Saltburn
Allotments Association
Has the weather taken a turn for the better? The nights are definitely drawing out, the sun’s streaming in the window and I’ve tidied up our shed, polytunnel and pot store. What more can a girl ask for in early February? It’s interesting that there are more and more web sites
about gardening and “grow your own”. Kitchen Garden Magazine at
www.kitchengarden.co.uk now has video clips of allotment gardening month-by-month. While it’s been so “deep and crisp and even” I’ve noticed that there seems to be an increase in the number of vegie talk forums and blogs as well. Some examples include
www.ukveggardeners.com,
www.horticultural.com,
vegplotting.blogspot.com and,
www.growveg.info. I wonder if this is a way of getting children more involved? Anyway, back in the land of reality, there are quite a few
things we can be sowing now, particularly if you have any warm areas, a bright windowsill, greenhouse, polytunnel or cold frame. Cover up the top of a cold frame on these very cold winter nights with an old blanket or the like. One article I read recently suggested sowing parsnips in pots to give them a good start in life. If you did try that, you’d need to make sure that the long taproot didn’t start to wind itself around the pot, as this will result in very twisted, forked parsnips. You can sow salad leaves, onion seeds, parsnips, broad
beans, early peas, summer cabbage, radishes, turnips and lettuce in the ground in February and plant onion sets and garlic cloves. It’s better if you’re able to warm the ground first and cover the seed rows with some protection such as cloches. A task we aim to tackle with the Grow and Learn course
this month is to prepare an asparagus bed in a nice sunny site in the kitchen garden we have been very kindly allowed to use. We will be digging over the patch and getting rid of all the weeds before digging in lots of weed free and well rotted manure. We will then cover the patch with something to warm it up before digging a trench and planting the asparagus in March. Talking of trenches, we are also going to dig a climbing bean trench; two spades deep if possible and piling in lots of kitchen waste, scrunched up newspaper and spent compost/well rotted manure before covering with earth. This is a tried and tested way of getting a lovely rich patch of ground for a future bumper crop. If you have free standing apple and pear trees and/or
gooseberry and current bushes, you need to finish pruning them this month if you haven’t done this already. Also, if you have any autumn raspberries, the canes need to be pruned to ground level.
Undercover and heated, you can sow tomatoes, peppers
and some say aubergines. A friend of mine on our committee, who reminded me about the bean trenches, has good success with aubergines if she leaves sowing them until the end of March/early April, she gets a good result so, worth a try. We will be getting our potatoes in the allotment
containers very soon and new seeds. Come and see us and get your growing year off to a great start. Happy gardening,
Sue 48
Rotary Club News
The big freeze which hit the UK in the run up to Christmas, made rather a mess of activities scheduled for the festive season. Luckily, the Club’s Chocolate/ Bottle/Tombola stand in the Community Centre fund raising for the President’s Charity, Deprived Children at Christmas, was extremely well patronised by the generous citizens of Saltburn and beyond. The bright dry weather was also a key factor in
the successful running of the event. All tickets for the Tombola were sold by the early afternoon and all of the eighty plus prizes were claimed and when the final accounting had taken place a grand total of six hundred and forty pounds was the result. This meant that after deductions for expenses totalling some £139 pounds, the president’s charity had benefited by over £400.
Our sincere and heartfelt thanks are due to all
those people who gave of their time and effort to make this venture the success it has achieved, particularly members of the ’53 Drama Group, providing and setting up the Father Christmas grotto, the many members and friends of the Rotary Club of Saltburn, who provided the bulk of the tombola prizes and finally the gentleman who did not identify himself, but provided the event with a large bagful of assorted presents and bottles to boost our list of prizes.
The Star Prize chocolate display produced by
Chocolini’s, which was displayed to great effect, was won by Mrs. Shaw of Brotton. Following the success of the event last year,
the Stroke Awareness Day, which the club helped to organise and run, ably assisted by the local experts in this field, will again be repeated on Saturday, April 9th. Going on past experience, the club will attempt to provide a caravan to assist with the blood pressure checks which are a significant part of the tests carried out on volunteers from the general public. With the Easter holiday now on the horizon,
the Grand Ol’ Opry of Cleveland (to be held during Easter week) is at the top of the agenda and a brief interim report from past president Mike Sellars informed that an advert will go in the SCAA flyers in the coming weeks. Our latest member, Martin Nesbitt, who was instrumental in providing many of the acts last year, suggested that better acts could be enticed to the program if expenses could be made available to help with transport costs. In view of this, the club will pledge £600 towards these costs and with the 150th anniversary of the founding of Saltburn this year, the Grand Ol’ Opry will be linked to these celebrations which will provide added interest to the proceedings. A committee has been formed to monitor the
week long event with the first of several meetings being held at the Cricket Club on Tuesday, January 25th at 8 pm. It was also agreed by the club that the Opry raffle, which has been very successful in the past, will now have a top prize of £150 cash.
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