With preparations for Christmas including family visits we haven’t spent too much time in the garden or on the allotment this month. However, a lovely day today saw us down at the allotment so that we could build the next pair of raised beds, harvest the sprouts and do some general tidying up. As we also harvested the parsnips from the garden yesterday, a photo opportunity of Christmas produce could not be avoided. The parsnips this year are as good as any we’ve had.
The Christmas Harvest
As a general rule we try to sow seeds in pots or containers and transplant seedlings into the place where we finally want them when they have already made a healthy start. There are a number of reasons for this:
This approach doesn’t work for everything. Carrots and parsnips don’t like it. Some books say that sweetcorn don’t like having their roots disturbed either, but our experience has been that this was no problem provided that the seedlings were handled with great care (they are rather less robust than they look and have a tendency to break).
The variety of pot sizes, root trainers and insert cells for seed trays means that there is generally a container available that will suit the plants you want to grow.
Sweet corn and Courgettes both benefit from the heat of a propagator
Today was largely an allotment day. We spent about four hours down there and got the next two raised beds built and planted these up with the garlic and onion seedlings that we had been bringing on at home.
I had slightly change the wood order using larger overlaps to hold the longer sides together and getting the corner posts cut into stakes, these two changes made construction and fixing much easier and in addition to getting used to the mechanics of getting things built, the process of putting the beds together is definitely become a smoother production. We are getting the wood from Chiltern re-cycling. http://chilternwoodrecycling.co.uk/default.aspx
I made a short trip to the allotment today to out the strawberries that we had cultivated from runners earlier this autumn, this means that the strawberry bed is now fully populated. As the weather was good, I also took a couple of update snaps.
The shot looking south shows the new compost heap as well as the winter greens.
Autumn tidying looking south 19 Nov 2011
I also harvested a few sprouts from the plants that are looking significantly better for last week’s bit of TLC.
There should be sprouts for Christmas
The shot looking north shows the field beans that we have sown as green manure on what will be the potato beds next year. This is the first time that we’ve tried a green manure, so it will be interesting to see how this works out.
Raised beds and green manure
We had a big day in the allotment today. Lynn constructed and treated the first of our compost heap containers (made from old pallets in common with most compost heaps on allotments) and I built the first two of our new raised beds, one of which Lynn planted up with strawberries.
We also had a mini harvest with some beetroots large enough for making some last batches of pickle for this year and some sprouts ready. The brassicas were heavily infested with whitefly and there are quite a lot of slugs and snails around, but we look like getting a decent crop of sprouts and the purple sprouting broccoli look strong so with a bit of luck there will be a decent harvest next spring. We tidied up the beds to remove some of the shelter for the pests and tried to smoke out the whitefly with a smouldering bonfire as well as leaving the protective net open to get some airflow for a few days.
We were down at the allotment pretty much all day, but when we got home, Lynn managed to sneak in pickling the red cabbage that I’d harvested from the garden yesterday.
I took advantage of a relatively dry day to get on with some garden jobs I raked up half a dozen sacks of leaves from the Green to make leaf mould, finished clearing and mulching the roses, weeded the asparagus and rose beds and tidied up the home brassica plot. Whilst doing the last of these I harvested the smaller cabbages for pickling.
The care for the roses has been inspired by my college course where we have discussed ways of limiting black spot damage. The roses haven’t suffered too badly in the past, but all have some degree of infection, so if I can reduce this next year, then we may be in a position to take some hardwood cuttings of the nicer ones this time next year.