We're well into November now, and the temperatures have dropped. Last week Plot 129 saw the planting of its largest attempt at garlic so far, with four cloves of Elephant garlic, and about twenty five cloves of a hardneck variety (Carcassonne Wight) going into a freshly dug bed. We've had mixed success with garlic over the years, but hopefully the sheer quantity going in the ground will ensure some edible plants for 2014!
Joining the garlic in the central bed were 50 sets of 'Electric' red onions, and around 100 white onions, ready for spring. Left in the ground these should develop into good cooking onions, but also promise a spring onion crop if picked early.
One of this years failures was the asparagus - apparently very unhappy at being moved into raised beds, most of the plants died off and didn't sprout at all this spring. Clearing out the bed, it became clear that fennel had done its best to colonise as much as possible. Whilst I love a good cup of fennel tea, we don't have quite as much application for fennel as asparagus, so the fennel had to go. Nine crowns of Connover's Colossal have gone in, in place of the fennel, and fingers have been crossed.
Other additions include a new 'Champagne' rhubarb, and lots of spring, summer and autumn bulbs (Autumnale Album and Water Lily colchicum and Conqueror autumn crocus , as well as snowdrops, gladioli and lillies) and this year Plot 129 is experimenting with winter planted peas - a variety called Meteor, which promises winter hardiness, dwarf habits, and tasty, early cropping. We'll see if theory matches practice in six months time...
Still to go in the ground are just the broad beans, having missed the window for green manure, and the poppies Plot 129 has been promising itself for years. There's also a lot of structural work to do, some of which can take place even as the temperature continues to fall. Oh joy!
The weather has dried up, and warmed up, over the last few weeks. The floods have receded, leaving an interesting spread of green and orange algae over the bare ground. Incredibly, some plants have survived the flood - many of the garlic and onion bulbs have coped well, and there are even a few peas and beans showing through...
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.
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!