It seemed a shame to cook it, so although it is way too late in the season I decided it might be worth planting.

I had a sense that sweet potatoes are a right faff in the UK and although Bob Flowerdew grows them successfully I didn’t stand a cat in hells chance.

I’ve done a bit more research now and I’m beginning to hope that it rots in situ. Here’s a quote from one site on How To Grow Sweet Potatoes:

In fact, the question is not how to grow sweet potatoes, it’s rather how to stop sweet potato vines from taking over the whole garden! Sweet potato is a very invasive creeper…

Sounds like I might have inadvertently attempted to cultivate a persistent weed on the allotment. Great.

Sweet Potatoes are usually cultivated from slips which I think are the shoots that you can see on my sweet potato photo. They can be potted up and grown on before planting out in May but I imagine they will still grow ok if you chuck the whole tuber in. This one will never be harvested though, they need about 4 to 6 months of sunshine to mature and I don’t expect we’ll have a lot of that between November and February.

I’ll be sure to let you know if anything outstanding happens.

They then told us that we had won the best new comers award – no congratulations implied.

Apparently we were now in the running for best new comers in the whole of Croydon. The committee had seemed slightly pre-occupied by the pan-Croydon allotment competition for a few weeks. A fancy new pergola has been erected by the entrance and bee hives have been introduced into a tiny corner.

Everyone has been instructed to tidy up and now it was our turn. All eyes on our plot.

We thanked them in shame and scooted off to de-weed our flower bed.

In the privacy of our own plot we allowed a little smugness to sneak through. Lynn insisted that it must have been her onions what done it while I maintain that it can only be the peaches of wonder.

Here’s a quick tour of our award winning plot.

We sat in the sun and ate Ratte potatoes boiled with freshly podded peas and pondered over the mystery of carrots. Yet again I managed to produce just 3 carrots out of 3 assorted packets of seed.

I don’t understand how you can grow 3 fine specimens and then about 300 abject failures.

The peach tree has proved to be the most exciting feature of the plot. We transplanted it in  the snow and had concerns for it’s future but it has bounced back and covered itself in fruit. Each week I rush up to check how much they’ve grown and confirm that no one has nicked them yet.

They are looking particularly peachy at the moment but are still rock solid. This is my most eagerly anticipated crop, I can’t wait to try it.

Not quite every seedling – some shine.

I planted two varieties of seed, a hand me down from Lynn’s dad that has been in existence for decades and a saved variety from the Sheen plot which is probably a version of Wisley Wonder. One of them seems to produce half way decent plants and the other doesn’t.

I’ve planted loads more seed and now can only hope for the best, or perhaps try and buy some plants in from the garden centre.

Lynn in the meantime was down on her hands and knees trying to capture the wonder of the onions with her phone.

It’s hard to do justice and this photo just doesn’t evoke the same sense of pride.

Lynn has claimed the onions as her own, along with the other plot success – peas. The plot failure on the other hand is always referred to as “Angela’s carrots”.

Hardly fair.

The peas are pretty wondrous though. The plants are vigorous and healthy and the peas are a delight.

A lovely sweet pea must be about the best thing to come out of an allotment (maybe second to purple sprouting broccoli?), and they cook up marvelously with a handful of Arran Pilot, prepared in the garden shed trangia and eaten on the plot while surveying our land.

From one petrol machine to another.

We hadn’t tried the hand-me-down rotovator since we picked it up last month and weren’t all that eager to pull it out of the shed now. It threatened to be a right arse and the lawn mower had put me into a mood. As it happened, the M1 Gardener started perfectly and by the time we’d dismantled half of it and discarded the air filter, it actually stayed started.

There is only have a tiny patch left to work and it was damn hard to control the machine within the confines. I’m pictured battling with the machine that was intent on ploughing through the neighbours fruit cage and then dragging me six feet under.

I finally got into a rhythm of ever decreasing circles and the effects on the ground were amazing. I was left with a tilth almost fit for sowing. I can’t wait til the end of the season when I get to churn up the whole plot.

Meanwhile, Lynn spent hours weeding the peas. Either the worms had worked the seeds to the surface or I had planted them too shallow because every weed pulled seemed to dislodge a tiny pea plant. Lynn must have transplanted at least half the row as she went along.

We’ve been researching pea support for last few weeks but in the end Lynn managed to forage enough dead wood from behind our plot to create an impressive architectural structure across both rows.

They look amazing and I hope those peas climb because it was a monumental effort.

There had been quite a hard frost at the beginning of the week and every last spud lay wilted and scorched over the earthed up mounds. I earthed them up again but we are at the limit now so I hope it doesn’t freeze again. I think the peach blossom was probably knocked back as well.

I’ve started to reclaim some of the fancy fruit area by sinking Grow Pots into the weed suppressant fabric and bark covering.

I’ve planted a few squash plants and if I can find a supplier of more grow pots I’ll have melons in there as well.

I had a slight hiccup with my squash seeds. I’d run out of plant labels so wrote the name on the polystyrene potting cups with marker pen. All the details floated away with the watering and now I’m left with umpteen unidentified forms of pumpkin and squash. It’s like last year all over again.

Four hours later, stripped to our t-shirts, we would have happily discarded the flasks in favour of a few tinnies.

We worked ferociously planting spuds and sowing seeds. Lynn would of course argue that she worked the hardest as she planted 7 rows of spuds while I weeded the seed bed and prepared some labels with my Brother P Touch – pah!

Weeding that seed bed was the devils own job. We’d planted onions, lettuce and assorted brassicas under the glazed area some weeks back but pretty much the only thing that had germinated was a field of weeds. After half an hour of dabbling around with a tweezer to uncover 1 lettuce and 3 brassica seedlings it occurred to me that it would be a far better idea to blitz the lot with a hoe and start again.

Our potato planting led to some interesting debates. I’m relying on C. H. Middleton with his Dig for Victory advice from 1945, topped up with a modern infusion from Joy Larkcom, while Lynn is regularly in contact with her Dad – a potato farmer by profession.

I’m a big fan of books and so would usually disregard 50 years of practical experience for something that could be gleaned by a quick scan from the comfort of a bath. We opted for the Dig your Own method: 1/2 spade depth furrow, place in spud and then cover with soil and a sprinkling of manure. No earthing up until the foliage starts to poke through.

The experienced voice tells us to dig a trench, place in manure with spuds on top and then earth up enough to allow the rain to run off and prevent rotting. I know it sounds sensible and was in fact my method of old, but its hard work and in clay, I’m all for short cuts. I do hope the buggers don’t rot though, I’ll never hear the end of it.

We have set ourselves a challenge to excel at two crops this year – peas and leeks. Of course we want all our crops to be prizewinners but these two have proved to be challenging in the past.

I wouldn’t waste time with the autumn sown peas – horrible dry things, but I think a hot day at the end of March might be perfect for the sweet summer variety. We prepared two drills and I started laying out the seeds in a perfect arrangement – square layout with a centre pea, then had a flashback to last years germination rate and walked back along my row scattering the rest of the packet.

Here’s Lynn proudly constructing the mesh cloche over the sowings.

We also had time to set the uber cheap summer bulbs (care of Lidl) by the rhubarb patch and get in a few rows of carrots and parsnips. I’ve gone mad with carrots again, so along with the standard Nantes varieties I’ve got some Red Samurai and Purple Haze, so with my usual carrot success rate these are all set to be mighty expensive tubers again.

I went over to see Sam to hand in my notice and nearly came away blubbing. It felt very hard handing over my lovely little corner plot that turned from a bindweed monstrosity into a moderately productive little haven in the space of a season. We emptied the shed and carted the trammel and another blackberry bush over to the new plot and rapidly felt at ease again.

We are lucky to be able to start over again, making plans and building stuff, and this new plot is sooo tidy!

It’s rapidly approaching the end of February and yet this was our first visit of the year to the Norbury plot. It’s been so wet and claggy and the snow still hasn’t declared for the season so we haven’t been able to dig or sow. My allotment task list is covered in red overdue stars though so we decided time had come to brave inclement conditions, ignore gardening sense and plant the cabbages anyway.

We knocked up this cold frame top for the seed bed in a downpour and I planted greyhound cabbage, cauliflower, onions and lettuce while Lynn started on the compost bin construction. I don’t hold out much hope for the seeds but that compost heap is a thing of beauty.

While Lynn snuck out of bed to source cups of tea and toast, I churned out image after image of Gripple circuitry. I’d woken with a plan in my head and as an ever ready kind of a Scout, I just happen to keep a pad of grid paper by the bed for this sort of occurrence.

Having failed to find wire tensioners in Homebase last week I was pleased when my internet search uncovered a swanky new gadget for creating trellis constructions. It’s called the Gripple and I promptly ordered myself the starter pack of 4 Gripples, 4 Eye Hooks and a 30m reel of plastic wire.

This is where my puzzling started. Using only the above items, how do I (read: how does Lynn) create a fanned peach supporting wire combo with 4 lengths? We went for the 3rd aesthetically pleasing option and headed down to the plot.

I should perhaps have mentioned that we had chosen the weekend of the Severe Adverse Weather Warnings to partake in the peach transplantation event. It was a struggle removing the tree from the old plot with the famed light soil, a layer of ice had to be cracked away before the fork would gain entry and we ought to have thought about the difficulty of digging in our frozen heavy London clay plot.
But we didn’t.

I was keen to play with the new toys but my hands were freezing and I had to run up and down the plot doing high knee raises and clapping my hands before I could contend with the fiddly bits.

The design of the “tensulator” was very smart and when it work I was very impressed. When it didn’t work, I let myself down rather a lot and had one of those, throw yourself on the floor wailing, kinds of a strop. A bit embarassing.

Here I am, pre-wailing, trying to force the wire to go through the Gripple and out the other end so that I could loop it back. No amount of forcing was going to tease the wire through and the thing is designed not to let me pull the wire back out again and it wouldn’t.

Cue strop.

We had to cut it off in the end and Lynn took it away to the shed to perform some kind of surgery on it (or perhaps she thought if she left me alone I’d stop flouncing).

We managed to get this one on successfully in the end but another Gripple got stuck after looping it around and without wasting loads of wire we couldn’t cut this one off. It was in a locked position but couldn’t be tensioned and so the finished job looked a bit naff but worked in a fashion.

I don’t know why we had trouble with two of the Gripples, if I’d had a pack of spares I wouldn’t have got myself too worried but I needed all 4.

The working ones were very neat and it proved easy to build up the tension. Our posts now look decidedly wonky as the incremental tensioning pulled them into an apex.

I would like to have a handful of these in the shed for odd jobs but I’ll still remain concerned about their reliability.

My Dad left me his half tonne mattock after his last visit and a few swings of that saw my back in traction but also cracked the clay.

A robin swooped in to feast on some of the worms I’d just uncovered and reminded me how lovely it is to spend time down on the plot. With the feathering of snow also comes a peaceful calm that I rarely notice anywhere else. It’s a beautiful site.

The recent wet weather has made a huge difference to the clay, it’s incredibly heavy but you can at least force your tools through the surface. We got the peach in and it looked relatively cosy against its snowy backdrop.

Back at home we got to play with the connectable outdoor Christmas lights that Dobbies sent me to try out. We’ve never had outdoor lights before and the new acquisition left me rather popular.

My first attempt at laying them out was snubbed by all though.

I’d trailed them through the letterbox, creating quite a draft and a trip hazard combined, and the lights ran out before they reached the tree base but in my defense it was cold out there and I thought the twinkling effect set the recycling bin off very nicely.

We headed back to Homebase to research outdoor electric options and came back with an enclosed extension lead that we could position at the base of the tree and feed through a specially drilled hole in the window frame.

Our neighbours have kindly planted a leylandii which forms the perfect support for our lights. The kids were able to scrabble up and position the cabling while we stayed at the bottom prepared to catch them.

These Christmas Tree lights were very good quality piece of kit, the cabling is very solid and formed of 3 twined cables with generously spaced bulbs. There is a waterproof connector so that you can join multiple sets without leaving gaps in the lighting. We are quite tempted to go nuts and light up the whole house.