15/10/25 - Autumn Jobs and Planting for 2026

 The Year's Not Out Yet!

Good evening to my reader.  I hope you are going great!  Over the last week, we have slipped suddenly into proper autumnal dreariness.  Gone is the blue sky, giving us the last of the warmth and we have slipped under a thick duvet of grey cloud for as far as the eye can see.  I dare say that the areas of the country that are still seeing the sun, are probably quite enjoying it.  We haven't had the first of the frosts yet, but I expect by the end of the month, we will see them.  At least it's dry though, and that means that there is still plenty to do, even after work in the evenings.  So, I'm trying to squeeze in as much as I can.

Time for a lick of paint...

It's been on the list of things to do for at least the last couple of months.  With not much to do on the ground at the moment, I cracked open the paint can.  Since taking over the second shed, I've done some bits and bobs to it to hold it together for another few years.  Pretty much as soon as I took it over, I built a new internal frame for it.  The slightest push on the side of it sent the whole thing leaning into some weird 3 dimensional diamond come rhombus shape.  It needed doing.  Once some form of structural integrity had been restored, the panelling was in a reasonable state but hadn't been treated for some years, so it had a first coat of paint to get it through the rest of this year, with the intention of giving it a second coat.  The first coat just seemed to soak in so quickly, and the colour didn't really show well over the old green original paint.  This week, I had the time to add second coat to the most exposed sides that face the incoming prevailing weather.  Our first shed was also beginning to show signs of needing a touch up from it's first coat a couple of years ago.  

Splitting the strawbs...

Earlier this year, I ordered two varieties of bare root strawberry plants, 20 in total, and potted them into 10 hanging baskets.  In my min at the time, I though that would be perfect.  I had visions of 5 hanging baskets of strawberry plants down each side of the polytunnel, and for the spring, that's exactly how it was.  Growing them on in the polytunnel made a massive difference, and we enjoyed a super-early crop of ripe strawberries, weeks before many other outdoor plants were evening beginning to flower.  But one thing started to bother me, and that was that I wished that I'd either only bought 10 plants, or 20 hanging baskets, so each basket would have one plant.

Reading up on strawberry growing, I've learned that generally speaking, strawberry plants will be good for a couple of seasons, but following that, you should really plant new, or at least, take cuttings from the end of season runners.  I have another season to get out of these plants, so decided that it wasn't too late to split the plants.  This is probably just before, or just as they are starting to go dormant for the winter months.  I have no idea if this was a good idea at this time of year, or if I would have been better to wait until February or April time.  But, too late now.  I've bought an additional 10 hanging baskets and it was out with the Hori Hori, calving up the plants, and potting them on with fresh compost with one plant to each basket.  There is still some work I want to do inside the polytunnel in the coming weeks, so for the time being, the plants are outside still and will be moved back undercover when my internal work is complete.  Now I just need to hope that I can fit 20 hanging baskets inside the polytunnel!

Sowing and planting for 2026...

A few weeks ago, I made a bit of a mistake.  I had sown some late season cauliflower seed a month or two earlier, with the intention of growing some on under cover in the polytunnel and getting an early cauli crop next year.  Not only that, I also planned to transplant some outside, give them the last of the autumnal warmth to grow on a little and then leave them over winter outside.  Then, crop the undercover polytunnel, and by the time that had happened, the outdoor temps would be creeping up through into next spring, and I would harvest the outdoor crop.  Easy.  That was until I completely forgot the plan, transplanted the small plants into the polytunnel and promptly binned the remaining ones.  Well done son!  Nice one.

The result was a spare bed, that was not only spare for the coming months, but now had nothing planned for it through until the summer of 2026.  Never fear though.  The local garden nursery came to the rescue.  Earlier this year, our sprout harvest was a total fail.  So much whitefly infested the sprout plants that it not only severely weakened each of the plants, but the caterpillars also managed to get under the netting as well.  What sprouts there were were packed with white fly and their remnants, even when you cut them open and peeled off layer after layer.

Back to Castrees, the garden nursery.  They nearly always have some form of veg plants for sale, and while I yet to read a book or a seed packet that says to make sprout transplants in October, I figured that if they were selling them, then it must be doable.  And for the sake of only £2 for 6 plants, it was worth a shot.  

Only a couple of weeks ago, I had made another mistake with that particular bed too.  I covered it with digestate.  This is usually the last action I do before putting the bed to bed for the winter.  When the digestate first goes down, it's quite potent, and I have had plants die within 6 to 12 hours of planting into or near it before now.  I tell everyone who asks me about using it to not plant things into it for a good few weeks, even a month or two to save the same fate.  Naturally, I ignored my own advice and hoped for the best.  I pushed back the digestate in 10" circles to reveal the soil underneath, dug a hole, handful of lime for the clubroot gods, handful of fresh compost, and in the plants went.  A week later, they are still alive!

Still on the theme of getting things in the ground, another digestate timing issue, although this one, not so bad.  We had a great crop of broad beans this spring.  The first time we've ever grown them.  So, I'm doing them again for 2026.  It's one of the earliest plants to crop in the new year, and frees up space for a second crop with plenty of time to go.  

The digestate on this bed was put down a few weeks ago and so it's potency has dropped off significantly.  I was a bit more comfortable planting into this.  So, after work this evening, off I trundled up to the plot, got the dibber, kneeling mat and bean seeds out and off I went.  Another half bed of beans now in the ground to germinate and then sit for the winter.

No such thing as a completed job list...

With plenty still to do before the really rubbish weather kicks in (including painting that new bench with preservative) on my own plot, there is plenty of voluntary work to do around the communal areas of the allotment site too.  There won't be a need for much more mowing in the year, but I'll keep on top of that as usual.  As well as those duties, some of the the committee and wider membership also freely give up their time to help others, or to bring plots back into a state suitable for reletting.  Unfortunately, we've had incident where past members have let their plots get so bad and overgrown that they have been evicted.  This year has seen another such occasion.  This time, aside from a lack of general plot tidiness, a plot with around 5 or 6 trees had been left unkept and not looked after for way over a year, perhaps nearly 2.  The trees had become so overgrown that this year, during them fruiting, the additional weight broke numerous branches, just because they hadn't been looked after.  They were also growing over neighbouring plots and communal pathways, but the former plot owner had refused to do anything about it.

So, up step the good people of the allotment society and put in their own time, expense and effort into getting the plot back into a good useable state.  I must say at this point, that I haven't contributed to this work yet.  It all gets magically done while I'm in work doing the day job, but this evening when I went up the plot it was awesome to see that someone had been very busy with a chainsaw.  Where there once stood trees with broken branches and dead or cluttered ground full of junk, now stand a handful of tree stumps waiting for removal, and the branches and wood from the trees that were formerly there.

Before people start down the line of wanting to hug trees, it's also needs to be pointing out that in the terms of the societies lease, any fruit trees grown on the allotment must be from dwarf root stock, to avoid exactly this sort of problem.

It's made such a big and positive change and now allows in so much more light into the neighbouring plots.  The next stage is to bring a digger onsite to deal with the tree roots.  This plot will then be split into 2 and we look forward to bringing on board two new plot holders later this year.