25 October 2009 - A little catching up to do

Well dear Reader - no doubt some of you will have despaired of ever hearing from us again. It has been too long, and time has flown on by in ever increasing haste, tempus fugit. We now see gold and red trees, leaves being blown here and there and ... yes, the autumn heatwave is about to descend. Temperatures of around 20 deg C are forecast for this week. Not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing, especially as we now have harvested all our squash, and Fat Boy, who needed his very own transport home. Well, Keats did describe autumn as "close bosom friend of the maturing sun" so I guess it's OK.

Mostly the work has been to take down the trappings of summer (bean poles etc), lift spent plants (corn, the final courgette and rather sadly nasturtiums, etc), generally tidy the facility areas and make the most of the now definitely diminishing produce. Where once we could hardly stagger home with the produce we could pick in a week, it is now down to the odd cabbage or bit of broccoli, a handful of chard and of course the ever dependable raspberries. We dug up the maincrop potatoes a couple of weeks back - quite a lot of damaged tubers (slugs) and tiny holes, but we think there's enough to keep us going for a good long while.

As is normal this time of year, we have also of course been looking to the future, and have now added to the red over-wintering onions (Electric) with some yellow ones (Sokyu??). So we should have 100 onions come May time. Today we sowed a couple of rows of overwintering peas in bed 2 (Meteor) which should be ready in May too. We have saved some pods from the beans with the hope that they will serve again next year (very good practice, btw - sustainable growing and all that).

As is also becoming normal for us tenders of the soil, we have spent some time huming and ha-ing over next year's Grand Plan for the plot. Crop rotation we are beginning to discover is a bit of a pain. You are meant to follow the same pattern - Brassicas, Others, Roots. Only trouble is that we have an odd number of beds and frankly we don't want to eat that many brassicas - there is much more in Others we like to eat (corn, garlic, onions, peas, beans, etc). So there is some fudging about what is going where, though we have kept as far as possible to the pure aspiration of the three groups. It doesn't help that the horticultural authorities seem to differ as to what goes into the groups, though the definitions of Brassica seem pretty consistent. We have diligently manured and now covered the beds that are going to sleep for a few months. The plan will be shared with you in due course.

We wonder about how to use the bank next year. Quite honestly we weren't overwhelmed with the potatoes, a lot of which had tiny holes in. They are lovely to eat of course. Potatoes were a good bet as the rabbits don't like 'em and anything else we put there will be vulnerable. We are considering really going for it on the bank and clearing it of weeds which makes it very difficult to cultivate, and properly composting etc. N envisages squash and beans on the bank. I'm more cautious, given its proximity to wildlife.

So, our end of year report looks something like this:

GOOD GUYS Garlic, beans, courgettes, corn, strawberries, raspberries, broccoli, chard, last year leeks, this year leeks, cabbage, squash, last year kale, potatoes
COULD DO BETTER Shallots, onions, apples, peas, parsnips, this year kale (though there is still time), potatoes, blueberries, loganberry

Ever onward in the quest for excellence!