Overdue plot visit!

It’s almost a fortnight since we visited the plot. The gloomy weather hasn’t encouraged us, we’ve also had lots to do in the garden and seem to have busy doing other things too.

Encouraged by the appearance of the sun and the need to replenish our fresh vegetable stocks we decided to go allotmenting this weekend.

As always the first thing that has to be done when visiting the plot - that is after donning waterproof boots, a necessity at this time of year if we are to avoid soggy socks - is to wander around checking on what is growing or in need of most urgent attention.

The peas that we sowed in October have now germinated well - much better than they did earlier in the year. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see whether they make it through the winter. We’re not going to give them any special protection, just leaving them to fend for themselves  to find out just how hardy late sown peas are! 

The winter onions are growing well and some of the garlic is shooting. The varieties of garlic that are furthest on are Lautrec Wight, Edenrose, Germidour and Purple Wight. Albigensian Wight is just beginning to produce shoots but as yet there is no sign of the other varieties. I’ll update on how each variety is performing in the greenhouse in a later post. All was not completely well in the onion bed though as it wasn’t only the onions and garlic that were growing. Chickweed was beginning to stake a claim for soil domination. As onions don’t really enjoy competing with weeds I decided my priority task was to do a bit of weeding.

It hasn’t taken long for our soil to go from as dry as a desert to wet and sticky. We haven’t had a great amount of rain but enough to make weeding out chickweed a very yukky task as the state of my gardening gloves will prove. Anyway the job is done and the bed looks better for it.

While I was weeding Martyn was tidying up the plum tree that cracked under the weight of so many plums during summer. He's posted about it on his blog here.

There should no longer be any white butterflies about trying to find a suitable place to lay their eggs and the wood pigeons only tend to attack young plants so we also decided to take the insect netting off our brassicas. Last year we think that the damage to overwintering brassicas was down to the snow building up on the net which eventually collapsed onto the plants. If the snow had covered the plants naturally it would have built up gradually but we think the collapse of the netting meant the plants were in effect squashed by the sudden weight that dropped on top of them. Hopefully if it does snow heavily again this year the plants will have a better chance.

Our harvesting list is here but one rather amazing mini harvest was a handful of autumn raspberries. Very strange to pick fresh raspberries in the last half of November. 

If you want to know what we harvested - including our first parsnips and sprouts of the year the list is here