Things To Do

Apologies for the silence - I've been fighting a horrendous cold, which has kept me out of the garden, uninspired in the kitchen, and generally unable to do very much at all. (I always seem to get these things ten times worse than anyone else - especially since a spot of bronchitis a few years back scarred my lungs.) I'm getting waaay behind in the garden and allotment now as winter approaches, and the list of things to do is getting longer and longer!

• Plant out broccoli, kale and spring cabbage plants - I picked some young plants up in Homebase.
• Buy, and plant, overwinter onions and garlic - I've never manage to autumn-plant before and I'd really like to try this year.
• Sow spinach and winter salad greens.
• Sow overwinter carrots and onions - it's probably too late for this now, I'm not sure...
• Pull last beetroots and make chutney.
• Dig the rest of the potatoes!
• Tidy and cut back the strawberries.
• Clear old bean plants - the French beans have kept producing all summer, despite a rough patch in the middle - I'm so pleased! - but they're just about finished now.
• Weed EVERYTHING!
• Sow green manures, if it's not too late - I have a big pack of Phacelia seeds I bought last year and didn't use.

What else can I still sow for the winter, when I get back out there? I've been very good at clearing old crops this year, so I have lots of bare soil to fill!

In the meantime, and because I hate to write a post without a picture, I have really been enjoying this bunch of sunflowers we brought home from the plot three weeks ago! They were still closed when we cut them, but they were self-sown and in the way, and had to be sacrificed. They've done really well on our windowsill and look amazing when the sun shines through them in the morning.

A Day Without Learning is a Day Wasted

This is how our allotment looks at the moment:

Gah! But don't be fooled; it's not all nettles and fat hen. There's asparagus, cauliflowers, broccoli, calabrese, herbs, leeks, swedes, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, runner beans, beetroots and all manner of courgettey squashy things in there too. And check out those sunflowers!

This past week we've dug up most of our potatoes. It's not a very impressive harvest - I guess those late frosts did more damage than we thought - but they'll keep us going for a while, and I suspect there are a few more more deep ones to be found when we have time to dig over the patch a second time.

We also brought home our apple harvest; three times what we had last year! Although one as you can see has been munched by a maggot.

And we brought home our garlic too; thirteen small but lovely bulbs. One of them had gone to flower, and what a funny creature! At the top of the flower stem was a bunch of tiny garlic cloves, exactly the same as the ones that form bunched together in the ground! Who knew? I'd never have guessed they grow cloves both at the bottom and at the top of the plant!

Well, you learn something new every day!

Summer Sights, and the River Ver

We rushed to the allotment early this morning to beat the heat, and got loads and loads of weeding done and the patch dug for the everlasting cauliflowers, which I will plant out at the next opportunity. When the weeds are clear the plot really looks pretty good - this is definitely our best year so far.

The asparagus ferns are looking really lush now, with the petunias flowering beneath. The ferns are covered in tiny flowers and it's pretty funny watching the huge bumblebees trying to get inside them!

The swedes look like they're doing well down there.

The runner bean flowers are opening.

The leeks are weed-free again and thriving.

We were surprised to find a few raspberries appearing on our new raspberry canes! I thought we wouldn't get any fruit until next year!

And we have our first sunflower, albeit a very small one.

I can't wait to try these summer crookneck squash. You eat them like courgettes, but they are supposed to have an even better flavour. Anyone else tried them?

As you can see, the plot is looking good - even... dare I say it... tidy and organised!

We took a slightly different route home today, just out of curiosity. The river Ver runs along one side of our allotment site, and we followed it. The path runs most of the way through town, along a strip of woodland between streets and back gardens, and it was rather pleasant. I can't believe I've lived here 30 years, had my allotment for four, and I've never been along here before!

The Ver is not a big or impressive river these days - it's only a few inches deep in many places - but it's our river and we like it. I guess it must have been much more significant once upon a time, when people first settled here and the Roman city was built and so on. It still makes itself known from time to time in no uncertain terms when it reverts to its original course and floods the allotments!

Not all of the river is hidden away - here it flows under a main road and we walk past this pretty scene all the time. At the moment there are mounds and mounds of water forget-me-nots on the bank.

And look what else was hiding in the reeds right by the edge of the road!

At this point we would have rejoined our usual route home, but we decided to keep walking along the river into the park. These are more familiar scenes; I love walking in the park and am so lucky to have it on my doorstep!

The lake was man-made in the early thirties, and the Ver carefully routed along one side of it (on the right of the picture).

There are dozens of varieties of ducks and geese here - and when we come here regularly enough it's lovely to see them raising their new families each year! Last spring and summer I made a point of walking through nearly every day, and became quite familiar with each little clan and where it lived and how it was doing.

On the way out of the park is this octagonal pub, reputed to be the oldest pub in Britain, although there are other contenders. We were going to stop for lunch but decided to save our money for this evening... That's a whole nother blog...

The wording on this sign outside always makes me giggle!

Update

As promised, here's a rundown of some of the things we've been up to on the plot over the last seven days!

The main task has been to clear and dig the pumpkin patch - which is actually three of our square beds. These grew completely wild last year and were covered in nettles, creeping buttercups and teasels, and the year before that they suffered from tomato blight (the far square) and onion white rot (the near square) and had diseased plant matter left on them. (Careless I know. Must do better...) Because of this, we didn't want to put any of the weeds and soil from here into the compost, so we think we've solved the problem by clearing and digging two of the squares and piling all the organic matter onto the farthest bed, hotbed style.

I think I'll cover it in black plastic too, to try to stop anything in there growing, and I'll plant some of the pumpkins and squashes through the plastic into pockets of fresh compost. Hopefully the hungry squashes will enjoy the extra nourishment, and by the end of the year everything will have composted nicely and the disease will be pretty much dealt with by the lovely composting microbes. What do you reckon?

Everything's been enjoying the sun; myself included. The comfrey is bursting into flower, which the bees are loving.

And the broad beans are flowering too, even though they're less than a foot high! What's that all about? Can plants this small really bear that many beans??

The salad greens are coming on really well, and are due some thinning.

The near bed contains spinach and little gem lettuce. The far one has, from left to right, some rather pathetic red spring onions, three little rows of head lettuces and lollo rossa, some patchy beetroot, some very enthusiastic and very crowded radishes, and lots of green spring onions.

But the warm weather has brought these little blighters out too:

Since I started growing petunias under my asparagus, I've hardly seen any asparagus beetles, and certainly never had any eggs laid on my crop. This year there are quite a few about, and quite a lot of eggs too, so I squished as many eggs as I could, quickly weeded the bed again and planted out this year's petunias.

They usually hate being planted out, but these ones are settling in very well and are untouched by slugs too, which is a first! And do you see the row of sunflowers at the back of the bed? They are rather frostbitten, poor things, but I think they will pull through.

While I was weeding the asparagus bed I found a lot of these:

Has the asparagus self-sown? Or is this some weed I haven't seen before? They were all over the strawberry bed six foot away as well!

I've also planted out my runner beans. Well, all five of them. Only five out of 25+ seeds germinated - the rest rotted in the pots! So I have direct-sown some more.

I bought these obelisks a couple of years back to try to train cucumbers and trailing squashes up. It didn't really work, but I couldn't just get rid of them so now I'm using them for beans. On the top and left of this picture you can just about see my courgettes and crookneck squash as well, thriving in their new outdoor homes.

These perennial sweet peas are planted out right next to the compost bin to grow up and over it throughout the summer. I will pin some strings or mesh to the front of the bin to help them, and hopefully they'll die down in time for messing about with compost over the autumn and winter, then come back up next year. Well, that's the idea anyway. I'm not very familiar with sweet peas so I'm looking forward to seeing how they grow. And if it doesn't work there will be plenty of self-sown nasturtiums around, as always, to step in.

Blogging Buddies

If you know me then you'll know I like to keep myself to myself - I'm not usually the sort to go round introducing myself or leaving comments on other people's websites. But this blog is nearly a year old now and it's high time it had more than three readers (even three may be a little optimistic I think!). So I've been on a mission this week to get myself noticed a bit more, by e-introducing myself to some other veg-growing bloggers, and begging and scrounging for mutual links left right and centre.
So if you're reading this, please also take a look at some of my new-found blogging friends, especially Gnome (who said some very nice things about my pictures here), Pumpkin Soup (a lovely neat, organised and efficient blog the likes of which I can only aspire to) and Hedgewizard (what a hilarious and engaging writer - be sure to read the unfortunate story of his pond, Jan 24th!). The links are all over there on the right, and the list will continue to grow I hope!

My 'blogging' new year resolution is to post little and often, so they will be more focussed and not so daunting to sit down and write! Hopefully it'll make labelling easier too; no point tagging every post with "digging, weeds, slugs, potatoes, beans, rain, compost, lettuce, courgettes, sweetcorn, asparagus..." - you get the idea!

So that's your lot for today. Except for this picture of a rather strange sunflower which I never got round to posting last year. Siamese sunflowers, anyone? This plant (which was supposed to be a "tall single") produced several 'conjoined' heads like this!

Winter

Sorry I've been quiet over the winter but hey - the allotment has too. Here's a quick recap of the few things you've missed.

I did plant a whole load of winter/spring cabbages, kale and calabrese (broccoli), but the slugs got them all despite my best efforts! I managed a small patch of turnips, which we're harvesting now, but they are a bit slug-nibbled too. I need a better strategy this year...

Our row of leeks are still developing nicely. I should have marked the parsnip row, because the leaves have all died and now I can't find them! Whoops.

We harvested the onions in September and stored them in string bags in the kitchen - we're still using them now, though I think ideally they should be somewhere colder, as some of them are starting to grow!


I need to find a better storage solution for our potatoes too, which we are still eating. I kept them inside the house in boxes but they're sprouting much too soon. I'm afraid the mice will get them if I put them outside... Suggestions welcome!

We picked our pumpkin in October - a fine specimen! Yes, just the one, but it fed us for about two weeks! We had pumpkin and potato stew, lovely pumpkin and rosemary pasta, and 'lantern soup' which has pumpkin, sweet potatoes and haricot beans. I wanted to try a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi too, but didn't have the time.



We dried our 'Canadian Wonder' kidney beans, and a handful of borlotto. The harvest wasn't great for either because of the rather large bramble that came up in the middle of the patch, so we only got a jarful, but I wanted to see the experiment through anyway. However, I checked on them after a couple of months to find THIS!


Blasted bean weevils ruined the whole lot! (Then suffocated slowly to death in the closed jar - haha!) I'm not sure if it's worth trying dried beans again. My only hope is that a different variety might be less attractive to them - they went for the red ones but not the borlotto...

It's January now and I'm planning for the year ahead, having learned plenty already from experience over the last ten months! I'm glad I can get an earlier start this year, and I'll be writing all about it again from now on.

For now I'll leave you with a couple more pictures from last year:

A sleepy bumblebee hiding in one of our sunflowers in late September.


And the one and only truss of tomatoes that grew on our blight-infested crop. They're 'red pear', hence the shape. Sadly though, they never turned red!