Mice and compost

A calm, sunny day tempted us to do a bit of tidying up. The asparagus was ready to be cut back almost to the ground. I put up supports for the newly moved raspberries and tied each stem to a wire. Jean turned the compost heap and covered the heap to help it rot. The compost bins work, but we don't get enough from them to improve our soil and to use for potting young plants.

We cut a few more leeks. They are growing well, but they won't catch up enough before we are ready to eat them all. The winter onions are growing well and a lot of spring onions have come up too. The recent warm weather and rain has helped. Some of our broad beans have sprouted, but the mice have dug a few up. I'm currently going to leave them alone and fill any missing ones in the spring, that might help spread the harvest. I might yet plant a few more in the spring anyway so we can try harvesting the beans a bit earlier than in the past so they are even more tender.

Most of the work has been done for this year now, so there will be a few little jobs and wait for the spring.

Wandering raspberries

The raspberries have moved. Well actually the plants moved, the berries have long since been picked and either eaten or consigned to the freezer for later use. The plants needed a hand to move of course - they're raspberries not triffids.

The land at the back of the plot has not been very useful. The soil is very sandy and light here, so we have been steadily improving it with compost. We moved the raspberries here, with a good dollop of compost from our bin under each one. The original plants came with the plot and we have struggled to clear the bindweed from around them. Digging them up made it easy to clean the roots of all of the weeds before moving them.

The whole plot now looks pretty tidy, but the old raspberry plot needs another dig over to completely rid it of the weed roots.

The next stage could be to move the fence. We've decided to not fence the new fruit bush area - rabbits should leave them alone. It will make it much easier to dig the weeds out from the bottom of the hedge and so stop them spreading to the rest of the plot. We also have some young trees around the edges of our plot and the original plan was to move some into the hedge to replace the grotty elderberries and supplement the hawthorn bushes. We have all winter to do this.

Less rhubarb

A bright, calm day tempted us up to the plot. We took some more leeks and some good-looking beetroot. The beetroot seems to have slowed down, so most of what is left might turn out to be small. A few of the bigger beets had been nibbled - it looked like mice.

Jean dug over the piece where the courgettes were, next to the newly planted garlic. The winter onions are sprouting and some of the spring onion seeds have sprouted too. We dug our first parsnip. It was huge, probably our biggest ever. One parsnip that big is more than enough.

The biggest hassle was digging out a chunk of the rhubarb. The clump of rhubarb is much too big and is full of bind weed, so we dug more than half of it up. We might yet dig some more of it up.

Onions

The last of the summer onions is going in tonight's phat thai. They have been lovely, but small and we didn't grow enough. the winter onions won't be ready until the middle of next year, so quite a gap on shop onions.

There was never any idea of self sufficiency and our plot would be hopelessly too small, but it is good to eat your own produce for as long as possible. This year's onion crop suffered from being too dry, but we also didn't grow as many as we could have done, so next year I might plant another row or two and try to keep up with the watering when it is needed.

More digging of the plot is still to come.

Garlic squeezed

We planted the garlic today. There were more cloves than would fit in a single row so we squeezed it up a bit, I hope that was a wise move.

There were lots of beetroot to take and we took some more leeks. The beetroot is great, the leeks are wonderfully crisp and tasty, but they are quite small so we will go through them rather quickly. next year we must water them if it's dry.

Take a leek or two

The courgettes have finally finished so we dug them up. The last few tomatoes were ripe too. There were some great beetroot ready and one chewed by a mouse. I pulled up the last of the red cabbages, they have been a big disappointment: very tough, tasteless and boring. Jean lightly dug some more of the plot and planted a row of broad beans planted in pairs.

We took the first leeks of the season.

Onion time

Some winter onion sets were planted today, two rows each of white and yellow. The winter onions we harvested this year were great, so I hope these do well too.

We also sowed three rows of spring onion seeds. We've only had success with spring onions sowed in pots and planted out, but we've not sown spring onions in the autumn before.  They should grow over the winter so we can harvest them, well, in the spring.