Allotment doings

October is usually a funny old month on allotments – many more organised allotment holders have cleared out their summer crops and dug in their manure or compost. The rest of us (the majority) still have pillars and wigwams of seedy beans, fading sunflowers, bolting lettuces and other end-of-season crops hanging around looking like the tall plain girl who never got asked to dance at the school disco.

I notice that one of my neighbours has already got his shallots in. There’s a saying about shallots – ‘plant on the shortest day and harvest on the longest’ which basically means any time after 23 September, the autumn equinox when the day and night are the same length, is good for shallot planting. If your soil gets a lot of frosts early in the year then the sooner you get them in the ground, the more they will establish themselves before they get frozen to the spot.

It’s also AGM month for our allotment site. Have I done a good enough job as secretary? Will I be voted on or off? It’s a nerve-wracking question, because if I get voted off then I lose my allotment, because I am only caretaking it for the allotment association I serve. Suddenly I feel like Gordon Brown, facing an election and wondering whether there will be anything left for me on the other side of the ballot box …

Labels: allotment-agm, allotment-beans, allotment-october, allotment-shallots