Blundell’s Plot

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November 28th & 29th December 5th & 6th Adults £8 Kids under 16 £6 Come dressed as a pirate and join the fun!

Coming to Meldreth village Hall

Go to www.melbournamdram.co.uk for more information.

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Every Saturday 10.30am to 12noon

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Blundell’s Plot

“Melbourn?” sniffed my neighbour on the next allotment, barely able to keep the scorn from his voice. “Melbourn – that place where they used to mine that clunch stuff? Couple of inches of topsoil sitting on solid chalk? No way you’ll grow vegetables there, my son.”

Well, yes, it has to be admitted that we aren’t ideally situated here for veggies. The soil is thin, it drains like a colander and we go for weeks through most summers hovering on the edge of drought.

So my condescending ex-neighbour, standing ankle deep in his rich loam on the banks of the River Hiz, had a point. All the more reason, then, to prove him wrong – and for the past three years since we moved to SG8, that’s what I have been doing. Each year crops on my new patch, which is a mere 30ft square, have improved both in quantity and quality, there have been fewer failures and there’s every reason to hope that we will continue to enjoy our harvest of Melbourn’s best for years to come.

Which brings me to the point of this column, in which I hope during the coming year to offer some simple tips on vegetable growing in our area.

Where to begin? As ever with crop growing, it has to be soil quality. Whether you are starting a new plot, or bringing back an old one, in Melbourn you will almost certainly need to add a lot of organic matter, either in the form of well-rotted manure, or compost (humus). Manure can be hard to come by since they did away with the horse-drawn trams but I note that some stables on the A10 have been advertising free muck if you will take it away yourself. Form an orderly queue, there.

As Alan Titchmarsh recently confirmed, the best way to dig in your humus is by bastard trenching. Absurdly, the BBC had to apologise for Alan’s choice of earthy language but it’s always been a well understood gardening term for double digging. If your patch is new, and the soil needs breaking up, you can start digging right now. Go down a good spit and a half, and chuck the muck in the bottom of the trench before back filling. A minimum of a barrow load to every five square yards should do.

That advice, of course, is for starting a new plot. For those with an established garden, here are a few timely tips which I hope will help through the late summer and into the autumn:

Keep celery and leeks well watered and earth up. Mulch peas and beans. There’s still time to sow lettuce for salads in the autumn (Avondefiance and Romany do well). Bend over onion tops. Keep a keen eye out for cabbage whites, and spray accordingly. Start harvesting sweetcorn (cook it within the hour, yummie). Lift squash off wet ground and rest them on a couple of bricks to help ripening. Keep feeding and watering French and runner beans. When your beans and peas are finished, cut them off and leave the roots in the soil – they are a good source of nitrogen. In In the next issue: Dig for Victory!

David and Diane Blundell