November Sowing First
Good evening! The chances are that either you're in to allotment growing and have searched for something that has pinged up my allotment pages in the results, or, you've fallen asleep on your keyboard and have randomly woken up to see this page facing you. Either way, welcome!
It's been another busy weekend with the weather being dry and kind allowing me time to get onto the plot for a good couple of hours. For the first time ever, I'm going to give growing broad beans a crack. It's one of the crops that can go in the ground and with a reasonable winter, they will germinated and then sit dormant over the winter before providing one of the earliest harvests next spring.
I've chosen the popular Aqua Dulce variety that can be direct sown during October/November, and have allocated half of one of the smaller beds to the crop, with 6 short rows giving me about 43 plants in total. From looking around at other plots back in the spring, I seem to recall that blackfly heavily infected many of the crops so I'll need to be on my guard for that next year.
Other happenings on the allotment this weekend took me a little by surprise. Though the weather hasn't particularly been cold so far this autumn, I did at least think that we were now safe from butterfly's and caterpillars. How wrong I was. Checking out the cauli bed, I noted that there are heads forming on the remaining plants, although I don't think they will come to any great size. And then I saw them. Not just one or two, but dozens of the little blighters! Hopefully the colder nights will arrive soon and deal with them before the see off the cauli lants! Fortunately, the calabrese are under netting, so they should be OK...
Finally, for this particular shift on the plot, it was time to take a small harvest. The carrot bath is still producing, and after a fair bit of digging in one of the other beds, I managed to extract a couple of parsnips too. Finally, the last of the seasons salad onions came out. They haven't grown much at all over the last month, so their a bit small, but welcome nonetheless.
That's about it for the first update of the weekend. Productive and as usual, a pleasure to be outside. Until next time, happy growing!
