It only seems like yesterday we were on holiday in Cornwall. September went by in the blink of an eye, mainly because my wife and I got married. We are now in the middle of October, and we have started putting the allotment to bed for the winter.
Prepping the Allotment for Winter
We have emptied most of the beds and begun mulching them with homemade compost and well-rotted manure. There are still a few things left; we need to pick and harvest loads of beetroot, the runner beans are just hanging on, and the pumpkins are ripening up and will be ready for Halloween.
Unfortunately, the weather battered the leeks, and they don’t look great. We’ll start harvesting them soon, as I doubt they’ll make it through the winter.
We picked the remaining apples and pears from our fruit trees, and I’m happy to say we had a decent crop this year.
We harvested and froze the remaining sweetcorn. It’s one of our favourite crops, and we look forward to harvesting it each year. We’d quite happily fill the entire plot with sweetcorn if we could.
The tomatoes in the greenhouse are still producing fruit and thriving. Normally, by now, we would have harvested all the fruit and composted the plants, but this year they are doing exceptionally well. I really want to have fresh tomatoes in December, so we’ll see how it goes.
As we wrap up the allotment for another year, it’s satisfying to see the results of our hard work, even though some crops thrived while others struggled. We always learn something new from each season, and we’re already thinking about what to grow next year (in fact, our onion sets and garlic just arrived today).
Until next time, it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our labour—both in the kitchen and in life.
I realise we’re at the end of January, but I thought I would take the time and reflect back at 2022, and look at our successes and failures.
After moving plots in autumn 2021, 2022 was the first year growing on the new plot. We managed to clear a large bed in time for spring (in fact it covered almost half the plot) and gave enough growing space for what we needed. We kept to our core veg; potatoes, beans, onions, sweetcorn, pumpkins and courgettes.
The potatoes started off well and we managed to harvest all our first and most of our second early potatoes. However, we left the main crop in the ground for too long, and when it come to digging them up in the middle of winter, they had rotted away.
The beans done extremely well, but started to suffer a little during the heatwave. They soon bounced back in late summer.
Our onions were fantastic, in fact probably the best crop we’ve ever had and we’ve still got some left in the cupboard.
Sweetcorn started really well, but we had a few succumb to smut, a fungal disease which affects sweetcorn. Smut thrives on hot dry summers, so it’s no surprise we had it considering the temperatures we had.
There’s one major issue that cropped up in late autumn and that’s rats. Rats have moved in underneath the chicken coop and while we are keeping them at bay with traps, they are still a problem. Fortunately, they seem to be leaving the chickens alone and more interested in digging holes everywhere.
