14/11/25 - Beans, Garlic and Broccoli with some Improvements
This time a few months ago, I would spend an hour at least each day, putting 4 watering cans into a wheelbarrow and making repeat trips to the water trough in the centre of our allotment site. Today, it is hoofing it down. There is so much water coming out of the sky that even the pet fish are getting wet.
This time of year, you have to snatch allotment time when you can, because in between the darker nights and the wetter weather, spending hours on end on the plot just isn't that enjoyable. So yesterday, I grabbed the chance to spend a couple of hours in a gloriously sunny window of good weather mooching around the plot. First up, the improvements....
Prepping for Raspberries
A few months ago, I placed an order for some bare root raspberry plants. They are scheduled for delivery towards the end of November which meant that I needed to get some ground work done. On the half plot, I have a narrow bed of around 50cm wide. This season I have grown cucumbers on a trellis in that bed which worked well. When we first took on the plot 3 years ago, we inherited some raspberry canes, but they were old, and nobody was able to tell us what variety they were. We made the decision to pull them up. Now we have the additional half plot, and following on from the success of our blackberry plants, we decided we wanted to add more soft fruits. The 50cm bed is going to be their new home. We have 5 bare root plants coming which should fit nicely and so to prepare for their arrival, yesterday I added more digestate to the bed. I also bought 2 x 1.5 meter fence posts, and I've dropped them into place, one each side of the bed. These will form the uprights for some trellis work to help keep the canes from falling over as they grow.
Prepping for Strawberries
This year was out first year at growing strawberries under cover and in hanging baskets. They have been a good success, but I think I made an error in putting two plants in each basket. In hindsight, I should of either stuck with 10 plants, or bought 20 hanging baskets from the start. Nevertheless, they grew and produced relatively well. This autumn, I have bought an additional 10 hanging baskets and split the 20 plants into individual baskets. That's all good, but it does mean that I will now be lacking room for hanging them up in the polytunnel. To get around this, I need to extend the hanging space along to run the full length of the polytunnel on each side.
I don't really want to spend any money if I can help it. My plan is to use some old tent poles to use as crop bars. In order to do this, I needed to provide somewhere for the end of the poles to rest on next to the door frames at each end. Yesterday, I fitted some wooden ledges each side of the door frames, ready to add the tent pole crop bars.
You can see the pole concept above to the right of the door. The remaining work on this job can be done entirely within the polytunnel, so it's great to do on a wet and rainy weekend. On my next visit, I will take my angle grinder to I can make sure things are cut to length correctly, and also some cable ties to help hold things in place. The hanging baskets are currently still outside, but once this is all in place, I'll being them in under cover for the winter.
Growing for 2026
Elsewhere on the plot, there is still plenty to harvest from this years crop. Parsnip, carrots and swede are all in supply along with pak choi, lettuce, Swiss chard and Chinese cabbage. It really is very productive and it's actually hard to keep up with eating the produce. So much so that we are giving much of it away to people too. But this is all still 2025 season. Already, we are planting for 2026 harvests and things are looking good. This weeks visit to the plot has shown that things continue to move on even though the temperatures start to drop. All but one or two garlic cloves have ruptured and have grown to around 15 cm. Last week, when I checked the broad beans, they had not long ruptured, but there were still quite a few gaps. This week though, all those gaps have been filled in as the remaining beans have germinated and started to catch up.
Inside the polytunnel, each of the broccoli plants have started forming heads. We may even get a harvest from these this year, which will be awesome! Growing them undercover has been a great experience and I'll almost certainly be doing it again next year.
The final bed to update on is the bed out the front of the polytunnel. It was a bed that originally had a failed brussels sprout crop in. I decided to cut my losses and see if I could get something last minute out of it for 2026 at least. Over the recent weeks, the beetroot crop haven't really grown on very fast at all, but this week's check on the plants now show that the roots are beginning to swell up so I remain very hopeful that we will be able to possibly harvest some beetroot in the coming 2 to 3 weeks.
Alongside the beetroot in the same bed, I transplanted some leek plants which I bought from a local nursery. I split the pack between this bed, and another. For some reason, the other half of the pack haven't done very well, but the ones in this bed have come on well and look strong. They should overwinter well and it will be great to be able to harvest these early in the new year.
Jobs for the next visit
Turning my attention to the next visit. Well, there's always something to do! Indoors, I've got the crop bar extensions to take care of, and then bring the strawberries in under cover.
Staying in the polytunnel, this windy weather with driving rain is highlighting one issue with the polytunnel. The doors are part mesh, and the prevailing wind blow in the rain. soaking the first 1/4 of the tunnel inside. I've decided to add some temporary glazing made from some plastic which I have in the garage.
Then there is the weeding... The weed growth is slowing down, but there are still plenty to be pulled. Especially in the carrot bathtub. A job for the next find and dry day will be to roll up the sleeves and deal with the weeding in the bath and in the large polytunnel.
Finally, I have started filling the empty second compost bay. An allotment society member had a delivery of woodchip delivered, but some of it was incredibly fine and was more suited to a mulch than for woodchip paths. I've picked up a couple of wheelbarrows of this mulch, and a wheelbarrow of digestate and mixed it together in the bottom of the compost heap. As this rots down, it should make some really good compost. In the meantime, as and when the dry weather comes to visit us again, I will also be trying to get to the stables to pick up another trailer of manure and fill the bay up to the top.
