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.

Late summer on Plot 29

The Moog and I have been a bit busy to update the blog recently, or possibly a bit lazy, take your pick. I'm going to have a go at bringing things up-to-date over the next few days. Let's start with the end of August.

It occured to me in August that it's a full year since I've had my plot. You may have read that I invested my £7 winnings from second place in the 2007 "Britain in Bloom" competition; this year, ta-da, I have won first prize! a whopping twenty Great British Pounds, and a certificate to boot. I will post some pictures of my front garden for curious blog readers when I get round to it. This year, I invested my winnings in a delicious curry from Cafe Balti in Wolverton.


Also in late summer (Hmph! What summer?! I hear you cry) harvesting was in full flow. I was a bit worried about carrots splitting, so I pulled most of them up in late August and put them in storage. There were loads, as you can see from the picture. Some of them were forked, some of them were split, but overall they've been pretty good. No carrot fly attacks. To store them, I bought a grow-bag for about £1.25 from the nearest DIY shed, and filled two cardboard boxes with layers of carrots and compost. So far (November) they're as fresh and crunchy as they were when they went in. Mind you, the bottom did fall out of one of the boxes last week, covering my shed floor in carrots and compost, you can imagine how pleased I was.


Onions were also dug up, dried in the garden at home (between rain showers), and strung up in the shed. We've been gradually working our way through them, and they're storing really well.

From the greenhouse at home, we collected a big bowl of green tomatoes and ripened them on the window sill. I have to say I couldn't tell the difference between ours and shop-bought ones (that is, ours were not the delicious globes of sweet flavour that I'd been led to expect). And if one more person mentions green tomato chutney, I may have to set an angry Moog on them.

The final crop I started harvesting in late summer was potatoes. The Sarpo Mira variety have been really successful, lots of nice big potatoes, no blight, and they seem to store really well. They eventually all came out of the ground in mid-September, although I think they might have been happy to stay in the ground a bit longer, they were starting to receive attention from slugs, so they came up.

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.

Beginning of the end?

I had a bit of a shock when I spoke to John last, as I mentioned planting some more radishes, he said, "well, yes, there is just time if we get the right weather." It hadn't occured to me that the growing season is beginning to draw to a close.

Turns out he's right. I'd been so busy with the joys of weeding that I hadn't noticed some of my plants beginning to wane. Half my pea plants have turned yellow, and there's a distinct lack of flowers - I'll only get one more crop off those. The French beans, which have produced a magnificent bumper crop and filled my freezer, are also starting to slow down - again, hardly any flowers and the plants have stopped racing up the canes. My autumn raspberries are starting to fruit, too, it was only last week they were covered in bees.

But of course it's not over yet. I've still got plenty to go - maincrop potatoes are still 4-5 weeks off maturity, lettuces are doing fine as are spring onions and carrots (splitting problems aside). My leeks and parsnips are looking good for the winter too.

So, it's not bad news, just time for a change. That's one of the pleasures of gardening, it's never finished, and there's always something happening or something to do. Soon it will be time to start planting autumn crops again (more garlic - it doesn't seem long ago I planted my first ever cloves!), to learn from this year's mistakes and try something new.

Beautiful British Weather

Yesterday Moog and me popped down to the allotment for a bit of harvesting. Of course it rained, but I got down to picking French beans by the handful, giant courgettes, peas, a few carrots and a lettuce for the fridge while Moog sat patiently on the bench.

While harvesting I discovered some of my carrots are split. This is a shame as they won't store very well now. The cause? Our Beautiful British Summer. Apparently carrots split when they start growing suddenly due to heavy rain after a dry spell, which is exactly what we've had. Moog thinks I should have watered them more when it was hot and dry, but then I can only find these things out with experience, and Moog was noticeably lacking in advice at the right time - hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I can only hope the weather hasn't also done for my onions, as I was hoping to store them well into next year.

Summer update

We have reached the very satisfying time of year when I can easily raise a plateful of fresh food at dinner time. So far we have harvested: Radish, lettuce, spring onion, carrots, garlic, potatoes, peas, courgettes, French beans, raspberries and blackberries (those last berries being a benefit of having a wild bramble at the end of my plot). Currently waiting in the wings are: Onions, sweetcorn, leeks and parsnips.


I'm pleased to report my peas were delicious - one of the things I have been really looking forward to was my own fresh peas, as I can remember beign invited to eat them straight out of the pod by my dad when I was a boy. Here's a picture of one of my pods.




'Old Mike's' wise advice on plot location was proved right again last week, when I received a tip from two of my experienced neighbours about onions. Since we've had a hot dry spell, now's the time to lift my onions before they start growing again. Apparently if that happens once they've started to dry out, then they'll split and not store so well. I didn't have time to lift them all or anywhere to dry them (it's been raining since they told me) so I've bent all the tops over as instructed. They should be ready to pull up very soon and with any luck, will store until next year.

Beast of Wolverton

An enormous scary wild beast has been spotted prowling around the allotments. I managed to take a photo and I present it here for analysis.

Moog thinks it might be a perfectly normal domestic cat, but what does Moog know about anything anyway?