End of year roundup

Once again, the end of another year and it looks really damp and dismal down the plot.

Time to reflect on the highs and lows of the year. And this year did not disappoint. That summer! Wow! Hottest ever. Put paid to a lot of crops, and boosted others. But lets give a blow by blow account of what happened.

January - Tree trimming. There is now a new path alongside of us. Traditionally on the East Side Allotments there has only been paths between each second allotments. Which meant that there was a path between Plot 29 and 30. There has never been a path between 30 and 31. But because of the way the new woodchip and manure bays have been built, there was a small piece of unused ground. To compensate for me taking over that small section I had to build a path to the very back of the plots. Which means that the tree needed to be chopped. So it got cut back allowing you to walk unhindered along the path. But the committee were not quite satisfied with it and said that even more had to be cut off. This will have to wait until next January.
February - I was still building extra beds at the front of the plot. We now finally have our full compliment of beds... at the front and centre. We still need something doing for the rear of the plot. Guess what next Feb's job is?
March - Wow. The Beast from the East blew in. Super cold, but I was still putting the last touches of beds in along the new section by the manure and woodchip bays. I still need to do some work along there as the grass seems to have a very strong hold and it will need digging out before too long. We also held our annual spring clean down the plot.
April - Now we're getting somewhere. This is when the most of the spring planting and seeds gets done, but the month started really wet. Once again I had a week off work to do a whole load of stuff down the allotment. During that week, although we didn't know it, the seeds were also sown for the weather for the rest of the year. We had the hottest April on record since 1949. Oh dear, at the time we didn't know what was coming along in our future.
May - Now we're transplanting and potting on our seedlings. But we're also struggling under the heat. For a change we actually had a sunny May Bank Holiday. We quickly ran out of room in the greenhouse and had to start getting stuff outside. Of course, once that happened it was feeding time for the slugs.
June - Time for strawberries. Oh, end of strawberries too. The heat caused the strawberries to suddenly put forth a whole load of fruit, then stop producing altogether towards the end of the month. This also had effects on other crops as well, such as the Potatoes.
July - By now we were starting to flag under the heat. Not only the constant watering, but I was also facing redundancy from my job. After 9.5 years I was laid off at the end of the month. But we did get to see our first melon. It was only a rough trial just to see if it was possible. But it worked.
August - New month, and a new job. Had a week off between leaving on and starting the other. Spent most of it down the allotment... watering. Once again, we seem to be having issues with our carrots. They're forked into looking like the spawn of Cthulhu. Still, they were pretty good in soups. The long dry month also meant we could spend a lot of time in the evenings down there. Mostly with a BBQ. Over the year we held 5 BBQs. I suspect that we may be doing the same again next year.
September - We're in full blown harvest. The Courgettes were cranking... I didn't keep count this year, but it must have been way over 100. The sweetcorns were so-so. the "Organic" variety we had didn't amount to much, but our regular variety did well. But still no good for eating on the cob. But the Chillies... wow. That long hot summer did absolute wonders for them.
October - Now things are starting to come to an end. We did find a load of extra squashes and such. Whilst our Courgettes did they're usual thing and cranked out a shed load, our Honey Bear Squashes didn't really amount to much. Yes they produced some fruits, but to be honest the taste of them was extremely bland and... meh. But something to consider for next year, or any year.
November - By now everything was over. Yes there was the odd thing here or there to tide us over such as beetroots and carrots, but now it's mostly down to putting the beds to sleep for the winter (courtesy of a large delivery of manure and wood chips) and making sure everything is battened down ready for winter.
December - Meh. Nothing. We don't really do over-winter veg. It not something we really aspire to. Of course we keep popping down the allotment every week to drop off our compost scraps and see if Frankie is still around, but other than the Chard and the Strawberries, we don't have anything planned for winter. I suppose we could consider Kale, but the last tine we did that, the damn pigeons scoffed it all. Maybe we need a caged area?

So what went well?
Tomatoes - They took off like a shot. We ended up giving a lot of them away. Though we have kept a lot of seeds, but we're probably going to try some other varieties next year.

Chillies - The long hot summer was perfect for chillies. Like the Tom's, we've kept a load of seeds so we're going to try to lay in a stock of dried chillies for the next decade.

Courgettes - Does anything stop these? Well yes, slugs. But after they've grown too big for slugs to attack then they just keep cranking them out.

Rhubarb - Our trusty rhubarb has done it again. Well next year we may have our very own addition to jam making. We have three Ginger Plants growing in the kitchen at home, so here's to making our own Rhubarb and Ginger Jam.

Soy Beans - The trick with the toilet rolls worked wonders. We has a full crop of them and they were excellent. Same again next year please.

Pak choi - Never really had much luck, but this year, growing them in the troughs in the greenhouse worked wonders. Have to try that trick again, but of course the real trick is getting them not to bolt.

And what failed?
Onions - We've not really had good luck with onions. But we're hoping that the Stuttgarters will do better. We'll have to see.
Potatoes - The long hot summer meant that they lacked water. As such they came out rather small. On the plus side though, there was no evidence of blight on the plots this year.
Sweetcorn - Well they were OK. But especially good, but the ones meant to be best for corn-on-the-cob just didn't produce properly. Was it the weather? Lack of rain? Possibly.
Cape Gooseberries - Something else I'll have to put down to the weather. They just didn't set theit fruit.
Peas - Didn't even germinate. Maybe I should do the toilet roll trick with these next year?
Beans - Well two of them did germinate... out of 36. Not a good success rate.

Obviously there are a load of other things, such as the carrots, beetroots, grapes, apples and such that we grew. And don't forget the flowers. Our front pieces of the petunias were definitely a talking point.

Next year? Well we'll just have to wait and see.

Very wet and miserable

They've been saying for years that Winter is coming. Winter is here and it looks very wet and miserable down the plot.

We're not overwintering anything in the ground*, and we only have a few strawberry plants in the green house. Other than that there is no real reason to visit the plot on a wet Sunday.

Except of course to drop off our collection of peelings, coffee grinds, orange rinds and other assorted detritus that accumulates when you're veggies who usually make their own meals. Since we can't get down there during the week, we have to amass everything for a single trip to dump in the compost bins. So by the end of the week things are starting to get a little smelly. We could just throw it all in the food bins here at the flats, but why waste useful goodness? Everybody should be composting, no matter what time of year it is.


* OK, we have Chard, but that grows in the bed irrespective of what is happening to the rest of the world. And there is the Strawberry bed. And I suppose you could count the fact that there are onions growing as well.

Old woodchips and manure

We've had a welcome delivery of composted manure to the allotments. Just in time for setting the beds to sleep over winter with a nice healthy dose of nutrients.

Obviously we're keeping a couple of beds free for our root crops of carrots, beetroots, and attempting turnips again. But the sweetcorn beds from this year have received about 3 wheelbarrow loads and will end up as courgette beds next year. They'll love that.

But also the Wife insisted on dumping some of the manure into her flowerbed ready for next yeah. No harm in that. But what really intrigued me was the floor.

When I built the flower bed, I put down weed membrane underneath to keep out the brambles and bind weed. This worked. (Sort of. A few incursions but they were easily dealt with.) But it also meant that I could dump a shed load of woodchips down as the walkway. Well underneath the top layer, they have all started to compost down into a decent humus. And if the number of earthworms buried down there is anything to go by, then that's some decent stuff.

Time to start digging.

I raked the old woodchips to the front. Making sure to use the back of the rake to stop the tines from digging into the weed fabric. Then sieved them to extract the soil. Apart from a shed load of sunflower seed husks (can't think where they could have come from), I ended up with a barrowful of good soil. Just right for topping up some of the beds.

I guess I'll have to get more woodchips though to ensure that my paths are nicely topped up. All around the plot at the moment there are small mushrooms popping up, which shows that there is a lot of fungal action going on breaking down the woodchips and returning the nutrients to the soil.

It's a matter of debate as to whether digging up the paths is the right thing to do. Some say that you should leave the woodchips in place the breakdown and then let the rain wash the nutrients down into the soil naturally. Some say that it should be dug up and used directly. I don't know which is the better choice. But in the flower beds, the roots of the flowers don't get down far enough to benefit from leave the stuff in place. So digging here doesn't matter so much. Around the veg beds, I think I'll leave the stuff there.

Good. Because my back is killing me.

Dead, dead, dead

We had a heavy frost last week. We were hoping the Cape Gooseberries would survive enough to ripen. But no, they took it pretty hard.

The flower bed has also finished.

And finally the grapevine. It didn't really succumb to the frost, it just the end of the line for this year. So it's time to give it a drastic haircut.

Now whilst digging out the root stumps of the Cape Gooseberries, something else died. Alas my poor old trusty fork took one leverage too many.

Good job it's end of the season. But I'll need to get a new fork before next season starts. Wonder if they'll have new year sales on garden tools.

Know your onions

Parts of the UK are having some terrible weather. But here in London it's been nice a sunny and warm. Albeit a bit breezy.

We've never really had much luck with onions. But we keep on trying. Either because of stubbornness or stupidity, not sure which. So here we go again with a different variety of onion to see if will fare any better.

These were being sold off cheap at the local garden centre so I thought I'd give them a go and see how well they do. After all, it's not likely to get much worse that our previous attempts.

Other than that, there's not a lot doing down the plot at the moment. We've cleared out most of the beds, leaving just carrots, beetroot, strawberries and Cape Gooseberries in place. We've got some grass that's made itself at home in the various paths, so it needs to come out. But of course, it's couch grass which is the perennial nightmare of allotmenteers.

But I'm sure there will be plenty of other jobs over the winter time. There always are.

Clearing beds

End of the season, and time to clear up the mess. We wanted to get stuff done yesterday (Sat) but the weather put paid to that. So instead we worked today to get things cleared up.

The outside tomato beds need to be cleared and cleaned. They're definitely a mess.

After a couple of hours, and more than a few of them actually deciding what to do with the squashed tomatoes, they were looking a lot clearer.

Now the biggest issue is that there were a few weeds in these, but we didn't want the tomato seeds in the beds. So that means we have to dig out the squashed ones, which means losing top soil which we really didn't want to do. After all, it's damn good soil. In the end we decided not to bother and we'll make sure we pull any rogues next year. The whole lot, including a few spadefuls of soil went into a strategically placed compost dalek. Hopefully the worms can do their job over winter and we can just dig and sieve the soil straight out again next spring.

Mean while whilst digging through that lot, I found a few more courgettes and marrows.

I thought we'd finished with the all last week. But no, it seems they're still coming thick and fast. However that it the definite last of them... apart from the ones we're keeping for seeds next year.

On the subject of surprises. We had a couple in the strawberry bed. Late bloomers anyone?

We had to be extra quiet down the plot today, so as to not disturb the Vulpine Overlord who decided that the afternoon sunshine was just right for a nap.

Sweet dreams Frankie.

It's chilli time

The Chillies have been ripening in the greenhouse. The plants themselves are starting to look a little sorry for themselves, but they sure have put out a whole load of fruit.

I have only picked those which are red. There are a lot more that are green or just starting to turn so they will be left to mature a little longer. There are also a couple of other plants which I haven't yet touched.

Meanwhile we have culled all the remaining tomatoes. It's easier to trim off the vines themselves rather than pick all of the small cherry tomatoes directly.

We'll probably be picking through these for the rest of the week.

And finally, there are the very large of the squashes and courgettes. We have enough of these, so we're going to leave them at the front of the plot for anybody who want them to grab.

We're definitely into the tail-end of the season now, so I'm starting to clear the beds, fill those that need it with manure. But I do need to start getting some covers made to ensure Mr. Fox doesn't dig through them too much. And I supposed I also need to start thinking about next year. Perhaps once I've cleared the beds, I can put down all the Stuttgard onions sets that I got on sale at the local garden centre. Would be nice to actually try for decent onions, given that I don't seem to have much luck with them.

Rainy day

It seems odd to be posting about a rainy day when we've had one of the longest and hottest summers on record. But it's nice to have the change.

We're now at the tail end of the season and things are starting to die off. Firstly the courgettes have just about run out of steam.

There are just a few left buried in the dead foliage.

Then the petunia troughs have finished.

Mind you, one of them did succumb to the high winds we had recently and fell over.

Not a major issue though. Just stand it upright and throw the dead petunias in the compost. We have more than enough seeds.

The courgettes were sorted out into those destined for food, those destined to become "Georges" (ie seeds for next year) and those to be given away to anybody who wants. We simply leave them of the water tank lid next to our plot and people can help themselves as they walk past.

We also grabbed a few of the remaining cherry tomatoes and thought we'd dig out some spuds from bags and buckets for dinner tonight. But we weren't happy with the quality of the spuds. A lot of them that we dug out were the tiniest spuds you've ever seen.

We barely got a decent plate's worth from 3 buckets and a bag. I think we might have a reason for that. Normally we find bags to work better than ground spuds. They're certainly easier to harvest anyway. However, as we have already mentioned in the past, we're on London Clay soil. Now we've put a lot of organic material into the soil, but that still doesn't solve the problem of the fact that the clay is there. Being bags and buckets, they're raised off the ground, where they can dry out and more to the point, they can be hit by the sun.

Emptying out the buckets, the soil at the very bottom was like rock. I suspect what has happened is that the long hot summer has baked the clay into bricks, thereby hampering the growth of the potatoes.


The leaves are turning brown now, and starting to fall. So it's time to think about winter crops, and covering the beds ready for next year. Well some of the leaves are brown. The Blueberries are starting to turn bright red which makes a nice splash of colour on a dreary day.

Time to head for home and a nice hot cup of tea.

Bucket'o'Toms

Remember the bucket'o'spuds? Its now Tom time. The tomatoes are coming to the end of the season. Time to get picking.

The Tomato Jungle has definitely seen better days. So It's time to start digging through and removing the old plants before the dreaded blight gets hold.

As you can see, the tomato beds have been infested with courgettes from the neighbouring bed. In fact we never actually planted courgettes here. They are rogues from previous sowings which seem to have got themselves established. Not such a bad thing, but it does make clearing up a bit of a challenge.

But we did manage to clear a couple of beds fully.

There are still three other beds to go, but they can wait. This bucket of toms will get turned into juice and sauce tomorrow.

We're kind of lucky with the blight this year. The long hot summer has kept it at bay. But now we're heading into autumn there is the possibility of infections, so it's best to start clearing up before it does so. Blight can hang around in the soil for years and allotments are particularly prone because you have to rely on everybody to manage blight at the same time, which is not always possible.

We also picked a load of apples from the tree.

All this work was being watched over by our Vulpes Overlord, Frankie.

And it's still the seed season. Despite the fact that we have a shed load of seeds already, The Wife just can't help but pick a few more seeds for next year.

Meanwhile, I was shovelling s41t, filling the vacant beds ready for next year.

These will eventually get a cover and left to the worms to devour over winter before being dug in. I've kind of over filled the beds because, although we have a large deliver of manure at the moment, the manure has to be shared by everybody. In previous years, by the time I got my beds ready there was no manure left to fill them with. So this is my share ready. It can be transferred to other beds as needed.

We spent a full day on the plot and it was extremely exhausting. Even Frankie needed a rest.

Is it a little Chilli in here?

This summer has been hot.

Let me re-phrase that.

This summer has been so damned hot. So hot that the Chillies in the greenhouse have gone crazy. We have had loads and loads of chillies, and they're still producing.

So today's harvest is very specific. We'll be hosting a BBQ tomorrow, (yes, another one), for a friend who is leaving these shores for Australia. We've also invited a few other friends round too. On tomorrows menu is a salsa, so we need Tomatoes and Chillies...

And a few grapes. Look closely and you might find a few potatoes hiding under there as well. They're for us though. So today has mostly been clean up and plot tidy ready for tomorrow.

So tomorrow around 2pm there should be much joviality and food to be had by all.

Sunday Update:
Yes we had our last BBQ of the year. It went down pretty well, with great food and great friends.

When was the last time you had a BBQ on your plot?

A corny post

Sorry. Couldn't resist the pun.

Time to pull the corn. Our organic corn we pulled a couple of weeks ago. It didn't really amount to much as the corn stalks didn't really grow well, and what cobs were produced were inedible. However our tried and tested popcorn variety performed with great vigour this year.

It works really well in the popcorn machine. However it's not good for eating on the cob. But this year, I've finally taken the plunge and bought a grinder to try and make cornmeal, and thereby cornbread. I'll probably give it a go at some point during the next week or two.

Whilst I was pulling cornstalks and wheeling barrow loads of wood chips around to refresh the paths, The Wife was performing her zen meditations (at least thats what I think they were) by washing pots. Again.

At least we'll have plenty of clean pots when it comes to planting next year.

Collecting seeds

Whichever way you look at it, the season is coming to a premature end.

The long hot summer has put paid to many of the inground crops, such as forcing our turnips into bolting, or shorting us on the strawberries. So now the flowers and beans are coming to an end and we need to start collecting seeds for next year.

The flower department is definitely The Wife's concern. So she has been collecting seed heads from the various flowers.

Don't ask me which is which. I can only spot the Soya Beans and the Petunias in that lot. But she knows what they all are.

Meanwhile I'm tidying up the plot, cutting back the triffid (which does have quite a good selection of grapes on it this year) and harvesting spuds and such.

We have also picked our first melon. Well not so much picked, as it fell off, so it must be ripe. The other one in the greenhouse is slightly larger. These are Honey Dew melons from Sainsbury's. Not so much from a seed packet, but from an actual Honey Dew directly. They were an experiment. And possibly one of our more successful experiments at that.

Apples are from our tree (still no idea what variety it is), but because we don't use any pesticides and this year, I didn't put up any Codling Moth traps, we're rather inundated with grubs in the apples.

Ah well, as the old saying goes, there's only one thing worse than finding a maggot in your apple and that's finding half a maggot in your apple.

BBQ

So this is the third BBQ we've held down the plot this year. We had an old friend (of The Wife's) visit us. So we had a jolly good cook-up down the plot with burgers and grilled slices of courgettes fresh from the vine.

Of course, when she left, she went with a load of tomatoes, apples and courgettes. After all, we can only eat so many. We have to give most of them away.

Working party (again)

So today was another working party. Part 1 involved getting an unloved plot back into shape. The plot regularly flooded and a previous tenant decided that a moat was the best way to counteract that. Unfortunately doing so made the site dangerous as it was very easy for anybody walking past to slip into it with potentially ankle damaging results.

We strimmed the long weeds, and uprooted what we couldn't strim (these ended up being dumped in a pile, then a load of horse manure piled on top and the covered by black plastic and some car tires to compost down). We also covered the plot with manure to give some of the bare ground a bit of nutrition where everything had gone to wrack and ruin over the scorching summer.

After Tea and Brownies, we then embarked on part 2 where we emptied out the MAGA Marquee and repaired the flooring (much wood chip and replacement carpet) and repaired some of the marquee flaps and side panels with new bungee cord. I didn't manage to get any photos of that part, so you'll have to make do with just a description.

After that we were so exhausted that we nearly didn't manage to do anything on our own plot. But there were a load of red juicy tomatoes staring at us saying "pick us, pick us".

So we did.

Plenty of trays of large toms (Ailsa Craig), one small tray of cherries toms (Sweet Million), a lonely chilli and a few obligatory courgettes (gave four away), liberally scattered across the back seat of the car, and hoping that the journey home won't leave them liberally scattered.

I guess we now need to figure out how to make tomato sauce properly. Unlike chutneys (where vinegar preserves it) and jam (where sugar preserves it), a good tomato sauce needs enough acidity to stop botulism forming, but enough taste so that it won't end up too acidic. Best get some research done quick.

But Freddy Fox doesn't think much of it all. He just wants his rest.

As do I..