Christmas

 I ventured to the plot just before Christmas to collect my veggies for the dinner table. It had been raining solidly for a couple of days and it wasn't the sort of weather I would normally expect to be digging in! See pictures below. The parsnips were hard to get out of the ground and needed a lot of mud washing off but they are in pretty good shape, tasty roots with only a small amount of canker affecting them. I would have expected more damage considering how wet it has been.

I also unearthed the baby carrots I planted in August (at Monty Don's suggestion on Gardener's World). These were not so successful, and had succumbed to quite a lot of wireworm (?) or maybe slug damage on the outer skins. There were enough carrots for a large meal, and a few did make it onto the dinner table, but the sheer amount of work involved in peeling and removing all the damaged flesh of such small carrots was so great I gave up in the end and used shop-bought veg for the sake of my sanity. My overall verdict on this late planting method is that the crop grew quite nicely, no doubt helped by the very warm weather in September, but the germination was very erratic and the crop quite small. Leaving the roots in the ground in such a wet year left them open to attack as I had feared, and I think they would need lifting a lot sooner in future to protect from damage. I think the latest planting time would be mid-July in future, with the aim of lifting in November instead of leaving them to their own devices.

Waterlogging on the plot. Brave daffodils shoots can just be seen in the water.

parsnips, and mud. lots of mud.

Water cascading past the plot on the access road

Overwintering onions seem to be doing well

Some heartening evidence of garlic starting to sprout, but this was the only visible shoot.

It was so wet, my footprints filled up with water after digging up the parsnips.

Sleeping, not dead

Awful weather in November has made it really hard to get to the plot. Any dry days have been taken up with other things so I'm grateful that the plot is in semi-hibernation at the moment.

I was able to pop in and collect the last of my maincrop carrots and the first of my parsnips last week, but that is about it. No more progress on the tidying up and winter digging I wanted to do. My cold frame project is two years overdue and I had grand plans to move the raspberries but that will probably never happen. I am pleased to report that the overwintering onion sets have started to sprout, as has quite a lot of couch grass, despite my best efforts to weed out the roots. We ran out of stored onions a couple of weeks ago, although they fared remarkably well in storage given the miserably damp conditions in which I harvested them.  Only one or two were  unusable due to neck rot where they didn't dry out properly.

It was very satisfying to have no less than four allotment products on the table with a late November roast dinner. They were garlic, potatoes, carrots and parsnips. The parsnips were tasty but I have high hopes that they will now just keep tasting better as we have had a few days of really cold and frosty conditions. I'm also hoping the cold will have kick-started the garlic into life, as there was no sign of it last week. I have some baby carrots still in the ground, I'm hoping nothing has attacked them under the surface as I want to have them at Christmas. The spuds usually last us until then too, but it was a poor year and we've almost run out. I have heard that there may be a shortage, or at least increase in price of seed potatoes next year because of the weather.

Mini harvest time

It's the end of October so time to harvest anything tender that's not already been eaten - such as squashes and pumpkins, ready for Halloween. Here's my mighty squash harvest. Not bad for a year's work, eh?



Mini squash.



Hmm, well maybe not. OK so what else? I also brought in the fast-growing French beans I planted in August (total six beans) and the last of my cucumbers, of which there were three, so a bit better there.  The baby carrots I planted in August all have very promising top growth so I am hoping for great things from them, after my maincrop is finished. Speaking of which, I unearthed a handful of maincrop carrots and also a huge block of concrete weighing about 10 kilos. That might explain why so many of my carrots are forked and stunted (careful how you say that). Bear in mind also, this is not the first crop in this bed or the first massive lump of concrete I've extracted. Oh well. Life is full of surprises, as they say.

On the positive side things are still fairly neat and I have managed to get both over-wintering onions and garlic in the ground nice and early. It's been cold, but not quite cold enough for parsnips - I'm waiting for a good couple of hard frosts to sweeten them up. The tops look good, let's hope there's something underneath, not just concrete.

Only one real job for the winter, build the cold frames I didn't build earlier this year, that might have saved my squash plants. Watch this space.

The allotment year begins again

I have decided that October 1st is the beginning of the gardening year. This is because harvesting is pretty much over for the season and it is now time to start planting and preparing for next year. I think I've mentioned on here before, how viewing the autumn as a time for new beginnings turns the seasons around a bit in my head and makes the winter that little bit easier to deal with. Rent was also paid on time this year after last year's fun and games with the local council. Their date for rental payments is something that new plot owners could take heed of. Most people who take on a new plot in the autumn seem to do a little bit of clearing then disappear until the first warm day of May, when they will realise they are already behind and give up.

Having said harvesting is over, I still have carrots in the ground and cucumbers keep on coming (see picture). I've been very pleased with my cucumber harvest, after a bit of a false start the one remaining plant has provided me with a steady supply of tasty fruits that store well once picked. To someone with a busy life who might not get down to the plot as often as they would like, they also have the desirable characteristic that they don't become monsters overnight like courgettes.

Spiny cucumber, plus weeds.

This weekend we had some clear weather and I unexpectedly found myself with a couple of hours to get to grips with the plot. I haven't done anything useful down there for a couple of weeks so was pleased to clear a large section at the front of the plot which had become overgrown, dug it all over, added a bit of compost from the heap and planted 50 onion sets (variety 'radar'). This year I used a nice big spool of sturdy orange string to help make neat rows, although if the birds pull up any of the sprouting sets it's never quite clear where to put them back in.

Next job is to plant some garlic in time for halloween to keep the vampires away. I wanted to get a good French hardneck variety but can't find any in the local garden centres, so I may have to order online or just replant some of my bulbs from storage.

Tidy

It seems hard to imagine, standing on a sun-baked plot in September that just a few weeks ago we thought it might never stop raining. One of the benefits of having had most of my crops ruined by this year's weather is that I can find time to do all those tidying up jobs that I never normally get round to. So the plot is looking quite tidy at the moment and I've even managed to do some autumn digging. Today I managed to dig up and burn a lot of weed roots and got rid of a big bag of rubbish. When the plot is tidy I feel more in tune with it, I hope weather and time continues to let me keep on top of it.

It's easier to see the structure of the plot when it's tidy too. I'm thinking of making more of an effort next year to get the top part of the plot shaped a bit more like a garden, with flowers for cutting and maybe some shrubs or herbs. The end of the plot closest to the shed is never very productive for veg growing. I think maybe some wild flowers would work better if the soil is poor. It was always my intention to have the plot as a garden with a mixture of planting but sometimes, like this year, I don't plant as many flowers and I always miss them.


 

Harvesting (and funny carrot picture)

There's nothing quite like bringing home a basket of fruit and veg at this time of year. I popped to the plot on my runabout bike which is an elderly Raleigh Estelle with a basket on the front. I may have picked rather too much as the ride home was a little tricky. You don't see Bradley Wiggins trying to stop potatoes flying onto the road as he goes along.

Basket of delights. Slightly too heavy for an elderly bicycle

Included in the basket are new potatoes, carrots, peas, French beans, onion, garlic and a rather nice cucumber. This is my second ever cucumber, which I hope is as nice as my first ever cucumber, which I picked a few days ago. That is another satisfying allotment feeling, trying something for the first time and finding out it's really rather good.

My first ever cucumber

Finally, as promised, the obligatory funny-looking carrot shot:

Funny looking carrots: The allotment staple.

Playing catch-up

It's official; it's a terrible gardening year. Monty Don said so on Gardener's World, and Terry Walton said so on Gardener's Click. All my allotmenteering friends and neighbours agree, too. This knowledge has lifted my spirits, because now, I'm not alone. I was getting a bit downhearted and wondering why I bother, but now I know everyone else has had collapsing seedlings, poor yields, slug attacks and phenomenal weed growth, I feel in good company. There's a sort of blitz spirit, perhaps if we keep our heads down we might just get through it.


Photgraphic proof that the sun did shine, albeit briefly, in 2012

Monty said it's not too late to plant things so I followed his example and got some baby carrot seeds into the ground. I may not have many potatoes for Christmas this year but maybe I'll have a few carrots instead. I also put some dwarf French beans ('crops in 7 weeks', the packet says) and when I have cleared a space, I will put some spring onions in as well.

In other positive news, there are some peas and beans on their way through soon, and I await with interest to see if my cucumbers are edible.  They are about the size of a small sausage presently and looking good. We've had some new potatoes, although they're a bit bigger and fatter than I would have liked. I've never actually been able to time new potato growing properly, they either get killed by frost or I let them grow too big. They should breed a variety that grows a little stalk with a flag on it when the potatoes are at optimum size.

Lots of other plots are looking much more overgrown than mine. I'm disappointed to see a few newly-rented plots have already been left to be reclaimed by the weeds, the new gardeners no doubt as dispirited as I have been this year. I guess having no experience to tell them things might get better (if not easier), they have given up. Having said that, I started working my plot in 2007 which was, at the time, one of the wettest summers ever seen, and I'm still here. So perhaps the expectations of these new entrants are too high, or they just don't have the staying power that is needed.

One pleasant side-effect of tall weeds everywhere is that quite a few wild flowers are blooming, and I had thought of just letting mine grow and calling it 'prairie planting' like they do on TV. Only a couple of weeks ago the grass was waist high in places. However, the lack of good growth and harvesting has meant I have been able to spend my last few visits to the plot catching up with the weeds, and it is beginning to look like a plot that is cared for once again.

I've also started dismantling the wooden borders I had been putting round my beds. The grand plan was to fill them up like raised beds, but of course I have never had the volume of compost or topsoil available to do that properly. The boards do mark out the edges nicely, but in reality they get in the way, and mainly harbour slugs and other menaces, so they're coming out. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to come to this decision, perhaps it's because I didn't want to undo the hard work of putting them in. But I am learning that allotmenteering is more successful when you accept that nothing is permanent, and you work with what you've got, not against it.