October allotment harvests

We got the last of our onions in during September, but you can still be harvesting them this month. Fortunately we’d already worked out where and how we were going to store them, as we didn’t have a single onion fail to come good this year – we’ve gone for placing them on mesh shelves in our dry and airy shed at home rather than hanging them in the one on the allotment which is still prone to springing new leaks in the roof. We’ve cut off all the foliage, just as the do in the supermarket, and they’ll be kept cool and dark. They are separated from each other so that there’s no chance one diseased onion will spread its problems to others.

We don’t have to worry about storing potatoes as our maincrops were so paltry, but we can see our neighbours lifting and storing their maincrops, sometimes in big paper sacks, sometimes in boxes of peat.

We’ve also stripped, blanched and frozen all our corn cobs to see us through the winter – although they take up a lot of room in the freezer, we think it’s worth it to have that delicious summer sweetcorn taste in the middle of winter.

We didn’t have outdoor tomatoes this year, but all the ones on the site have gone, after a very cold night this week, so the plants are being dug up and removed. If your tomatoes had blight, don’t compost them, as you risk overwintering the spores for next summer.

We've also been storing pears, taking them from the tree before they fall, checking them for blemishes, then setting them in paper nests (recycling old printing paper) in the shed. They will be delicious for several months.

And soon it will be time to plant the broad beans and start all over again!

Labels: allotment-broad-beans, allotment-onions, allotment-pears, allotment-sweetcorn