October allotment harvest and crop rotation

I’ve managed to dig over the whole of the strawberry bed although this picture shows the halfway point of digging.

The result is a pile of old strawberry plants, with roots as tough and woody as elder, that’s about waist high and over a metre long – seriously that strawberry bed was over-crowded. About a quarter of the bed was grass, which has been impossible to weed out because the strawberries were so closely crowded, so we won’t have that to contend with next year either.

I’ve also got about six strawberry runners potted up to replant in a raised bed, and I’ve ordered another nine plants from a supplier. That will give us two different varieties – ours are rather late so I’ve ordered an earlier cropper so that we can have a longer strawberry season. To be perfectly honest I got fed up with spending so many of the best days of the year picking and freezing strawberries so if I can spread that out a bit it’s better for my mental health!

While I dug the strawberry bed, Himself dug over the area that had held the peas and beans in the summer. This year the broad beans, French beans, peas and petits pois will go into the area where our first early potatoes were planted. The ground in which we had maincrop potatoes (our biggest failure) needs a lot of work to get it truly productive, so we hope to work in lime over the summer and get it ready for next year’s brassicas. And our potatoes will go where the peas and beans were – crop rotatation, not exactly perfect, but pretty good for year 2 on a previously neglected plot, I think.

And we also harvested another trug full of borlotti beans, the last of the beetroot (okay, we missed them and only found them when we were digging over) and a few carrots, as well as some alpine strawberries – still delicious!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-crop-rotation, allotment-rough-digging, allotment-strawberries