Chair’s Chit Chat No.1 January 2023
You lose a few, you win a few.
It is January and time to look back at the highs and lows of last year’s allotment gardening campaign.
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. The Brussels sprouts were an absolute DISASTER. We didn’t manage to harvest even one meal off 22 plants (yes, we love sprouts). They just did not like the hot, dry summer and became incrusted with whitefly. For the first time in over 25 years my executive chef has had to buy in this wonderful vegetable. The cultivated bramble and swedes also fell victim to the searing heat, the former no bigger than peas and hard and sour, the latter just not flourishing, even though they were regularly watered. Not one swede made it into the kitchen and the feeble, wizened specimens were consigned to the compost bin.
Ah – but there were some successes. With very little help from me, other than a handful of ‘blood, fish and bone’ and a good mulch of well-rotted muck last winter, all the soft fruit bushes did really well. We have never had such a crop of gooseberries. So abundant were they that to use them up we were forced to make 10 gallons of gooseberry and rhubarb wine. The blackcurrants and strawberries did really well too, as did the redcurrants, but the blackbirds had them away before I could get round to covering the bushes. After receiving gallons and gallons and gallons of water – supplied via me lugging watering cans (we are not allowed to use hosepipes on our site) – the broad beans and peas repaid the gruelling, strength-sapping work with a bountiful crop of well-filled pods. The peas and beans were tucked up in the freezer and will see us through to early summer.
We were moderately happy with everything else, neither wildly successful nor utter failures.
As long as you win more than you lose, then that, in my book, is a result.
