‘who’ advisedly) haven’t yet got the message, and if it were not for the efforts of one or two people who clear up behind them the problem would be worse.

They’re quite content to have someone else wipe their backside for them and they know who they are.

I will not mention by name one of those who currently does most of the clearing up because (s)he would not thank me for it, but D**** ****e, you know who you are too.

Also sprays.  Why do a significant minority insist on spraying outside and around their allotments?  Is there a practical or  an aesthetic preference for the dead, scorched look or is there some other reason?

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Heasman, June 16th 2019

I set out to write about bumblebees and have veered off topic before even writing a word so this will be a post in two parts.  The bees will come later, and there is a connection, but for now let’s think about the grass.

We have an obsession with lawns, lawnmowers and keeping grass cut.  By cut we mean short, the shorter the better.  Skinned in fact.  A uniform verdant green is what is to be earnestly desired and imperfections of any kind, especially weeds, will not be tolerated.  For many of us even so much as a daisy with the temerity to pop up is a bridge too far.  Out with the lawnmower, reach for the spray, apply lawn conditioner.  A natural look?  Not in my backyard!

But why?  No, really, why?

It is not as if in so doing we are bringing a natural look to our gardens; quite the opposite.  What we are doing is overcoming nature, bringing a bland homogenised look to the ground we own and walk on.

What’s more it’s costly.  Costly in terms of labour, costly in terms of weedkillers and additives.  And perhaps there’s the answer.

We live in a world where we judge the value of things not by their worth but their price.  The more it costs the more we want it.  An expensively manicured lawn is just that: expensive.  It proclaims to the world that the owner has money; come to that it proclaims to the owner that the owner has money.  There is nothing new about this.

Go back a few hundred years and look at the great estates of Britain and Europe.  Palatial stately homes were designed and built to shout one thing: ‘look at me, I have money’.  Once the house was built the grounds had to be landscaped and vast lawns established.  These swathes of land sent out the same message: ‘I have so much money that I don’t need to use the land, I can do with it what I please’.

It cost money too, a lot of money.  This was before the advent of the lawnmower and maintenance would have had to be done entirely by hand.  A scythe was the weapon of choice and cutting grass tight and keeping it that way with a scythe was hugely laborious. A mansion was a status symbol; a mansion with a well manicured lawn doubly so.  Lawns were the preserve of the rich; no-one else could afford one.

Then in 1830 a resident in the small village of Thrupp, just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, did something to change all that.  He invented the lawnmower.

This not only saved the rich a considerable amount of money, it also meant that the newly emerged Victorian middle class of the Industrial Revolution could now afford a lawn too; albeit a rather more modest sized one.  And afford it they did, each pocket sized patch of carefully shorn green proclaimed the wealth and upward mobility of the owners behind the front door.  The invention of the lawnmower revolutionised the suburban landscape and helped make it what it is today, our vanity and our desire to show off remain unchanged.

Our forbears emulated their betters and we ape our forebears without even knowing we’re doing it.  That is how we’ve ended up with our present mindset.

Now, I can’t tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do in their garden and have no wish to do so, anymore than I would feel compelled to dictate the colour of their wallpaper.  I’m simply inviting people here to ask themselves why short grass is so important to them.

 

Grass verges are another matter entirely, they are not status symbols and if we can get away from the ‘shorn like a sheep’ mentality we can perhaps find a better use for them.

Howls of anguish already: “they must be kept neat”, “we don’t want our town looking scruffy”, “we can’t have weeds growing along our roads”, etc, etc.

Point taken, but can we at least compromise?  If we were to look at things through slightly different eyes would we even be compromising at all?

I believe Fingal CC have got the balance somewhere near right on the railway side of the newly named Barnegeera Road.

A strip along the kerb is mowed; the rest left (so far this year at least) to nature.  This inconveniences absolutely no-one, saves fuel and taxpayer’s money and benefits wildlife.  A win win situation.

Personally I’d like to see the mowed strip narrower and the wild part wider but we’re working along the right lines here.  Do I think it looks untidy?  No I don’t.  Do you?

Crossing to the other side of the road, and going back to our first picture, we have a different story.

Fingal, like so many Councils, are in the habit of spraying round the base of trees; these poppies are probably doomed.  Why do it?

What is so harmful about a tiny patch of wildlife that it must be exterminated?  Far less harmful than the sprays that do the job.

———————————–

Let us move to another part of Skerries and to the bees that were originally supposed to be the subject of this blog.

We are going to the South Strand.

We have parked up, got out of our car and are walking across the neatly mown grass.

But what happens when we reach the unmown part?

This is what happens.

This part could be mown, but it’s not.

It gets better…

Nature imitating art: a Renaissance painting if ever there was one.

This strip of land is left to its own devices, it grows what wants to grow on it and people can enjoy it.  Access is in no way restricted, one can walk alongside it, across it, or through it.  What’s more, so can insects.  And bees, which is why we were here yesterday.

Bumblebees, as we all know, are in decline.  So are a whole host of other pollinating insects.  At this rate it will not be long before we are all in trouble ourselves, we need to reverse the trend, and urgently.

The problem is that in order to fix a problem it is necessary to know as much about said problem as possible, and that is not always easy.  How much have bumblebees declined?  How many were there before?  What do we actually mean by before?  Before what and when exactly?  How many are there left now?

Fortunately there has been a monitoring scheme in place in Ireland for ten years now so at least we have an idea how many there were then; before that is only guesswork but it doesn’t take a lot of guessing to say that it would have been considerably more.

Unfortunately the results of ten years study has shown a steep decline with several species now endangered.

The public, you, me and anyone else can help here by monitoring a local area and submitting records of sightings to the National Biodiversity Database.  Skerries has a newly formed group of bumblebee watchers doing just that and they’ve actually managed to come up with some good news for a change.

One of the members came across what he was pretty sure, but couldn’t quite believe, was four queens of the same species feeding on the same plant.  Seeking confirmation, a photo was duly sent and the answer came back.  Not only were they indeed queens but they were of a species (Bombus muscorum) in the close to endangered rating.  They had not been previously recorded in Skerries.

That sighting was in the Ballast Pit one week ago.  Marion and myself thought it might be worth a look on the South Strand and that is what has brought us all here now.

We were amazed when we set to work just how many bees were here, in places so many it was difficult to count at all.  We encountered five different species, pretty normal for any one site.

 

 

We were only about 15 mins in when we found what we.d hoped to see: a Bombus Muscorum, and a queen at that, feeding on Red Valarian.

Out came the trusty iphone and photographic evidence obtained.  Unfortunately I’m a lousy photographer, especially when it comes to bees which tend to be incooperatively mobile, and I’d be ashamed to show that picture here.

Our luck changed in this respect a little later when,having found plenty more of the same species, a guy with a decent looking camera asked us what we were doing.  We told him and he was pretty interested, being an amateur beekeeper himself as it turned out, so he started clicking away.  The results are these photos.

 

We were able to lead him to a muscorum queen and here she is:

All in all a successful day.  When we got home we tallied our counts and found that, by our results at least, the semi endangered muscorum actually makes up 6% of the bumblebee population of the South Strand.  An important and surprising result given that it was first recorded in Skerries only one week previously.

——————————

To conclude:

The South Strand is a small but important conservation area but you have to look closely to appreciate its full value.  No-one has to maintain it; simply leave it alone and let nature do what nature does.  The same can be said of the Ballast Pit and other odd corners around the town.

But what if we had more?

What if we can overcome our fixation with mowing and our fear of long grass?  Could we not rewild odd corners of the green spaces like this through the town?

Or this:

At present these are little more than green deserts, it would cost little or nothing to change this.  Leave the actual playing fields of course; they serve a purpose; concentrate on the margins and corners and all pollinators would benefit.  So would we in the long run.  Big time. 

Now imagine if every town in the Country did the same.

Charlie Heasman; 7th June 2019

 

When I first started writing this blog I thought I’d be talking about growing healthy veg, working with nature and all things joyous.  Now, for the second time in three months, I’m writing about something nasty.

You may recall that in April the subject was the huge amount of waste we allotment holders collectively produce, the illegal dumping of it, and the problems and expense of dealing with the consequences of same.  I’ve a feeling that we have not seen the end of all this and that another rant may not be too far ahead in the future.

But that’s another day’s work;  here and now I want to alert everyone to the dangers of herbicide contamination which can, and is, finding its way in to our allotments wreaking absolute havoc as it does so.

The problem is aminopyralid poisoning, and it’s on the increase.  None of us can afford to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist.  It does, and it’s only going to get worse.

The problem, at least in our plot, first appeared last Spring and initially we had no idea what was wrong.  Our tomatoes were the first to show signs, with the growing tips curling into tight gnarled knots, the stems growing long and spindly so that they couldn’t support their own weight, and further growth ceasing altogether.  Symptoms, in short, identical to those in the photos above.  Not ours, incidentally; those are this year’s plants and someone else is the lucky owner.

At first we thought it must be some sort of virus, though what and where it had come from we had no idea.

Then other things started happening.  Perfectly healthy broad beans – raised in modules in the polytunnel –  were planted out, sat in the ground for a week or two, tried to flower when only six inches tall, and died.  A row of peas was perfectly healthy and growing well for most of its length, but at one end seedlings died faster than we could replace them.  All other veg seemed pretty much okay.

If this was a virus it was acting in a very strange manner indeed.

At the same time our friend Carmel, who has two plots in two different parts of the allotments was having identical problems not only with her tomatoes but also with her potatoes: all showing exactly the same leaf curl symptoms.  This was a little surprising because our potatoes were perfectly fine.

The penny finally dropped: we had both used the same batch of cow manure.

One further piece of evidence was an absolute clincher as far as we were concerned.  I had spread manure on most (but not all) of the allotment and nearly all of the polytunnel.  In fact I ran out three quarters of the way up the second bed of the tunnel and applied compost instead.  The tomatoes planted here were perfectly healthy, showing no signs of stress and stayed that way for the summer.  All the rest we had to take out and replace with fresh plants, this time grown in grow bags.

Ditto the peas, which had also received compost except, as you might by now have guessed, one end which did get manure.  Entirely by accident, and nothing to do with judgement, our potatoes didn’t get manure either.  And stayed healthy.

We now needed absolutely no more convincing that the cow muck was in some way to blame.  But how?

At this point I did what I invariably do when I’m stumped: I Googled it.  The answer came up time and time again: aminopyralid.  Try it yourself, there’s an ever increasing amount of information out there – most of it, significantly, from organic growers and gardeners.

In fact all of a sudden everyone seems to be waking up to and talking about the dangers.  Here in Ireland Klaus Laitenberger from Green Vegetable Seeds talks about it in his June newsletter and over in Somerset organic grower and gardening guru Charles Dowding posted a Youtube video two weeks ago.

For my part, I was going to say nothing just yet because I recently started doing a trial and wanted to see the full results before saying anything.  But fresh outbreaks are occurring almost weekly in Skerries allotments and it would be pretty useless to wait and warn people after the event.  In any case, I have some results already and am about to share them here.

I kicked myself last year for not retaining a sample of the suspect manure for laboratory testing, which I thought would have settled the matter one way or another.  (Some people were still insisting that the cause was a virus; others blamed late frost, nitrogen excess and anything else they could think of).

In fact lab testing is not an option here, mostly because it is prohibitively expensive.  There probably isn’t a facility in Ireland anyway; samples would have to be sent to England or beyond.  The problem is that aminopyralid can cause damage even when present in minute quantities, 1 part per billion will destroy sensitive crops such as tomatoes, potatoes and legumes, and 1 part per billion takes a lot of finding in even the most advanced laboratory.

So I had nothing to send for testing and wouldn’t have been able to afford to do so in any case.

Then, at the beginning of last month, I heard that someone elsewhere in the allotments had spread cowmuck over almost his entire plot and planted potatoes, with disastrous results.  I don’t know the guy, I’ve never met him, but I can quite confidently tell him that he has aminopyralite contamination.  I might never meet him anyway because I’m told that at this point he walked out, shut the gate, and vowed never to return.  Shame.

But at least he’d left the remnants of his manure pile behind, so I helped myself to a bucketful.  Back in our allotment I took soil from a bed that I knew to be clean and filled flowerpots with a 4:1 mix of earth and cowmuck.  Soil was taken from the same spot, mixed 4:1 with compost and also potted up, the pots were labelled.  Pea plants and two tomato plants went into each sample, were given the same subsequent treatment and kept side by side to see what transpired.

This might prove there’s something wrong with the cowmuck, but of course it doesn’t prove what exactly.  For this we must revert to the internet, as said earlier.  Google aminopyralid images and see what you get; you’ll get pictures like these.  Search for written texts or videos and you’ll get the same story.

So what is this aminopyralite, and what’s the story?

It is a herbicide manufactured by Dow Chemicals and is licensed here for the control of broadleaved weeds in agricultural grassland and has been around for the last decade or so.  On this side of the Atlantic it is most commonly sold under the name of Forefront; in America as Grazeon.  In 2014, after much controversy, it was withdrawn from the market here (at least in the UK; I’m not altogether sure about Ireland) and that should have been the end of it.  But in 2015 it was reintroduced with exactly the same formula and the only difference being enhanced safety guidelines on the packaging.  One of those guidelines was that users should ensure that treated grass or hay should not be allowed to enter the compost chain.

Clearly this is not working.

Aminopyralid is absorbed by all the vegetation it is sprayed on.  Broadleaf weeds die; grasses do not.  But those grasses retain the chemical and one way or another (as grass, hay or silage) are eaten by cattle, sheep or horses, pass through them and end up in the manure.

It will eventually break down but no two authorities can agree on how long this will take.  Estimates range from one year to five.  I hope to prove here that one year is hopelessly optimistic.  Back to Carmel.

Last year she carefully took all of the cowmuck that she could back out of her beds; a laborious process as one can imagine.  Also, by the very nature of things, inexact.  This year she rather foolishly planted her tomatoes in the same place – she won’t mind me saying so because she’s kicking herself anyway – and got the same results.  Those are her tomatoes in the first two photos.

So that batch of manure at least has remained virulently active for two years so far despite Carmel’s best efforts to remove it.

Meanwhile another grower is experiencing the problem in his polytunnel this year for the first time.  Again, reef everything out and replant in growbags.  He is not best pleased either.

At this point I should stress, very clearly, that I am not blaming any individual for the problem in our allotments.  I’ve been told the name of the farmer from whom the manure came, but I’ve never met him.  Those who have tell me that he is a conscientious type who adopts best farming practices and would be appalled by all this, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.

Which leaves the question hanging in the air: where did the contamination come from?

I’m also told that he buys in some of the winter fodder for his cattle, and it is entirely possible he bought the problem in completely unwittingly on a contaminated delivery of hay.  This is the crux of the problem: the stuff is so insidious, persistent and invisible that it is virtually impossible to avoid it.  As if to prove the point, yet another allotment holder this year bought in horse manure, from an entirely different source, and is experiencing exactly the same problems.

So what can we do?

Apart from call for the stuff to be banned, which we should, the short and rather glib answer is to be very careful.  Klaus makes an eloquent point in his blog when he calls gardeners “the canaries in the coalmine” (or was it Michael D Higgins who said it first?).  It’s bitterly ironic that organic growers are the ones hardest hit by malpractice or carelessness in modern conventional farming.  We are told that aminopyralite poses no risk to the human food chain but we can see that it can, and does, pass through livestock and poison future crops.  It would seem reasonable to question whether it is therefore present in the meat or milk.  We’re currently reassured that there’s nothing to worry about but we were told the same about thalidomide, DDT and a whole host of other things which were subsequently proven to be very bad indeed.

One thing we could do in the meantime is to stop using weedkillers ourselves.  Most in the allotments don’t anyway; a disappointingly large minority still do.  Perhaps if they come to realise that these sprays are not only bad for the environment but bad for themselves they will stop.

So, no sprays and no manure.  What’s next?  We have to get our fertilisers from somewhere, right?  Buying ready made proprietary brands of compost should be safe.

It should, but it still might not be so.

Manufacturers will go to great lengths to ensure that their supply chain is not contaminated – it’s in their best interests to do so –  but it can, and does occasionally, happen.  Levingtons, a name to be trusted, fell foul in 2016 when customers complained of failing crops.  In fairness to the company they admitted liability and ‘compensated’ the victims with replacement plants and suchlike; small comfort for anyone who’s just lost the best part of a season’s production.

       This from one anguished lady:

Again, I’m not trying to victimise one particular company here; I picked Levingtons because they’re a reputable company and if it can happen to them it can happen to others.  And it has happened to others.

A small bit of good news, but only a small bit: there is a test you can do – as

recommended by the RHS – on your freshly acquired manure or compost.

Before using it take a sample and plant a bean.  If after two weeks the bean is growing and healthy you’re good; if it crunches up and dies you’ve got a bad batch.  The trouble is that you’ve just wasted two weeks and have a ton of useless manure on your hands.  How do you dispose of it?

You can hardly take it home and put it in your brown bin, for all sorts of reasons.  You could  spread it on grass but the only grass you’ve got is in the laneway outside your allotment and your neighbours aren’t going to thank you for that.  You’re stuck with it.

The only answer is to keep things as ‘in house’ as possible, make your own compost from your own allotment and be very cautious about importing anything – anything at all.

Even garden waste can be problematic.  It turns out that aminopyralite has a cousin called clopyralid (thank you again Dow) which is a weedkiller approved for use on lawns.  It has a similar chemical composition and does the same things.  So if a few bags of grass clippings come your way, check and make sure the grass in question has not been sprayed, it might well have been and you will have just brought in exactly the same problems you’re trying to avoid.

All of which sounds incredibly depressing, and I’m sorry if it does but facts are facts and we ignore them at our peril.  Perhaps it’s time to stand up and shout about what’s going on around us.

Despite all this there are still people with perfectly healthy allotments, just make sure you’re one of them.

Charlie Heasman

May 12, 2019 in Uncategorized | 1 comment (Edit)