Red Onions, a Tired Sweetcorn Patch, and Room to Think

 Wednesday morning, same as it ever is. Up early, kettle on before my eyes had properly agreed to open, and out the door while the house was still doing that lovely early-morning hush that never lasts much past half seven once everyone else surfaces. Sam was off to work today, poor lad, which meant it was just me and Iris heading up to the plots, and I'll be honest, there's a particular kind of peace to a two-person morning that a three-person one doesn't quite manage. Nobody arguing over who's carrying the trug. Nobody "just popping to check something" and vanishing for twenty minutes. Just me, Iris, and whatever the allotment decided to throw at us today.

Onions, Shallots, and a Girl Who Knows What She's Doing

First job of the morning was lifting the red onions and red shallots, they have been ready  a while. we were just letting them dry where they were.

For anyone new to growing your own, the tell-tale sign an onion or shallot is ready to lift is the foliage starting to yellow and flop over of its own accord. You don't want to be bending it over yourself to force the issue, just let nature do its own thing in its own time. Once they're up, they need a good few days somewhere warm and dry with plenty of air getting round them before you even think about storing them, otherwise you'll open the shed in October to a smell that will clear the whole street. We lay ours out on an old wire shelf rescued from a defunct fridge, propped up on bricks in the greenhouse, which does the job of a proper curing rack without costing a penny. If you haven't got anything similar knocking about, an old bit of trellis balanced across two chairs works just as well, and nobody need ever know it started life as a garden fence.

Red onions and shallots do take a little longer to cure than the standard sort, so patience is the order of the day, something I am, if I'm honest, still working on at sixty.

A Shower That Talked a Good Game

We did get rain last night, about twenty minutes of it, and for a good chunk of that twenty minutes it came down properly hard, the sort that makes you think, "right, that's it, the drought's broken, get the flags out." I stood at the kitchen window at work watching it bounce off the yard like it meant business. And then, same as every other tease we've had this summer, it stopped, the sky cleared, and by this morning the ground on the plot was bone dry again, like the whole thing had never happened. Twenty minutes of hard rain sounds like a lot until you remember how thirsty the soil's been for weeks, at which point it's roughly the equivalent of offering a marathon runner a thimble of water and asking them to make it last.

So it was watering as usual, can after can, up and down the rows, same as it's been most mornings for what feels like a month now. If you're in the same boat, my advice hasn't changed all summer: fewer, deeper waterings beat little sprinkles every time, because a light dampening just teases the roots up toward the surface looking for more, which is exactly the wrong direction in weather like this.

When Sweetcorn Just Won't Reach

It was while I was watering that I properly clocked how short this year's sweetcorn is. Not poorly, exactly, just, well, modest. Where I'd normally be looking up slightly at the tops of the plants by now, this year I'm looking them fairly square in the eye, and there are noticeably fewer cobs forming per plant than usual. The lack of rain has clearly told the whole sweetcorn patch to manage its expectations, which is rather sound advice for most of us this summer, plants included.

Sweetcorn is thirstier than people give it credit for, especially at the point where it's forming its tassels and starting to pollinate, and this year that critical stretch has landed right in the middle of the dry spell, which explains a good deal.

If you fancy having a go at growing your own here in the UK, a few things make all the difference. Sweetcorn wants full sun and shelter from wind, and it absolutely must be planted in a block rather than a single long row, because it's pollinated by wind carrying pollen from the tassels at the top down to the silks below, and a block gives that pollen far more chance of actually landing where it's needed. A single skinny row is asking for trouble and half-filled cobs. Sow indoors in April or direct outside from late May once the frosts have properly gone, keep the soil consistently moist rather than letting it swing from parched to soaked, which is easier said than done in a summer like ours, and feed it well, sweetcorn is a hungry crop and rewards a rich bed with good manure or compost dug in beforehand. You'll know it's ready when the tassels turn brown and a squeezed kernel releases a milky liquid rather than a watery one. Give it a try next year even if this year's caught you out, there's little in the vegetable world quite as satisfying as sweetcorn eaten within the hour of picking, still faintly warm from the sun.

A Craft Worth Keeping

While we were pottering about waiting for the watering to soak in properly, Iris got busy with a job that's more craft than gardening, but earns its place on the plot all the same. We save every onion net and mesh bag that comes our way through the year rather than binning them, because once washed out they make the ideal hanging storage for the cured onions and shallots later on. Iris strings them up along a beam in the shed with old baler twine, and there's something rather satisfying about a row of onions in their netted bags swinging gently every time the shed door opens, like a little larder installing itself for free. It costs nothing, uses up what would otherwise go straight in the recycling, and keeps the crop drier and better ventilated than piling them in a box ever would.

Colour Among the Chaos

For all the sulking sweetcorn and thirsty soil, the flowers up the plot haven't given up on us. The dwarf asters are still putting on a proper show along the front edge, and a stray clump of self-seeded cornflowers has muscled in near the bean poles, that particular shade of blue that photographs beautifully no matter how little skill you bring to the camera. Iris took a good few shots this morning while I was busy being watering man, and I'll admit she's got a far better eye for it than I have, always finding the angle where the light comes through the petals rather than flattening them out. It's a nice reminder, on a dry, slightly discouraging sort of summer, that something up there is still determined to put on a bit of a show regardless.

Room to Think

Once the practical jobs were done and Iris had wandered off to photograph something else entirely, I found myself just standing there a while, leaning on the fork, not doing much of anything. That's not laziness, whatever it might look like from the next plot over. The allotment is, hands down, my favourite place in the world to just think. Something about the quiet, the birdsong, the smell of warm soil, lets my head properly empty out and sort itself in a way it never quite manages indoors. Whatever life's thrown at me over the years, and it's thrown a fair bit one way or another, I've always found my way back to sorting it out somewhere between the runner beans and the rhubarb.

So tell me, ladies especially, because I know a fair few of you read this with a brew on and your own boots still muddy by the back door: do you ever find yourself using the garden or the plot just to think, rather than to actually do anything much? Pottering about with half a job on the go while your mind wanders off somewhere else entirely? Or is your allotment strictly business, in and out, list ticked off, no daydreaming allowed? I'd love to know how the rest of you use your quiet time outdoors.

Happy growing, everyone. See you on the plot.