Autumn 2019, preparation for the winter.

 So, now that we are starting to get shorter cooler days, as the beds are cleared of the tender crops, I am filling them with the winter veg.

This bed was a potato bed, which was cleared mid August. It was technically cleared much earlier, but I wanted to sieve the potato beds after harvesting to both mix in fresh compost, and to sieve out any remaining potatoes to avoid volunteers, and to remove any bits of non-organic matter that was brought in with the topsoil we bought.

So on the 19th of August I sowed Spinach, two types, Butterflay and Early Prickly. I also sowed coriander which i will transplant to the greenhouse once the tomatoes are all out. And I did a cheeky sowing of one variety of Dwarf French Beans and one of Runner Beans. I mainly did the beans because I like to take a chance on warm weather in the late autumn, I don't routinely sow beans this late. I got the seeds from Seed Co-operative.

These took no time at all to start kicking into action, and I am already cropping the spinach [second picking on the 7th September].

 Bed on 7th September.

I've also sown the three other sieved potato beds with a mixed bag of seeds; mainly consisting of whatever half used packets of anything from carrots to dill, to Chinese cabbages, to kales, lettuces, radishes etc.

These get started and seem to grow better in the beds than in seed trays, so it makes sense to start them off there and then transplant them to their final positions as other beds are emptied. So I've put the more tender stuff into the greenhouse beds [Pak Choi and Chinese Cabbages], and moved the more hardy stuff to the beds that the huge carrots were in.

I'm also doing a winter tomato trial. I've sown some Maskotka tomatoes, around mid July, and transplanted into deep pots. I've put the first two into the greenhouse beds; where I took other tomatoes out. They already have their first flowers on, and the idea is to keep them low to the ground, bending them over if necessary so that the stems root and get as much nutrition as possible, and then see how late I can get them to crop. I did these last night and by the time I got to the allotment today they had already lifted their heads up to the sun. 

I used Maskotka as they are a bush tomato, and they seem much happier in colder temperatures and they also taste lovely.

Summer 2019 - The Allotment

Just as a refresher:

We got the allotment 10 years ago. It looked like this.

We spent years, and years, trying different things. The council had rotavated it before we got it, which chopped up all the weeds, and we struggled to overcome the clay, which sucked up any and all organic matter that we added to it.

After about 8 years, we tried woodchip. Thick woodchip mulches, but this didn't work.  It probably would have had we just left it to rot down but we wanted to get some growing out of it and it was allowing weeds and pests to overwinter and nothing really grew properly.

So just over a year ago we were going to give it up. And put a little polytunnel in at home for tomatoes. When I had a thought - what would I do if I inherited this plot at a school...and I would cover it with weed fabric, and bring in raised beds.

And then I discovered Pallet Collars.

We took a week off work.

Flattened the whole allotment, by raking out all the woodchip.

Then laid weed fabric [30m x 8m plot, £99 for the fabric].

I bought pallet collars. 27 at first. 

I grew over the winter of 2018; I had overwintering onions, spinach, lettuce, coriander and to be honest, we were eating very well through the whole of last winter.

This spring and summer has been bountiful. We've had the best potatoes ever, no slug damage. We've had salads, radishes, tomatoes, more carrots, squashes, garlic, broad beans, french beans - dwarf and climbing, onions, Kohl Rabi, kale [so much kale that I was bunching loads each week like a bunch of flowers, and leaving it at the end of the plot for the chickens down the road], I've got Yard Long Beans to grow, I've got parsnips growing now for winter, we've had strawberries, black, red and white currants, i've put tomatos from armpits into a one collar deep bed and they have gone mad, I've got amazing beetroot and even the later beetroot that was sown is bulking up, so much so that the last batch I sowed, Dobbie's Purple has grown so fast that i can use the best specimens for seed saving for next year.

We've had more crops out of these beds, since last September, then we have probably had out of the ground in the last 5 years.

So, I bought some more, and more and now i am probably at capacity for what we can eat.

So now I feel I am back on an even keel, I am going to try and go back to blogging about growing in these raised beds. They are awesome.

Late summer 2019. Carrots.

I have no regrets about changing the way we grow on the plot. 

I sowed Oxheart Carrots using Baker Creek seeds [from Missouri], which in the greater scheme of things was yes, quite expensive but has already washed its face as they say. 

I sowed them in March, in between the Garlics that I had put in during last October, which I had left over from a teaching session. They germinated quite quickly, and steamed ahead. I was thrilled when they started getting some girth but I never expected this.

Now, I've been saving seeds of plants for years, and I know I shouldn't save from plants that flower early. But, I'm going to let the 3 that are flowering, flower and save the seeds and see if I get decent carrots next year. If so, I'll save from the slowest to flower. It's worth the risk. 

These carrots are sweet, don't go woody and have had absolutely no issues whatsoever.