23/11/25 - Harvesting, Making Compost and Strawberries

Good evening reader.  Wherever you are in the work, I hope all is well with you and your plot.  It's a bit odd at the moment, getting used to only having the chance to visit the plot on the weekends again.  The weather has started taking a wintery turn with sub zero temperatures finally reaching out little corner of Herefordshire.  This weekends visit started with some allotment committee duties, helping members of our lower site by fixing and improving the lock to their main get.  There is now a chain in place which will make locking up the gate when people leave much easier.

Back to our own plot and the weekend's visit.  As usual, I started with a bit of a look around the plot, checking for any changes or damage or anything else that was going to need some urgent attention.  I was pleased to find that most things were exactly as I left them.  With the drop in temperatures this week, I've noticed that most things have slowed down their growth rate, but that's OK.

The Red Cabbage is looking really good and at last, though they are still about, the numbers of white fly do seem to have dropped off a little, thanks to the frosts.  We seem to be on course for hopefully enjoying home grown red cabbage for Christmas!

Continuing the inspection, the last of the outdoor cauli plants continues to grow with the head this weekend being about twice the size as it was last weekend.  Providing things keeps going the way they have done, this might be ready for picking next week or the week after.

It was time to do a few jobs, and being a Sunday, we needed a harvest for our dinner.  The carrots in the bathtub are still doing fine.  They are a little on the small side, but they were a late sowing so that is only to be expected.  The season for carrot root fly has now passed (I hope!) so I have removed the netting over the bath tub.  I picked a few, and there are probably around 6 to 10 more left to pick from there.  Then, it will be back to harvesting the remaining carrots from the polytunnel.

Next for the harvest basket were some parsnips.  The cold weather has started to really have an effect on the top growth, now killing it back.  But parsnips are great at sticking out the winter conditions in the ground.  We should have enough in the ground to last us well into the new year.  One push down with the fork brought up 3 nice sized roots.

Under cover from the mini polytunnel, I've continued to pick Pak Choi and Chinese Cabbage.  They were added to the harvest basket along with a couple of small red lettuces.  This should be enough to keep us going through this week nicely.

Around 6 weeks ago, one of our members had a load of mulch delivered to the allotment site, mixed in with a bit of woodchip.  The pile hasn't really gone down and it seems that many people have no use for it.  But I think it will continue to rot down really nicely and produce a nice compost.  Over the last couple of years, I have been visiting stables to pick up trailer loads of manure.  One compost bay is rotting down nicely, and is full of it.  But I still have one empty bay, so I've been taking a few wheelbarrows of the mulch each visit, and adding it to the empty compost bay.  Having that mixed in with some digestate every now and then should given me a really good and nutritional compost by around late spring next year. 

Time to take 10 and have a brew...

Last weeks visit, I made some changes to the crops bars in the polytunnel so I could hang all my strawberry baskets ups.  Strawberry plants are cold/frost hardy so they can easily be left outdoors through the winter.  But they do need a degree of drainage which is something I'm not sure they will get if I leave them in their hanging baskets outdoors.  So, it was time for a bit of a trim, removing any dead foliage off the plants.  I'm not exactly sure why, but I thought it was an idea to only move half the plants inside this weekend, leaving the other 10 outside.  Who knows what I was thinking!

The polytunnel temperatures have taken bit of a drop this week with the minimum temperature showing at -4.5.  But, the plastic I fitted to the windows last week has made a big difference with the ingress of rain.  The tunnel was bone dry inside which is great news.  I just need to keep an eye on things over the winter because on the negative side, there isn't so much air circulating around the tunnel now.  Can't have it all I suppose!