Weaving, Winding and Snipping

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Charles Dowding, Espaliered apple, Japanese wineberry, RHS, tayberry

Whether it’s an allotment or garden, most of us don’t have a lot of growing space and have ambitions greater than room will allow. There are ways of maximising space though. Fruit bushes and even trees can be trained in all sorts of ways making it possible to fit quite a selection into a small area. With careful planning and some nifty work with the secateurs it’s surprising just how much you can grow.

Training my tayberry

My tayberry is a perfect example. A cross between a raspberry and a blackberry its growth habits are certainly more blackberry than raspberry. The canes it sends out are long, really long, up to 9ft. It’s also a biennial cropper which means that it sends out canes one year which then flower and fruit the next. The idea when I first planted it was to train it into a panel of wire fencing with one year’s canes which would be bearing the fruit trained in one direction and then the fresh canes it sent up during that growing season trained the other. That was the plan anyway. I just didn’t give the plant enough space or metal fencing for this method to actually work. Instead, I ended up weaving and winding the canes around the metal support in a snake-like fashion. The problem came when the new canes started to grow from the base during the summer. It’s important to keep the two different years’ growth separate so that when you come to prune out the canes that have fruited you don’t mistake any of next year’s growth. If you do you’ll have no fruit the following year. In the end, I ended up allowing these stems to simply grow out along the ground. By August, the tayberry had stopped fruiting and I pruned those canes out at the base and removed all the growth that was on the metal support. The task then was to wrestle with the new growth. Fortunately, the canes remain really pliable and apart from the vicious thorns (you can buy a thorn-free variety) it isn’t too difficult a job to wind these stems in and out of the fence support, snaking them around just as the others had been. It is a bit of a faff but doing it this way means my tayberry only takes up a space of about 4ft. Ideally, each year’s worth of growth would have a space of about 6ft so that’s a space of 12ft in total but I’m not sure many of us could devote that to one plant.

A fellow allotmenteer has employed the same strategy successfully with a hybrid blackberry and Naomi at Out of my Shed recently wrote about training her Japanese wineberry which has very similar sprawling growth. Her ideas are much more aesthetic than mine! This summer I visited the kitchen garden of a local restaurant and I loved the idea they had had of growing a thorn free variety of blackberry up one side of an arch and on the other an apple was being trained to form an apple and blackberry crumble archway.

A blackberry being trained up an archway

I dream of having my own orchard but at the moment it certainly isn’t a possibility but I did manage to squeeze in an espalier apple tree into the garden last spring. I was impatient and so bought one that came already trained into 2 tiers but when I pruned it in July I spotted two branches that looked like the beginnings of a third level. With the posts and wire in place for the tree already Wellyman added another line of wire and I tied some twine around the 2 stems to the wire to start training the branches down into a horizontal position. We only got 6 fruit from the tree this year but I’m hopeful as the tree gets older that we should get a good supply.

I have toyed with the idea of adding some stepover apples to one of my beds at the allotment. These are the type that grow to about 1ft in height before the branches are trained out horizontally. I really like the idea that I could get several varieties running down the edge of one of my beds with space to grow salad crops which would not make great demands on the soil. Charles Dowding successfully grows crops like this at the base of his larger apple trees. Pruning of fruit trees grown in this way might seem quite daunting but armed with my RHS encyclopaedia it wasn’t actually that difficult. It is mainly about keeping the shape of the trained tree and encouraging fruiting wood by keeping the stems short and stubby. One of the great advantages of all this pruning and contorting is that it actually encourages the plants to produce more fruit, a bonus in a small space.

Pears, cherries and nectarines can be trained to fit smaller spaces and gooseberries can be made into beautiful standards giving your kitchen garden or allotment a sophisticated air. Currants can also be trained and look beautiful up against a wall dripping in glistening fruit. By concentrating growth to fewer stems and opening up the plant more light can get to the wood to ripen it, important for fruit production. It also means fruit will ripen more quickly and air flow around the plant is improved, leading to fewer problems with fungal diseases.

I’d love to see any of your own examples of growing fruit in small spaces.

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Manure Envy and a Leaky Welly

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Charles Dowding, manure, organic matter, wellies

Manure envy

It’s funny what you start to covet when you become a gardener. Rather like when you move into your first home and you get excited about the arrival of the shiny new washing machine. No? Come on . . . . oh OK, that was just me then. But I bet there aren’t many gardeners out there that haven’t got excited at the sight of their own home made compost.

It wasn’t until I got my allotment 2 years ago that the quest for organic matter, and lots of it, really started. The problem I’ve found is there is never enough of the stuff. I have 2 compost heaps which take waste from the garden, the plot and any kitchen waste but it’s not enough by any stretch.

On allotments, manure has always been the organic matter of choice. My allotment site has an area of hard-standing where a local stable owner drops off bags of horse manure. It’s tends to be pretty fresh stuff and deliveries are quickly snapped up, barrowed off to plots where they await a degree of rotting before application. The amount of time allowed for rotting depends on the plot holder, with some of them pretty much putting it on in its raw, and very smelly, state. The whiff sometimes can be pretty overwhelming.

This summer’s awful weather though has meant fewer site visits and manure acquisitions and the spring and summer deliveries had built up so much that manure lady has stopped coming. Some of the pile that had built up had been there for a while and was really good stuff, well-rotted and with no hint, or whiff, of its origin. I spent some time back in September making inroads into the untouched manure. Occasionally I would get deep enough down to discover a seam of rich black matter which was quickly exploited. It was surprising how little of my plot I had managed to mulch, though. So last week, after clearing some more beds of spent crops I headed over to the pile, only to discover it had been raided. There was now only enough left for a few barrow-loads.

An empty manure pile

Persistent rain has turned quite a bit of the plot into a muddy mess and it was a slippery business transporting the manure from the pile to my plot. The grip on my wellies is so worn I was sliding all over the place. It’s also not wise to fill a wheelbarrow too full, especially when your centre of gravity is lower than most. A nifty little turning manoeuvre and the weight of the barrow nearly pulled me over into what was left of the manure pile.

Each trip took me past a fellow plotholder’s personal pile of manure. Hidden under a blue tarpaulin is a heap of truly wondrous stuff. Black, crumbly organic matter. Where he got it from initially and how long it has been there I don’t know, but when I first took on my plot, and was told about the communal manure pile, I was warned under no circumstances should I mistake the manure under the blue sheet for the communal pile. The ‘black gold’ was precious stuff and he would not be happy if anyone else helped themselves to it. And so the coveting began. I’ve got manure envy. The only time I’ve seen stuff look this good was at Charles Dowding’s farm.

Now the communal pile is bare I’ll have to look elsewhere for mulching material. I’m sure deliveries will start again at some point but this will be raw and not well-rotted. There is an alpaca farm about a 15 minute drive away and I have heard that it makes particularly good manure which doesn’t need a long time to rot down before it can be used on the ground, some even say it can be used fairly fresh without damaging plants. The problem is we don’t have a trailer and I don’t want the car to stink of alpaca poo; I fear it is a smell that would be hard to shift.

It’s not just a new source of organic matter that I’m now looking out for. Friday was a sad day as I discovered my wellies of seven years have sprung a leak. Hosing them down after a squelchy visit to the plot, the tell-tale sign of the wet sock inside told me it was time for a new pair. They’ve served me well and will remain in the shed for outdoor paint jobs but their days on the plot are numbered as I search for their replacement.

Shopping Trolley Guilt

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Charles Dowding, River Cottage, salad growing

It was all going so well. My plan this year was to get from mid April to October without having to buy any lettuce. After an inspirational day with Charles Dowding, the salad growing guru, I even harboured ideas of winter lettuce. Gone would be the bag of soggy salad leaves with all the verve and vigour of a teenager in the morning. We would be self-sufficient in lettuce and leaves; that shouldn’t be too hard. In the past it’s been my organisation, or lack of it, that has let me down. Starting off well, I then forget to keep up with the sowing regime for the holy grail of successional crops and, inevitably there ends up being a gap.

This year would be different and it really would have been, if it hadn’t been for the slugs and snails. It started well with harvests of ‘Freckles’, ‘Rubens’, ‘Dazzler and ‘Little Gem’ all from the plot. I was priding myself on how organised I was being by sowing some trays of salad leaves before we went on holiday, in June, so that these would follow on from those at the allotment. I prefer to grow salad leaves in containers at home. I did try them in the ground last year but they were quickly infiltrated by weeds and at one point it was hard to distinguish what was weed and what was edible leaf.

Well they say pride comes before a fall and, whilst my organisation skills may have improved, my ability to protect my salad leaves from slug attack hasn’t. Three troughs and a large pot have all been annihilated. One container was 6ft off the ground, for heaven’s sake. All I can say is slugs must have an incredible sense of smell. They even bypassed hostas to climb the equivalent of a mountain to them, to dine out on my specialist Italian salad leaf mix. The tiny seedlings which had appeared just before we went on holiday had gone by our return.

I’ve resown twice and moved the containers but each time, just as I see little green shoots emerging, they disappear just as quickly. Strangely lettuce on the plot hasn’t been touched, thanks I can only think to the resident song thrushes and blackbirds but in recent weeks with warmer weather my plot salads have bolted and now reside on the compost heap.

Plot lettuces

And so, with a sense of guilt and disappointment a bag of salad leaves and some cos lettuce made its way into the shopping trolley at the weekend. I never expected to be self-sufficient when I took on the plot but I think because lettuce is so easy to grow that I should at least be able to achieve it with them. We had some non-gardening friends stay with us back in June and when we were preparing food they kept asking what was from the plot and it felt a little embarrassing that so little of it was from there. Similarly, looking in the trolley at the weekend I did think we should be buying less vegetables in August. Surely the plot should be providing more. I’ve accepted that without a greenhouse and living in the damp west of Britain with perfect blight conditions that tomatoes are a lost cause. Carrots are impossible on the carrot-fly ridden allotment and although I’ve had tasty baby carrots grown in containers at home these were never going to mean I could stop buying carrots over the summer. The courgettes have been slow to get going and I’m by no means inundated. I’m actually missing my courgette glut. Peppers, and aubergines both need the extra warmth of a greenhouse. I had about a month supply of new potatoes but don’t want to devote more space to spuds.

My plot growing is still in its infancy, as this is only my second season, so some of it is learning what is most productive and easy to grow but it’s also accepting that the veg growing portrayed by the glossy gardening magazines isn’t always the reality that the majority of us experience. Just as with other aspects of the media constantly showing us images of what constitutes perfection, the immaculate house, the flawless body, the most desirable products there is a danger of ‘growing your own’ becoming another element of our lives where we feel we have to live up to ideas of perfection. There is an immense feeling of satisfaction when I can cook a meal from the plot but to do this is difficult to achieve over a sustained period. Perhaps the disparity between the portrayal of fruit and veg growing in the media and the actuality of it is one of the reasons why many new allotment holders hand back their plots after a few years. The idea of the River Cottage type utopia is very enticing but the reality is somewhat different.

I have salad seedlings on the go and I’m keeping a close eye out for further slug attacks but whilst I wait for them to achieve an edible size I guess I shouldn’t feel guilty that my plans didn’t quite come to fruition.

Salad growing guru Charles Dowding

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Charles Dowding, no dig gardening, salad leaves

Charles Dowding showing us around his polytunnel

For my birthday at the end of last year, Wellyman kindly bought me a day with Charles Dowding. Charles has been growing salad crops and selling them for nearly 30 years now. He has, over that time built up quite a reputation not only for inspiring the British public to be a bit more adventurous with their salad growing but also for following the ‘no dig’ practice of mulching beds and then letting worms and other soil organisms do the hard work of improving his soil structure and fertility.

Charles runs courses from his farm, where he explains the thinking behind his ideas and you get to pick his brain and see his philosophy in action, and this is how I spent yesterday. From his farm in Somerset Charles runs a successful market garden, selling bags of mixed seasonal salads to businesses within a 4 mile radius. With 2 polytunnels and over an acre Charles makes £30,000 a year from growing salads. The site is less than ideal facing north and on clay but by using the ‘no dig’ technique of mulching with compost and well-rotted manure every year he has created soil conditions most gardeners dream of. The colour of his soil and the lack of weeds were the most striking aspects of his farm.

Just a few of Charles' incredibly productive beds

The soil is black and just so rich in organic matter from years of mulching with manure and compost. This dark colour means the soil warms up much more quickly in the spring, absorbing the warmth from the sun. The structure of his soil is much improved draining more freely but holding onto moisture when needed. In fact the structure of his soil is so amazing that he is able to walk on his beds when the ground is almost fully saturated, as it is at the moment after several weeks of rain. When he moved his feet you could see the ground underneath spring back and there was no footprint left behind. This really was quite remarkable to see.

Greeted by tea or coffee and tasty flapjack the course started with everyone introducing themselves. There was a broad mix of people, some with newly acquired polytunnels wanting inspiration, others running or planning to run their own market garden and some who just wanted to take away some ideas for their allotment or garden. Dodging the heavy downpours we spent time in the polytunnels seeing what varieties of winter salads he has been growing and getting the opportunity to taste along the way. This was particularly useful. I have never tasted sorrel or chervil before and was impressed enough to be add them to my seed wish list. Charles doesn’t just grow salad crops though and a visit during the summer and autumn will show a site packed to the brim with squashes, tomatoes, leeks, celeriac and much more.

He shared with us seed sowing tips and how to achieve good compost. Part of the garden has raised beds which Charles uses as experiment beds, comparing dig versus ‘no dig’ and the effects, if any, of charcoal as a mulch or when dug in.

A tasty lunch of foraged nettles for a soup and homemade spelt bread and of course some of Charles’ salad leaves was followed by the opportunity to ask questions and a final tour of the garden, which included a trip to the all important manure and compost piles.

Black gold - Charles' compost and manure heaps

I had a great day and came away with lots of ideas. The main ones being to track down a good source of manure and to use the space I have got more effectively to produce more salad and with lots of different varieties. For me it was refreshing to see a different and successful approach to growing. For me studying with the RHS for 4 years has been extremely useful, giving me an understanding of the theory behind growing but some of what you are taught is quite rigid and restrictive in it’s thinking. I’m learning that becoming a good grower is an ongoing process, with a great deal of experimentation and trial and error along the way. People like Charles are very inspiring and courses like the ones he offers are a great way of seeing your plot in a different light.

For more details about the courses offered by Charles Dowding visit his website.

If you can’t get to Somerset don’t despair, Charles has written a selection of books on the ‘no dig’ method, organic gardening, salad leaves and how to get the most from your plot in winter. Again have a look at his website for more information.