Harvest!

It's been a while since Plot 129's last blog post, but it hasn't been quiet on the plot. The raspberries have been producing steadily over the summer, and we've had a proliferation of beans, beetroot, lettuce, Italian kale, chard, potatoes, spinach, shallots and raddish. The blackberry season came early, and produced a wonderful crop of enormous, juicy fruit, and the tomatoes also did well for quantity, although their refusal to ripen has dictated the production of a large quantity of green tomato chutney! This year also marked the first in five that one of the gooseberry bushes has fruited, so all round, a good year for soft fruit.

Italian kale

It's been a pretty good harvest in general this year, although the onions suffered with the weather and haven't grown particularly well. A particular highlight was eating our first sweetcorn - we will definitely be planting more sweetcorn next year.

 

 Some of this season's other lessons learned for 2014 are:

• Plant more shallots!
• Plant a lot more beans than you need as they don't all sprout.
• Plant fewer yellow courgette plants!
• Don't over fill the raised beds, as smaller growing plants such as carrots and beetroot can get overshadowed and stunted by larger neighbours.
• Build more raised beds.
• Grow tomatoes in a greenhouse environment. (Obvious, now I think about it?!)

 Autumn is setting in now, and the temperatures are dropping. We've been promised a frost tonight, so some last-minute crops were brought in, and rhubarb, asparagus and red currant bushes planted, ready for the spring. Plot 129 is experimenting with a mycorrhizal fungi (Thompson & Morgan's 'Rootgrow', to be precise), which promises to help plants develop a secondary mycorrhizal root system, giving increased access to nutrients and water - we'll see what happens next year!