I have not been to the plot for nearly a month, a mixture of being busy and bad weather. The past weeks have been really rainy and windy and enough for schools to be closed and trains to be cancelled (although they don’t seem to need much of an excuse it seems). I wondered what I would be faced when I arrived in the first non stormy Sunday morning for quite a while. As it happened, nothing seemed to be amiss apart from the netting over the sprouts could had been standing up a bit straighter. The biggest change was a transformation into winter, leaves off the trees and things dying back. It certain was all in ‘winter mode’.

Instead of weeding, as it was not needed, I spent time clearing off the fallen leaves and generally tidying things up. The broad beans planted under old squash bottles had all germinate and were trying to fight their way out of the tops. I removed the bottles and tied the bean plant up as they were all a bit spindly having spent their first weeks of life trying to escape the bottles. The turnips had mostly grown from their small nice size to the not so nice larger size. When they are small they taste to much better I think but they only stay like that for about a week. The larger ones are not a problem as long as they don’t get super large.

Since last visit, both the onions and the garlic have all started to grow, I removed the netting off the onions with the risk of birds pecking them out now gone. I hoed in between the rows and suddenly things started to look a lot more looked after.

Leeks have suffered allium leaf minor again, not too bad at the moment. The leeks haven’t really done very well in general, this is for the second year in a row. Last year we didn’t have any whereas this time I think we will have one or two but nothing like the massive harvests we used to have which make leaks one of our “big three” harvest moments of the year. Not quite sure what’s going wrong.

The previous day with picked up some lengths of metal rebar that was being given away free and seemed the sort of thing that I could find a use for pretty quickly on the plot. This I did, by redoing the netting over the sprouts. It leaves gaps at the bottom and sides but I’m thinking the netting is more there to stop the pigeons than the butterflies at this time of the year. It looks a lot neater too. If I had wanted it to reach the ground then all it would need is bashing more into the ground to make things lower, I think it should be fine as it.

I pulled up the old courgette plants, there was one courgette ready to pick which had some nibble marks in it but should be fine. It seems like only the other day I planted these in, the summer came and went, came again for a bit and went…. a bit of a strange summer growing wise. I also pulled the remainder of the carrots.

I returned home with a large selection of winter veg:

• turnips
• swede
• carrots
• sprouts
• curly kale