In May we always have an abundance of rhubarb. It’s a fantastic vegetable for crumbles, jam, cakes or just stewed with a bit of ice cream. We appreciate it even more because there isn’t much else from the garden at this time of year. Here’s a cake I bake a lot when there’s rhubarb about.

This is a double mixture cake, quantities below are good for a large loaf tin.

• 18 oz fresh rhubarb
• 12 oz self raising flour
• 6 oz caster sugar
• 6 oz butter
• 3 eggs
• Sprinkle of Demerara sugar
• Pinch of salt

1. Preheat over to 180 ºC and line a large loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

2. Sieve flour and salt into large mixing bowl.

3. Add butter and rub in until you have breadcrumb texture.

4. Add sugar.

5. Cut rhubarb into chunks less than an inch long and add to bowl.

6. Crack the eggs into the bowl, break the yokes and stir the mixture.

7. Don’t be worried about how dry the mixture is at this stage, there’s a lot of water locked up in the rhubarb! Just mix it all together.

8. Transfer mixture into tin, firm it down and sprinkle with Demerara sugar.

9. Cook for about an hour or until it generally looks done! Leave to cool for at least 20 mins before turning out of tin.

Apple trees can’t be grown from seed. Well, the pip will grow but it will very likely produce a fairly unpalatable crab apple* and the tree will be large. When propagating apple trees we want to grow a particular variety; Bramley, Cox or Russet etc. and we want the tree to be a manageable size. The only way to grow a Cox is to clone an existing Cox – all Cox apple trees alive today are cones of the original (or clones of clones etc.). In order to clone the existing tree we take cuttings of scion wood in the winter when pruning the tree, typically first year growth of approximately pencil thickness. These ‘twigs’ are then grafted onto rootstocks in the early spring. The size of the eventual tree is determined by the choice of rootstock: a seedling rootstock will be a full sized apple tree but for most gardens or orchards, semi-dwarfing or even very small dwarfing rootstocks are preferred.

Apple rootstocks

The seedling, or standard rootstock is a third larger again than M111/M25.

This spring I bought ten MM106 for £2 each. A couple of months earlier I had attended an apple tree pruning workshop where along with learning the basics of pruning I was able to collect some scion wood from both Bramley and Fiesta (also known as Red Pippin). I also took some scions from the Worcester Pearmain on our allotment. The dry scion wood was wrapped in plastic and kept in the fridge to keep it dormant until it was time to graft. The ten trees were grafted on the 25th March 2012.

There are many ways to graft. I chose the ‘saddle graft’ as it seemed the simplest. An upwards pointing ‘V’ is cut into the rootstock and a matching hollow is cut into the scion so that it forms a tight fit. You can buy special grafting tape to wrap around the join but I used used strips of plastic carrier bag.

I’m writing this six months later on the 25th August having just removed the the plastic bindings (which in all cases stayed on tight). See below for the resulting grafts. Eight of the ten seem to have worked well, one didn’t take at all and one seems to have formed a good join but there are no leaves on the scion wood.

10 apple trees.

Apple tree graft.

Apple tree graft.

*Unless you happen to be lucky. Erica’s great-grandfather (known as Grandpa Buxton) planted a pip from an apple he ate in the garden, and the resulting tree has produced many excellent cooking apples over the years. It was registered as a new variety and is now even available by mail order!

We have an apple tree on our allotment, it’s a Worcester Pearmain (we think) and by late August we have more apples than we know what to do with! This variety don’t store well and after giving away a couple dozen we still have over 50 on the table. Drying seems like a good idea but the food dehydrators on the market cost around £50 for a small one (0.38 m2 drying area) to over £200 for a larger one (1.35 m2). With a bank holiday Monday to kill, we joined the crowds at the hardware store to see if we could knock something up ourselves.

We did skip a few bits of wood and if we’d planned this for more than 15 minutes could certainly have skipped all the wood. As it happened though we spent £6.90 on the wood.

Wood £6.90
Trays 7 x £1.75 = £12.25
Cable £1.80 (4 m)
Plug £0.64
Lamp holders 4 x £0.98 = £3.92
Switch £1.72
Bulbs £1.97 (4 x 60W)
Screws ~60 = 0.40

Also a little bit of wood glue and some foil and duct tape (say 50 pence).
The cardboard is of no cost and the fan (120 mm, 12 v) came from an old computer case (these can be bought for £3 from good computer shops).

Total cost = £29.90

Call it £30.50 or £34 once we’ve added the 8th and 9th racks there’s room for. The shop only had seven in stock.

The materials for the dehydrator.

The cats were very helpful...

The basic idea is a simple wooden frame, with lights at the bottom to provide the heat and a fan to provide the air flow. All the joints were drilled, counter sunk, glued and screwed to produce a pretty robust frame.

Drilling - no power tools used here!

Each corner post has little ledges for the racks to rest on.

The four 60 W bulbs are in two parallel sets, each with its own switch. This gives us two heat levels of 240 W and 120 W.

Four 60 W bulbs provide 240 W of heat (and a small amount of waste light).

The sides are covered with thick cardboard. The 120 mm fan is fitted into the middle of the cardboard base, separating the bulbs from the heating area. It’s a DC fan, running off an old transformer I had kicking around.

All assembled with the 120 mm fan in the base.

And here we are in action!

First run!

In its current configuration the drying area is seven trays of 0.094 m2 totalling 0.66 m2. The capacity is 9 trays so a total of 0.85 m2, over twice the capacity of the cheapest commercial version. At least £10 of the final cost of £34 could be easily avoided by getting the wood and cable from a skip. The switch, bulb fittings, and plug could also probably be skipped with a little more effort. The trays were the most expensive part, they do look nice but similar function could have been achieved far cheaper by using a square metre of fine wire mesh from a garden centre. The apples do seem to be sticking to the metal a bit, so maybe plastic trays would work better? Or maybe we need to use a little bit of oil/butter on them next time.

Here’s the result:

The first batch!

It took around eight hours, used close to 2 kWh which is around £0.25 of electricity. Next up the solar adapter for sunny days! Whilst some did stick to the trays, these were the thinner ones; they were too thin! The best results are from the thicker slices, 4 mm seems around right.

The temperature with all four bulbs on was a stable 35 C, which looking at commercial dehydrators seems on the cool side. Be interesting to know how much airflow they have though. Now to try some courgettes! 🙂

Follow the allotment series here.

Everything is growing really fast this month. After a relatively cool and wet July in Bristol (16.9C compared to the 30 year average of 18.3C along with 18% more rain) August seems to be a little warmer. Here’s the crop from the 13th August:

These are the first of our carrots along with lots of squash, courgettes, blackberries and chard.

Of course we can’t hope to eat this much squash, though we’ve had a good go! Most of this load was given away at a BBQ last week. The variates here are Parador courgettes along with Sunburst, Sunshine and Turks Turban squash. We also have some Crown Prince, Harrier, Confection and Harlequin on the plot which should all keep fairly well, along with a prolific pumpkin. The carrots are Jaune Obtuse de Doubs’ Yellow Carrot, a non-hybrid from Real Seeds. These carrots were planted on 26th March. The squash plants are mostly growing in front of the sweetcorn:

Sweetcorn and Squash

Our monstrous sweetcorn! Dave’s a handy 6 foot rule so these 55 sweetcorn plants are around 9 foot. Looking at other allotment plots and commercial fields our corn is exceptionally tall, however, it seems to have fewer cobs forming than we’ve seen on other plants. The seed was another non-hybrid, called Golden Bantam Improved.

The leeks are continuing to bulk up

We're letting this one grow!

We sowed more carrots on 10th July. These should be ready by the end of October, thanks Amanda and Dave for weeding!

Yellow carrots planted 10th July

Here's our haul from 2nd August 2011

A few photos from earlier. This is the first half of the plot, as it looked on 17th July:

Chard, leeks, rhubarb and squash in front of the sweetcorn

We're eating the turnips much smaller than this... but it's fun to let one grow!

The kittens are curious and enthusiastic creatures, not often helpful though!

Follow the allotment series here.

A round up of recent progress on the allotment.

These photos are from 9th of July:

These leeks had a slow start. The rabbits ate them almost down to the groud a couple of months ago. Amazingly they seem to have come back pretty well.

The squash are growing fast now, looks like we'll have a lot! These are called Sunburst and have a wonderful scalloped edge.

The kale's done really well. More than we can eat! And in the background the rapidlly growing sweetcorn.

A few days later, 23rd of July and we’ve got a good harvest:

The potatoes are the first earlies, Foremost. That's the crop from three plants. We've also lifted the second garlic patch, this was planted in January and seems pretty similar to the stuff that went in in November. Also a good crop of courgettes, turnips, chard, onions and blackberries.

Sweetcorn are looking lush now, lots of foliage but not much sign of corn yet!

The chard has been a great success. We have yellow, red and a more conventional leaf beat, very similar to spinach.

We've planted sweetpeas and sunflowers against the fence for a bit of colour.

The beans have been a nightmare, bad weather, rabbits and voles have had most of them. We have some dwarf runners that are finally doing what they're meant to do now.

Follow the allotment series here.

After a record-breakingly dry spring, we’ve finally had some wet weather and the plants have really appreciated it. The rhubarb, which had been looking increasingly unhappy despite regular watering, is now thriving:

Rhubarb, these started as four small donations from our allotment neighbour.

The remaining onions (some were nibbled by hungry rabbits) are starting to swell:

Onions, this is our 2nd bed of onions. They went in after the super cold December and have done better than the first lot.

And the sweetcorn are looking great!

Sweetcorn, current count is 55 plants from the 60 kernels. Not bad!

Our squash have come from various sources. Some we grew ourself from seeds, some we got as little plants, others from friends and family:

Our largest squash, the donated pumpkin from Will & Kaz. 🙂

We have 23 various squash/pumpkin/courgette plants in total.

The beetroot and parsnips are coming along well. We may have underestimated the germination rate of the parsnips and overestimated our likely consumption of them…. Anyone out there who would like some parsnips in a couple of months’ time??

In the foreground, the eldest beetroot, behind them younger. In the background parsnips and potatoes.

After netting the chard to prevent the rabbits getting at it, it has grown up quickly. Tasting some directly from the plant, I can see why the rabbits liked it so much. The ordinary green ones taste best, but the yellow and red look exciting:

Rainbow (at least red, green and yellow anyway) chard.

The kale has been growing fast since it finally started raining a couple of weeks ago.

The garlic that we put in in autumn had completely died, so we were forced to harvest them all, although it’s a bit early. Maybe they were tricked by the dry spring into thinking that summer had been and gone. Turnips that we had almost given up on have also done remarkably well, so we thinned them out and ate some in white sauce with the chard.

First real harvest this year. Chard, turnip and garlic.

Time to stop buying vegetables!

Follow the allotment series here.

It’s been a while since the last update, with the improving weather a lot’s been going on at the allotment. On the 18th February we started chitting the potatoes. Four weeks later, there had been some progress:

Four weeks chitting, 18th Feb to 20th March

The ‘before’ image is here: 18th Feb.

Of our five variates, Foremost (1st Early), Roseval (2nd Early), Sarpo Shona (Early Maincrop) and Kerrs Pink (Late Maincrop) have chitted nicely, ready to plant. Pink Fir Apple (Late Maincrop), however, hasn’t done much. There are some shoots but not ready for planting yet. We’ll give it another couple of weeks.

Chitted potatoes, 20th March 2011

Here they are going in; the earlies are spaced 30 cm apart in rows around 40 cm apart and the rest spaced 40 cm apart.

Potatoes going in, 20th March 2011

Potatoes going in, 20th March 2011

We’ve also been improving the rabbit proofing, adding chicken wire to the gate, fixing a bit of fence, blocking up holes… it’s not obvious where they can get in now.

This weekend (26th March) we’ve been busy planting, and weeding. The thistles have the potential to be a problem. The meadow before we started digging was full of thistles and their remaining roots are spawning babies everywhere!

We added some more parsnips and cabbage, a few weeks after the first sowing. Sown the first time this year are: carrots, turnips, beetroot, bunching onions and leeks. We also dug a new bed along the fence and sowed a mixed pack of wild flower seeds.

Seed beds