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

And into the ground the onions go …

We certainly picked a hot day to plant out the onions – and while we won’t know the outcome of the germination for a couple of weeks, I can already say that it’s certainly worthwhile doing the business with paper and paste if you’re a little bit cack-handed (clumsy, in polite speak) as I am. It wouldn’t be the easiest procedure on a windy day, but we had a fine, calm one. And the ‘simple’ method, of digging a trench and dropping an onion seed into it every six inches, sounds great but when you try to drop just one, tiny, black, onion seed at regular intervals, you end up doing a lot of cursing, in my experience.


We also grabbed the chance to plant out our garlic: we’re growing two varieties this year, Mediterranean Wight and Solent Wight, just to see how a softneck and a hardneck garlic compare.

We’re also busy harvesting all the squashes – we lost all the pumpkins Duncan planted, not quite sure why, but we think the planting through a growing membrane allowed water to build up under them as condensation which then rotted the side that was on the ground/membrane. Next year we shall lift them all onto mesh trays to try and give them an air gap. The hard squashes have done much better though, and as the neck that joins the fruit to the plant has begun to narrow, showing that the parent plant is becoming dormant and no longer feeding nutrients to the fruit, it’s time to get them off the site and somewhere warm and dry for a couple of days to toughen the skins, before putting them in a cool airy place to keep until they are wanted.

And, like everybody else, we’re still weeding. Weeds are the first things to appear in spring, and the last to disappear in winter … depressing, isn’t it?

Labels: allotment-garlic, allotment-october, allotment-squash, allotment-winter-onions