Harvest

We've been up a few times over the past week, mostly to harvest vegetables and water the tomatoes in the greenhouse. We have had great beetroot, lots of runner beans, huge savoy cabbages, crunchy spring onions and crisp fennel. Norman on the next plot lifted a parsnip to see what it was like. It was fat but short; we'll see what ours are like in a few weeks. We dug up the stray raspberry canes that had self-seeded outside of the rows. I put some chlorate weed-killer down around the grass edges to stop the couch grass spreading onto the plot.

We have started to think about next year's layout. We will remove the beds and go for longer rows across the width of the plot for most vegetables. We want some more gooseberry bushes and we'll take blackcurrant cuttings to grow more of them. We're going to use the plot we cleared last to grow small amounts of things like spring onions and maybe some other salad stuff.

We need some more horse manure, so we''l be heading off to the local riding stables to get some. It's very handy and free. It made a big difference to the soil texture last year, so I'll keep adding it when we can.

I think I'll extract a summary for the year from this blog, so we know what worked well and for timings of sowing and planting out. This will help to create a plan for next year. Keeping the plan and results seems to be useful, Gary has records for twenty years, but every year is different.