Allotment update – 1/11/2025

At this time of year growth has slowed a great deal and not a lot changes from one month’s end to the next. Or so I thought, perhaps wrongly. Perhaps it just seems that way. The bed in the picture below was cleared of maincrop potatoes and sown with green manure seeds on 22nd September. Phacelia has been the most successful by far; out of a seed mix of Phacelia, Italian rye, red clover, winter tares, fenugreek and buckwheat, only Phacelia and Italian rye have come up. Admittedly a lot of the seed was a couple of years old, so I’m not drawing firm conclusions.
I sowed some forage peas amongst the germinating seedlings in early October and you can see them growing well right at the bottom of the picture.

In the next two pictures I have cleared corn and sown a mix of forage peas and Hungarian grazing rye which have germinated and are growing satisfactorily amongst a mix of self sown and plug grown plants. It doesn’t much matter what is growing so long as it is not a weedy species that gets to seed. Chickweed, bittercress, groundsel, annual meadow grass and one or two others need to be weeded out before they seed. Dandelions, Verbascum, foxgloves, forget-me-not, Viola tricolor and various others I see as being useful at this stage.

In the tunnel the summer crops are all gone except some sweet peppers which I have cut back hard. I may lift and pot one or two to bring home and overwinter in a frost free greenhouse; I may not bother. More overwintering salad crops have been planted out from the cells they were germinated in and more pot plants from the garden have been moved to the tunnel for winter where they will be protected from rain but not to any degree, cold.

The picture below is of the piece of ground I took on in July. I direct sowed beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions, lettuce, radish and carrots on July 1st and the only real success has been the carrots, which have not only yielded well but are largely free of carrot fly. I have had a small amount of chard and will get more in spring, along with perpetual spinach. There was a massive amount of weed seed in the ground, mostly coarse grass, which I’m leaving for now but will have to kill or remove in early spring. Under the mesh tunnel are cabbages, variety January King Marabel, which are hearting up nicely and have fewer caterpillars than my unprotected ones. They were sown 15/5/2025, pricked off into cells and planted out in early July but not immediately given the mesh protection.

In terms of the financial value of what it produces, my fruit cage is way ahead of the rest of the plot. This year’s blueberry crop overwhelmed us again this year and many were given away. The blackcurrants however were not as good as usual and having produced very little new growth in this year’s dry summer, will not be very good next year either. I will thin them a lot and mulch them over winter and if they make a comeback will keep them thinner and smaller in future so there is less plant to be sustained from the area of ground they occupy. Even with a poor harvest we have more in the freezer than we really need.

There’s not much else to report. I’m reasonably happy with how the season has gone and am already planning for next year. I want if possible to grow few if any F1 hybrids next season, persuaded by the arguments in favour of non hybrid varieties. Tomato ‘Sungold’ may well be the one exception. I’ve been looking at Vital Seeds and Real Seeds, either or both will be getting my order for next year.