October allotment tasks
It’s frightening to think that this month is when some parts of the UK will have the first frosts of winter. We shouldn’t, being in the balmy south, but we need to be thinking about fleece protection for some of our crops.• We’re picking over our potatoes and putting any that are less than a third green in complete darkness – after a month the green will be gone. It’s the result of sun exposure and the green parts contain a poison called an alkaloid which just goes to show that potatoes and Deadly Nightshade are part of the same family. However if they’ve gone back to potato coloured after a month of total light exclusion they will be safe to eat.
• We’re not planting garlic until November, but it’s time to prepare the garlic bed – this year they will be going into a raised bed as we grew far too much last year!
• We also need to move our broad bean supports to their new site so that we can plant the beans next month. We found overwintering broad beans to be much better than spring-planted ones so we’re doubling our sowing in November.
• And we’re picking off any yellow leaves from our brassicas so that they don’t harbour slugs or diseases like botrytis.
What are you going to be doing in October?
Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-october-tasks, allotment-preparations
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on Thursday, October 1, 2009
My Little Plot
Stay up to date with the latest Allotment Blogger posts by subscribing to our RSS feed.
Allotment Gardener RSS Feed
Latest Posts
- Next year’s allotment potatoes and onions
- Brassica update
- Seed Saving on Allotments
- Best crops this summer?
- Allotment haul 12 September
- Allotment haul 7 September 2009
- Allotment clearing, tours and planning
- And the winner is … (allotment competitions)
- Allotments: the bad side
- Allotment Competitions and Niceties
Get in touch
Have a question? Send it to:
allotmentblogger [at] gmail.com
Browse the archive
- June 2007
- July 2007
- August 2007
- September 2007
- October 2007
- November 2007
- December 2007
- January 2008
- February 2008
- March 2008
- April 2008
- May 2008
- June 2008
- July 2008
- August 2008
- September 2008
- October 2008
- November 2008
- December 2008
- January 2009
- February 2009
- March 2009
- April 2009
- May 2009
- June 2009
- July 2009
- August 2009
- September 2009
- October 2009
- November 2009
- December 2009
- January 2010
- February 2010
- March 2010
- April 2010
Links
- Gardening Shop
- Composting Instructions
- At Last I've got my Plot
- Down on the Allotment
- Cottage Smallholder
- Vegmonkey and the Mrs.
4 Comments:
My main job for October is to get cracking with the digging over of the plot. I've now got a manure mountain, so that's waiting to be dug in.
I have been clearing and tidying for the past month...now I pray for rain so that i can give a winter dig...I am going to planting broad beans too...I didn't know about winter garlic though...maybe I should give it a try..I have a raised bed I could put it in....does it have to be a particular garlic to plant in the winter??
Well we had our first heavy frost last night here in Latvia, well enough to finish off the courgettes so we spent the day gathering the remaining crop of beans (all 10 kilos of them but that is before shelling), the pumpkins that we didn't even plant so goodness knows where the seeds came from but we ended up with four huge ones a few small ones, carrots, some cucumbers and nasturtium seeds. Our remaining jobs will be to get the beetroot in, kohlrabi, some sorry looking broccoli and the remaining sweetcorn. We still have kale, parsnips (all four of them), hamburg parsley, cabbages and leeks which we will probably sort out this next month. Once November comes it will be too cold or snowing.
Jo - manure mountains are great.
Tanya - any european garlic can be planted in a sheltered spot to over-winter.
Joanna - you have an even tougher winter than we do! Good luck ...
Post a Comment
<< Home