Autumn photo gallery

In my continued effort to keep up to date, here are a few photos from the last few months down on the plot.










First, my sunflowers eventually started producing blooms, and we had a fair few vases full of these in the house for a while. I happened to notice them on sale in the florists for an extortionate amount! Mine cost the price of a pack of seeds, about £2, and now, of course, I have an airing cupboard full of free seeds for next year! The hyperbole on the seed packet led me to believe I would need sunglasses to look at these, and people would be coming from far and wide to view my many-coloured blooms. Far from becoming something of a local celebrity, I was a bit disappointed that the ‘harlequin’ seeds produced mostly bog-standard yellow flowers.










I was quite excited at the beginning of autumn, planning what to plant for next year, but the excitement has worn off in the face of regular rain showers and the return to GMT which have both been keeping me off the plot.

Here, however, are pictures of my first winter veg. Parsnips have been slowly growing away all year, thanks to early identification by John they didn’t get pulled up. They’re nice and sweet.

Pak Choi are now coming along well. These are to be used in the spring, or whenever they are big enough. I seem to have solved the flea beetle problem by applying simple cardboard collars (as seen on Gardener’s World) and covering them with a mini polytunnel, excellent value from B&Q only £9.99. Also in the polytunnel are spring onions and overwintering lettuce. I’ll see how the spring onions get on, but I may not bother with many more of those – they’re easy to grow but never seem to be ready when I want them, and don’t seem to store well – when they’re so ridiculously cheap in the shops all year round I might devote the space to something else.









Not pictured here are my leeks. I couldn’t get a picture because they’re too small for the human eye to detect. The biggest ones are only like the baby leeks you get from the supermarket. I suspect a combination of poor soil and late planting out.

Everyone else at Stacey Hill seems to have grown leeks as big as American fire hydrants, with their luxuriant, rust-free foliage waving and mocking me as I pass. Mine are more like pencils. And not even those big novelty pencils you get at the seaside. Mind you, they still taste good.

Failure Count

I have had lots of congratulations from various people on my successes this year, so Moog thought I should let reality have a look in and share some of my failures:

1. Cut and Come Again salad leaves. These all bolted to seed. In fairness, not really a failure, because the reason they bolted was that I chose not to pick them - they didn't taste very nice!

2. Wild Rocket. All germinated, and then all completely wiped out by flea beetle. Almost overnight there was nothing left, not even a stalk.

3. Radishes and Pak Choi have been riddled with holes by flea beetle. This is probably due to me eradicating their favoured food source, which is Oilseed Rape. I can't win.

4. Tomatoes. I don't know why I bother. One minute they're fine, the next minute, the stems and fruits are brown with blight. John pointed it out to me this week and I was forced to burn all my allotment tomatoes. Greenhouse crop is still going steady at home. For now.

5. Leek rust. This covered my garlic, but luckily didn't spoil the crop. It has now graduated on to my leeks. Hopefully the white parts under the soil will be saved from destruction (apparently you can still eat rusty leeks if it doesn't get too bad) but after seeing how fast it spread I have decided to resort to a chemical spray of dithane (fungicide) on this crop to try and save them.

6. Split carrots. I avoided carrot fly, but quite a few carrots got too big and split, so I've had to harvest them all to stop them growing any bigger. Hopefully I'll be able to store them for long enough, only time will tell.

I blame all these problems squarly on the weather - a bit more sunshine and warmth in August wouldn't go amiss! The only time we did get any sun, I went to the plot in shorts and got attacked by my next pest:

7. Red ants. These aggressive little blighters managed to get into my boot and bit me 4-5 times, making my whole foot swell up to about twice normal size! And it itched like mad!

So there you go; it's not all rosy down at the plot, even if I make it look that way sometimes.