There are actually things growing!

I spent week in Crete last week with five days of wonderful weather and two not so much. On the way home I scrawled through my photos and realised I had more pictures of flowers than I did of other sight-seeingy things. I won’t subject you to them all but here are a few:

The plants are Glebonius coronaria or crown daisy, rocket, horned poppy, Lantana with its colour-shifting flower and a corn marigold and poppy. There were fields and abandonned plots full of each of these flowers, obviously in the Cretan climate they are all on the invasive end of spreading, but here in the UK they make rather more contained plants.

Slugs and snails

A helpful person offered me some slug pellets when I was on my plot because they had just bought a new tube and didn’t want to use the old ones - I have no idea why. I thanked them and said I didn’t use them - no, not even the organic ones. It was the end of a long afternoon of planting out, and I didn’t have the energy to explain what I do instead, so here it is.

๑ï Reduce as much as I can the hiding places whilst accepting it is not always possible to eliminate them. I say this as a woman with a whole bed of ‘weeds’ for biodiversity at the end of her plot which is a veritable city of slugs and snails.

๑ï I use a weather app to see what the next fortnight’s weather will be. If there is going to be a lot of rain or dampness, I don’t plant the seedlings out but wait. This might mean I need to pot them on, or give them a very diluted seaweed feed if they are showing signs of nutrient deficiency, usually through yellowing leaves.

This next fortnight isn’t great and our beetroot really needs to go out. Decisions will need to be made.

๑ï Plant out sturdy seedlings that have been well-grown with little stress and strong root systems. Slugs and snails will make a bee-line (slowly) for weaker plants.

๑ï I place my earliest crops such as radish, lettuce and spinach as far away from beds which might be hiding slugs and snails, near to chipping paths, as possible. I have always found that the beds with brassicas in are also a great place for these critters to hang out.

๑ï I protect most of my transplants with fleece, enviromesh, clear plastic bottles used as cloches and copper rings until I think the plant is big enough to withstand an attack. I have had these plastic bottles for over twenty years.

๑ï I check for slugs and snails under the bricks and stones that hold fleece down and under fleece and mesh, and remove those that I find.

๑ï I lose crops - not as many as you might think. Last year I planted out my celariac because I was off on holiday and didn’t think they would survive being in the tunnel in small modules. I didn’t protect them and they didn’t survive the holiday. You can’t sow celariac again, it takes too long to germinate and grow, but other crops such as carrots you can.

The RHS have a cheery piece of research that shows that most barrier methods don’t work - eggshells, wool etc. Although the jury is out on copper barriers, the image they show won’t work because the leaves are hanging outside the barrier. In this instance two rings need to be joined to make one larger one so that everything is contained inside the ring. I also think copper rings only work if they are put in place when the seeding is transplanted, not after the snail meal.

And so to cucumbers . . .

We’ve been bombarded with headlines about food prices going up, shortages of salad ingredients on the shelves and a lack of carbon dioxide used in packaging for fresh foods recently. All of which makes me glad I grow as much as I can, but sometimes it is not as simple as making one sowing of a crop and then sitting back and letting the magic happen.

This then, is how I manage cucumbers to have them from the end of May to the end of October. I don’t eat many cucumbers over winter as I am sick of them at that point. I have a polytunnel and greenhouse and a small heated window sill propagator. Jump into this list when I use the resources you have.

1. As early as possible (April) I buy a grafted cucumber and plant it in the polytunnel or greenhouse. These are vigorous plants and usually produce cucumbers by the end of May. I really like small cucumbers at this point but take whatever the garden centre has to offer.

   

2. The first week of April, I sow indoor growing cucumber seeds using the heated propagator, usually Carmen. These are F1 seeds so only five in a packet but honestly, two plants are enough unless you can get through more than one cucumber a meal. This year I transplanted these into the polytunnel on the 29th of April and expect fruits around the middle of June. The grafted plant will still be producing cucumbers but may be slowing down.

3. The first week of May I sow my outdoor cucumbers, usually some form of Marketmore. They have slightly bumpy skins but are a good, reliable cropper. These will go outside on a frame at the end of May and start producing at the beginning of July. I usually have six plants, but for the two of us that is too many and we start eating cucumbers as snacks and at meal times. The Carmen cucumbers will be slowing down now.

4. The first week of June I sow an old heritage variety, Crystal Lemon. It needs to be peeled but has a crispness unlike any other cucumber and by the time this is producing fruit, mid to end of July, we are ready for a change. These plants will continue producing into October depending on the weather, but definitely towards the end of September.

And at this point we are truly fed up with cucumbers and never want to see another one!

Happy cucumber growing and gardening.

We had a frost the night of the 12th having just transplanted our peas. The date for the last frosts in our area is the 9th of May - well, that is Exeter and we are probably a week earlier because of the sea - but we stick to the 9th. The website Findyourlastfrostdate is an excellent starting point but gives us a last frost date of about 13th of April with the climate change button switched on. My growing experience would be that it is a bit too early but it is always worth taking a chance.

My poor little kiwi ‘Jenny’ did get a bit of tip burn on its leaves so I might wrap it up for a week or two.

We made the choice to protect our peas because we had just survived a couple of days with very cold winds even though it had been sunny. I’m glad we did. The peas were grown in gutters and then we slid them into a trench created the same size as the guttering. It’s always good fun and creates an instant line of peas.

Then using twiggy pea sticks, hazel, we built supports for the peas to climb up and to prevent pigeons getting in and stripping the leaves. Finally, we wrapped the enviromesh we use to protect our brassicas around them. Nothing is getting in at these peas, including frost!

The broadbeans have picked up and are now starting to grow.

The edges of the leaves have been nibbled by bean weevils, they love pea leaves too, but it doesn’t kill the plants.

Clearing an overgrown allotment plot

We went to look at the plot we have agreed to clear for the allotment association. It’s not too bad. Pictures next week but I have to say, it is the only plot I have attempted to clear that has no metal poles, bricks, lumps of concrete or anything to hold the plastic down that we need to use. However, we have a plan!

Happy gardening.

This is the plot and tunnel at the end of the session

Twiggy pea sticks

In preparation for planting out our peas next weekend, we harvested twiggy peasticks or hazel branches ready to create a climbing support and a defense against pigeons. We are fortunate that the wildlife plot on the allotments has a lot of hazels and so we should be able to cut enough for everyone.

I did look through this article and fantasize about creating structures like these, but in reality we need something straight forward that is easily built and replicated.

On the last course people built fortresses after a pigeon managed to scale someone’s structure and get into the peas.

Sowing Leeks

There can’t be many ways that we haven’t sown now: we’ve used guttering, modules, seed snails, seed trays and now pots. The leeks were scattered across the top of the compost and then lightly covered with more compost and watered.

We are growing a leek that is ready in late summer/early autumn because the course finishes at the end of October. Called Jolant, it’s quite a tall leek and harvesting can start in August.

Once germinated, we will grow them on in seed snails.

Just direct sowing left now.

Pricking out lettuce and cabbage

Pricking out the seedlings from the tray into modules gives each seedling more space and nutrients and so we can grow them on until they are slightly bigger plants and therefore less vulnerable when we transplant them.

You can use anything to loosen the seedlings. In the video below I have a plastic ‘fork’ for lifting them out there are a whole load of items you could use: a knitting needle, teaspoon, pencil or stick or even just your fingers. My favourite is my copper tool with a fork on one end a small spoon on the other. Burgon and Ball have a strange implement that I think looks like something you might find in a dentist’s and is called a ‘seedling widger’.

Questions

Always great questions. This week’s was: when you can stop watering seedlings with tap water? We are using tap water because there are bacterial and fungal diseases in collected rain water that can wipe out a whole tray of seedlings, in particular with something called ‘damping off’, a fungal disease.

There are two things I take into consideration:

1. size of seedling, and

2. temperature of the environment that the seedlings are in.

In our communal polytunnel it is so hot and humid, read too hot and humid, which means I would always water seedlings with tap water until they leave the tunnel. In a cooler environment I would move to rain water once the plants have been pricked out and have grown a few true leaves or look a little sturdier.

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And finally

If you like podcasts and would like to know more about soil, this podcast is easy listening but informative. The Joy of Soil from Rare Earth.

Hoe Nerd

Yes - I can talk for some time about hoes, the different types, how they work and what they are good for and I have quite a large selection myself. Is that wrong?

Anyway. One of the reasons for having so many is that we like everyone to try out a whole range to find the one that they like best because it really is an individual choice. My favourites are what I call arrow heads but I see are also called ‘winged weeders’ online. I have two different sizes, a large one for when the beds are empty and a small one for when the beds are planted up. The large hoe is bronze, copper with a little tin in it, and was expensive.

There are, however, others, and we have a dutch hoe, a swoe (a combination of the words sword (really?) and hoe first made by Wilkinson Sword) and an oscillating or stirup hoe. The hoe most commonly seen in garden centres is the dutch hoe but often the cutting edge or blade is really blunt and won’t slice through anything, let alone a weed, so you need to check how sharp it is before buying.

Hoes can have up to 4 cutting edges, like my large arrowhead hoe, or just 1 such as the dutch hoe. All need a slightly different action but make weeding a plot doable in approx. 30 minutes. And as they say, the best time to weed is before you can see the weeds, i.e. when they are germinating below soil level and so we hoe, or hand weed, every session when the soil is dry enough.

I’ll stop there but only after showing you my allotment neighbour’s hoe which he uses regularly. When he hoes, he sharpens it regularly, wearing it away bit by bit, and you can see that the blade is smaller, rounded and that he is right-handed as it is not symetrical.

Potatoes

We are growing Charlotte potatoes which are a second early, salad potato and delicious. There is no comparing the taste with shop bought ones and it was time to plant those we had chitted.

They are in two rows of three, each row 60 cm apart and 30 cm away from each other down the row. They have gone in about 15cm deep and are covered with soil. When the leaves start to show, we will decide how to cover them: earth them up or cover with compost/decomposed chippings/grass/strulch or anything else we can get our hands on.

Broad beans

Normally there would be nothing to talk about with planting the broad beans but this time we had grown them in seed snails and so they have very long roots which we don’t want to damage or break.

This means using a trowel and creating a slit in the soil and dropping the seedling into it. It is much deeper than a dibber would make and needs to be wider so a trowel is the best tool.

Some of the beans were much slower germinating and their leaves hadn’t poked up through the compost but on opening the snails they were starting to. There are several possible reasons: the seeds were just not as viable as the others, they were poked a little bit further down or uneven watering that didn’t quite get between all the spirals of the snail. I think though, we may not have had quite enough compost in the snails and it being tightly wrapped, the seed did not have much room to swell when germinating.

Back to talking about hoes

In my shed I found these draw hoes, which describes the action needed to use them.

I find it quite difficult to weed with them as they move the soil around, it is a drawing-towards-you action that is needed, but it is good for creating seed drills in the soil and for earthing up potatoes if that is the way you grow them.

There is just one final hoe that I would like and that is a Sneeboer royal dutch hoe. Look at those blades!

It’s a combination of the dutch hoe and the blades of my Wolf and Garten hoe but is also very expensive. There’s also a DeWit diamond headed hoe - so many but you only need one if it is the right one.

Happy hoeing.

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Yesssss! It’s stopped raining and we have at least a week if not a bit longer with no rain which means (drum roll) we will be able to start planting out. As we don’t use slug pellets, but are still susceptible to slugs after a year of the plot being under black plastic, there are four key questions I ask before planting out:

1. Have we got true leaves on the seedlings? (This one is not essential but preferred)

2. Is there a strong root system?

3. Have there been a few days where the top of the soil has dried out? (Tricky so far!)

4. Are there several dry days after planting out forecast? (If all the rest of the questions are answered with a no, but this one is a yes, I will sometimes still plant out if time is an issue.)

And, if I do plant out, I make a decision about the protection, if any, that a plant needs. At this time of year retaining warmth is an issue so I usually use fleece lying on top of plants until nearer the last date of frost: 10th of May here.

Other protections might be copper rings, insect mesh or old plastic water bottles as individual cloches against slugs. Only the bottles provide the warmth that is also needed at this time of year.

The final question happens on the plot. Where to plant? You might have a plan but consider the slug hiding places near by and try and avoid those for your earliest transplantings. There will be slugs and snails under perennial leaves - strawberries, raspberries, globe artichokes and the many beds of brassicas that might still be left. I try to place my radishes as far away from these as I can, making sure there are no bricks, stones, canes or anything else a slug might hide under or near.

You have given your seedlings the best chance you can in terms of readiness and position. Now the watering. Don’t sprinkle water all over the soil or leaves. Slugs and snails love it as they are attracted by dampness. Dib a hole, pop the seedling from the module in and water into the dibbed hole and then cover with soil. No water will be visible and that is a good thing at this time of year.

This sounds like a lot of decisions to make, but once you have done it a few times, it takes a split second. It takes much longer to ferret the fleece out of the depths of the shed.

Sowing celariac, lettuce and cabbage

It always amazes me that such a large, knobbly veg can come from some of the smallest seeds, but it does.

I sowed these and brought them home to keep a close eye on them on a heated windowsill propagator. The seeds do not need to be covered by soil so are sitting on top of the damp compost after being pressed gently in. We need to grow these on until they are quite a reasonable size before putting them out. As the top of the compost drys out quickly, they need a gentle watering every day.

We have sown seeds in modules, seed snails, gutters and also now, what I call the old style sowing, using seed trays. Seed trays are a two step method of sowing seeds and a good one to use if your modules are full and you need to wait a few days to plant out some of the seedlings. We sowed a red and a green cabbage, Red Drumhead and Greyhound and lettuces; Red salad bowl and Little Gem.

Here is a quick video of how to sow brassicas in a seed tray.

Hoes

My husband asked me if I was a hoe nerd and I think I might be! The soil was finally dry enough to have a go at hoeing and to try out the different types that we have (6 at the moment) and see which one suits best. I will talk more about these in the next newsletter - something to look foward to! 🤔

Happy gardening.

I sowed four types of seed, cabbage, spring onions, onions and and placed them outside the greenhouse whilst wondering why I don’t just sow them in the greenhouse as normal. The cabbage and spring onion seeds were new, the others had been open for some time but surprise, surprise. The cabbage and spring onions have germinated!

I wish now that I had sown some in the greenhouse just to see if they germinated as easily or not. I will transplant these into modules eventually and let them grow on, but for now they are staying outside.

Grow lights

I have no electricity in my greenhouse and it is too difficult to get it put in so I won’t ever have growlights in there. However, I did spot these nifty little seed starting kits on Amazon with built in growlights and thought I would use them to start sweet peppers and chillies this year indoors.

Normally, I sow my chillies in March and they start ripening in August so for earlier peppers the trick is to sow them earlier, but that means support in terms of warmth and light.

I am sowing my usual long red marconi and gourmet jalapeno chillies with the new-to-me Snack Bite, which although it says is ideal for children, I’m sure will be fine for us too.

I’m going to give them 3 hours of light from about 4pm and the same from about 7am. It’s all a bit of guesswork at the moment but I am aiming for about 10 hours a day. I still think they are a bit leggy but when I transplant them into pots, I will bury the stems quite deep.

Here are the onions I sowed on the 17th of January - one seed snail on the kitchen window sill and one under growlights.

It’s the ones on the right as you look at the photo so I wonder if it is worth it. And yes, it is raining outside! Talking of . . .

Rain

It has rained so much over the last couple of months that the Veg Course Bed is underwater and completely unworkable. This is the third year in the last four or five that this has happened and so I tend to think that this is how winter will be: grey, warm and wet.

What this means is making some adaptations to the plot to try and deal with the water. We are at the lower end of a slight slope and so the water collects on the plot from quite a large surface area above us. Things we might consider to reduce the problem:

• Digging ditches/swales to hold the water - the paths could be dug out for this and filled with chippings.

• Raising the beds - we could start with the soil from the ditches. I would hope to do this without edging the bed as that holds water in.

• Creating a raised bed with a low tunnel on it. This would mean that we could grow differently on the plot as well.

• In France they plant willow where it is very wet. If this were my own plot I might do this, but I don’t think my allotment neighbours would appreciate this response.

• Again, if it were on my own plot, I might create a bog area where most of the water collects and grow bog plants but we need this plot for people to practise growing veg on.

Are there other things we could do? Let me know.

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February 15th is when we reach the magic 10 hours of daylight which increases dramatically as we move through into March and April. This is really the earliest date to sow seeds if you don’t have heat mats and grow lights and even then we can get leggy seedlings which never seem to do quite as well once planted out.

Bide your time. Later sowings catch up quickly at this time of year.

I would say happy gardening but it is almost impossible here. So instead, stay dry!

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Lev Parikian, on his substack newlsetter of Six Things, shared the wonderful sunlight optimism calendar. Put in your postcode and it will show you sunrise and sunset and hours of sunshine - something to look forward to. Here is Exmouth’s calendar.

Winter seed sowing

I like to try out new, to me, ideas that I see on instagram and elsewhere. Last year I attempted a seed snail or two as developed by Farida Sober and I can really see the benefits of them.1 Click on the image to visit her on instagram account.

Recently, the algorithm on Facebook has been sending me the posts of a woman who sows seeds in winter and leaves them outside. They are mostly flower seeds but some veg are included in her list of what works well, and as I don’t have growlights or heating I thought I would give it a try. It looks to me like she is in America and gets cold but sunny winters so I am not absolutely convinced that warm, wet grey winters will work but there is only one way to find out. We are in zone 9 climate wise so we are at the outer limits of where it works.

I had some small ziploc bags so I have used those. Compost and seeds needed too. I have fresh seed in the form of spring onion Lilia and cabbage Greyhound and then old packets of Ailsa Craig and Magnate onions.

I put about 5 or 6 cm of compost in the bag and squashed it to make it flat and even, watered and then sowed the seeds. Not that easy.2

I zipped them up most of the way but left 2 - 3cm held open with a peg to allow for an airflow. This made the tops fold over so I will need to buy some skewers to hold them upright. I was left wondering why this was better than a greenhouse but I need to stop doubting and see what happens. I’ll let you know as soon as something germinates.

I always like to sow some seeds on New Year’s day just because it has been months since I last sowed some seeds for food in 2025. The only things I sow are pea seeds, Early Onward, and broad beans, Aqua Dulce Claudia. They take some time to germinate and seeds sown a month or two later soon catch up, but that isn’t really the point.

Happy New Year and I hope you can get some gardening in between all this weather.

When I lifted the bin off, you could see the runs they had made but they hadn’t nested. I tried to get a photo of the tunnels but it isn’t clear on the photo and just looks like a load of semi-rotted plant material. The real proof was in the nibbled veg on top of the pile.

There are things you can do to reduce the likelihood of rats, one of them being to turn your compost heap at least once because they do not like being disturbed. I was told that if I hit the heap everytime I passed it, that would be enough to keep them out but I have six daleks. It would be like playing a strange (un)musical set of drums.

Anyway, here’s what I did. I cut a square of wire netting which I already had, large enough to cover the bottom of the bin and fold up.

I then threaded a thin wire around the dalek and pulled it tight to draw the wire in close to the bin because rats are clever creatures.

Finally, I turned it up the correct way and filled it with the material. This was a slightly smaller bin than the one that it was in originally. I would say the compost had sunk by about 10% in the original bin after two months, but there was enough to fill this rat-proof dalek right to the top.

What I was pleased with was how this is almost ready to use two months after being filled. I have used compost much rougher than this when needed.

Five more bins to go.

Christmas wreaths

Sunday was our Christmas wreath making day and very christmassy it was too. I cut a load of greenery from my garden, but it is a like holding a party and wondering if you have enough food to eat. So I cut a bit more!

This year we made the wreaths out of willow, and they were lovely if not always circular. One of us was very good at making them (not me).

We didn’t use moss but just tied the sprigs onto the wreath and you can’t tell the difference.

One of the benefits of willow wreaths is that you can decorate half of the wreath and make it look as if that was meant to be.

The other benefit is that once you have taken the ribbon off, the whole thing can go in the compost heap, chopped up, or in your green bin if you have one.

People are very creative so we had candle decorations and a whole range of wreaths for different places that look great and are so different considering we started with the same materials.

Happy gardening if the rain ever stops!

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So, for Christmas it is a large down pipe ( a greater diameter than the one in the video), two empty plastic bottles and some sand plus fixings to hold the contraption to my shed!🎅

Christmas wreaths

The very last activity we complete as a Veg Growing course is to make a christmas wreath. As we didn’t hold a course this year, we have invited last year’s lot back again to make one. We are being very green and making our wreaths out of willow rather than the usual metal frames and leaving out the moss. It’s too expensive and I don’t have the time to scarify my lawn, where there is plenty.

The greenery comes from out and about but mostly my garden where I give everything a good prune and we use the prunings. I have all the usual items: holly, ivy, pittosporum, bay, rosemary, dried grass heads, twigs of all sorts, conifer of some sort, wild rose berries, dried poppy heads and a can of spray gold paint. People bring their own sparkly, colourful bits to add and they all look so different despite starting off with the same ingredients. Pictures of the finished wreaths next week.

It’s too wet to do any work with soil at the moment, so time to look at that list and sort out my garden shed.

Happy gardening

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Normally, what I do is cover every bed with compost which has meant I have to bust a gut to make enough compost, and then leave it on the beds until the spring and the weeds sprout. This is only on the beds where I have nothing growing. This year, I am trying something different - I love a trial!

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

Adam Savage
https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/experiment-quotes

I have been watching Huw Richards discussing the difference between mulch and compost - yes compost can be mulch (Charles Dowding says so, and I believe him), but I have to work very hard to make enough compost whereas I have leaves and grass clippings coming out of my ears following a warm autumn. What if I mulched with grass and leaves, and saved all of my compost for the spring when I was planting?

Well, that is what I am about to try.

Watch Huw talk about it here.

It is certainly easier to do.

So, here is the order in which I would do things depending on resources available.

1. Roots in the ground. The veg you are growing over winter are really important - soil is made to grow plants and plants are made for soil. Nothing keeps the soil biome working like roots in the soil and it is the cheapest and easiest thing to do.

2. However, it is a challenge to keep roots in every bed over winter. It gets easier the more you want winter veg: sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli, rocket, cabbage and much more if you have covers. If not, cover the beds with whatever you have to hand. Black plastic is fine but if you have anything organic, tuck that under the black plastic if you are clearing the beds. Leaves and grass clippings are fine but not wood chippings. Those are to be used in a particular way, discussed next week.

3. You can cover beds with compost or manure. We have done this every year for the last six years on the veg course beds (manure) and they are very fertile, but of course this costs money. It is horses for courses here.😂 I did wonder this year if beds can be too fertile. Something I am thinking about particularly if Bruce retires and we no longer have easy access to manure.

4. Just cover the beds with black plastic and wait until the spring. It will clear most weeds that do not have tap roots and will give you some time to collect resources. Although I am a passionate no-digger, if I were taking over a new plot and could not buy compost and didn’t have access to any grass or leaves, I would dig the bed for the first and last time, spread some blood, fish and bone in the spring and then plant into it. Needs must if you have a family to feed. The next year I wouldn’t repeat this cycle, but use the time to set myself up to create compost and collect mulches.

What are you doing this winter on your beds?

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Another option is to build a hoop cover so that you have a mini polytunnel. I have it on my long list of winter jobs to do just so. It increases the crops you can grow during all of the seasons, and so I want to try it out.

And now for something completely different. A wild apple project in Cornwall. I love it! Many thanks to Lev Parikian and his substack Six Things for sharing this.

Happy gardening

They are beautiful in flower, reminding us of the plant family that they belong to: Asteraceae, the daisy family, and which also contains sunflowers. 🌻1

But it is the tubers that I am after.

I grow them at the end of the plot on a fairly shady bed that is not easy to use for anything else. I limit myself to four tubers as they can take over. But now is the time to start harvesting them and seeing what is hiding under the soil, having enjoyed the flowers.

Thinking like a permaculturist, this plant provides three crops: tubers to eat; flowers to cut and use in house; stems that can be chopped up small and used as a brown in the compost heap. And you can keep four tubers and plant them next year so you never need to buy them again. What’s not to love?

Roots in the soil 🪱

The best way to keep soil healthy and working is to keep roots in the soil over winter. It means the carbon and nitrogen cycles continue, microbes in the soil still work although may be a bit slower due to lower temperatures, and depending on the depth of the root, holes and gaps and tunnels for water, oxygen and creatures to use.

On an allotment, much of that can be food. We have all the brassicas, lettuce, rocket, onions, garlic, carrots, parsnips, beetroot and herbs sitting there waiting to be harvested. However, there are some beds where we have nothing planted and so cover crops can be a good idea. At the moment, I am trying a mustard in the same bed as my garlic. In theory the mustard should be killed by the frosts, leaving some decaying matter and the garlic can then grow on. What I’m really testing is whether we have enough frost on the south west coast to kill anything.

Update: aftertwo nights of frost, the mustard is still here.

Mustard is a quick growing crop with a reasonably big, fibrous root system. Ideal. And in this wet autumn, these plants are still growing and will be taking up some of that excess water, preventing water logging in the beds with garlic - that’s the hope.

I also have a lot of grass clippings. I get the feeling this is going to be one of those years when we have to cut our lawn twelve months of the year if it isn’t too wet. You can only use so much grass in your compost heap before it becomes a matted smulch so I am going to try spreading some on a bed to see what happens. Not too thickly but enough to protect the soil.

Huw Richards wrote an interesting newsletter about mulch and compost and what he is using and when.

Happy gardening

The seeds are large and I plant them on end with the little brown bit at the top despite the fact that we undertook a trial to see if it mattered which way up you planted a broadbean seed. It didn’t! What does matter is that you keep them in a mouse-free environment. If you come back and there is a little hole next to where each seed was planted, you have mice. 🐭This is what Rob of @robsallotment on instagram recommends.

Broadbeans fix or hold nitrogen in the soil through bacteria in nodules on their roots. This is a good thing and is one of the reasons why we don’t pull the roots up when they are over but cut the plant off at soil level. When bacteria and fungi break the modules down and release the nitrogen into the soil as ammonium, the nitrifying bacteria then convert it to nitrites which plants can use. If you would like to see this cycle as a diagram, this is a good site to do so. Here endeth the lesson on the nitrogen cycle but it is an important one to understand with all legumes such as any bean and pea acting in the same way.

Harvests

I am not organised enough to show you my harvest every week, but once a month I can. This month’s harvest contains leeks, squash, carrots, beetroot, cos lettuce, red mustard, nasturtium leaves, lambs lettuce, chard, kale, fennel, red cabbage, two types of rocket, apples, sweet peppers and I am in the process of cutting down all the lemon grass.

In the store are potatoes, onions, shallots, chillies and garlic and I haven’t yet harvested spring onions, radishes, spinach and savoy cabbage although they are all ready. I do still have some tomatoes in the polytunnel so we are eating those when I bring them home.

Compost material - again 🍎🥬🪲♻️->🪴

I have a lot of compost material, usually stems and twigs of defunct fruit and veg, which I want to put on my compost pile but they are too big. One of the underlying prinicples of making compost is that the smaller the piece that goes into the compost pile, the quicker it decomposes and your compost is ready.

When it is wet, I sit in my polytunnel and chop up brambles, jerusalem artichoke stems, sweetcorn stems, teasel stems, any stem going really, to less than 10cms. If I have a lot, I store them in old compost sacks once chopped and add them when needed to the compost pile. You just need a good audiobook, a sharp pair of secateurs and a flask of tea.

Let’s face it, because of the weather, it’s not been easy to do anything else this week other than wait for Monday. 🌞I might need to start a list of wet weather gardening tasks.

I also wanted to take a photo of my tidied garden shed, but not yet. Still work to do in it. It’s difficult to store the cardboard neatly when I get some large pieces.

Did I say that I have managed to grow three, yes three, parsnips? I am saving them for Christmas day.

Happy gardening whatever the weather.

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I needed to do some weeding, but as I am turning my compost heap, I can’t put the weeds into the compost bin so thought the new raised beds would be the ideal place. Before I do that, however, I needed to put some anti-rat netting under the bed because these new beds are near our compost heap and we do get rats. (I wouldn’t do this on an allotment, only at home.) Here starts a long chain of tasks.

First buy the wire netting to stop the rats getting into the beds. Cut to size.

Next, remove the beds and scrape away everything I have put in them already. Put the wire down, the beds back and start to fill again.

First leaves, then the brambles and twigs and branches.

And finally, some buckets of weeds that have been waiting for me to sort out the netting.

And now my two hours of gardening time have been used up and the weeds are still sitting there in the flower bed. I am not a fan of wanting to do a task and finding I need to do three other things before I can start! Anyway, they are all set to take plenty of buckets of non-flowering weeds. Now I need to finish turning the compost heap.

Old beds

My raspberries on the allotment were 22 years old and no longer producing well so time for them to go. I had taken one bed out a while ago but then left it and the weeds had grown.😲 Time to cover the bed with the principle objective being to exclude the light. I have woven plastic sheeting which I have been using for over ten years now but it does let some light, and rain, through. To stop this, I have placed cardboard underneath the plastic so that no light can get through, and will leave it on for a minimum of six months but or longer as there is bindweed under here.

As I turn out my compost, I will peel back the black plastic and layer it on top of the cardboard and then cover again. I cover again because I do have quite a bit of weed seed in my home-made compost no matter how hard I try not to. If I put manure on top of the cardboard, I won’t cover the bed again but allow the the weather over winter to work on the manure.

Overwintering onions

I sowed the red overwintering onion sets, Electric, into modules on the 2/10/25 as the weather was so foul and I couldn’t get out onto the plot. Five weeks later they are more than ready to be planted out.

Onion roots are quite brittle and a few of these did break as I was removing them from the module but they will soon recover. I will probably need to start using these in May or June if my summer grown onions last that long.

And finally. I am still collecting leaves! 🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂

Happy gardening.

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But compost making can be an incredibly tricky thing because everyone makes it differently, some very precisely, others are a bit more happy-go-lucky. The ideas to hang onto are the principles of composting and probably the amount of time you have to devote to it. Some methods require a lot more time and effort than others. Below is a list of different ways of making compost.

• Aerobically - usually referred to as hot or cold composting although I prefer to think of these two methods as being along a continuum where you might make compost more towards one end than the other. Charles Dowding makes hot compost with one turn, others make 6 turns and then it is ready as in 18 day compost.

• Anaerobically - this would be using methods like fermentation such as in Bokashi composting and is one I have not yet tried.

• Fungal composting - this is composting for those more woody materials such as wood chippings or leaves. This usually takes some time - 1+ years for wood chippings. There will be some bacterial activity.

• Worm composting or vermicomposting - where worms do the work for you. It is almost a given that there will be bacteria involved as well, but worm compost is black gold.

But now, now is the time to start collecting leaves for leaf composting. Collect as many as you can - I have been known to go up and down roads that are not my own collecting them. If it is possible, chop them up because this will speed up what is a slow process of decay. I do this by laying the leaves out on my lawn and using the lawn mower, running it over them and collecting in the bag behind. What this does is also mix in a little fresh grass clippings which are rich in nitrogen and help speed up the rotting down process.

Pack these chopped up clippings into a bin - whatever sort of bin you have or bags - water them as they are dry at the moment and leave. They will rot down and what were once full bins will end up a half to a quarter full but leave you with some wonderful compost underneath the top layer. And then you will wish that you had collected more leaves. What I love most about this is the fact that you can make compost for free. And it’s easy!

If you can’t chop up the leaves, don’t worry. I made compost out of leaves for years without chopping them up. It took a little longer - at least a year - but it still worked. In fact, as I was chopping the leaves up today I remembered that when leaf fall is at its maximum, I can’t chop them up because I don’t have the time. I do mix them with fresh grass clippings though.

This is a great TED talk about making leaf compost. The only difference is that he uses ground coffee beans rather than grass for the nitrogen but either will work.

I’ll talk in a few weeks about how I’m going to use this as part of my seed starting mix.

Happy leaf collecting.

Unfortunately, I have been struck down by Covid this week so no gardening for me. I was due to plant my garlic and talk about how to do it but will have to do it next week. However, no need for you to wait. Here is what other gardeners do.

Firstly, Huw Richards planting his garlic.

Although I am not a massive fan of the blood, fish and bone powder GrowVeg uses, I can see that I might need to be putting garlic in the fridge if we continue to get these warm winters.

It wouldn’t be complete without Charles Dowding and the rust which garlic on my plot often suffers with.

My version is make a hole with a dibber and drop the clove in so that the top of the garlic just pokes out and then cover with 2-3cm of compost. Job done!

Happy gardening.

There are three veg we can sow in autumn which will help with keeping plants in the soil. Broad beans, overwintering onions and garlic. Now is the time to make sure that you have purchased some of each if you wish to grow them because next week will be an ideal time to start them.

You don’t need to sow many overwintering onions but the advantage of them is that they are ready before the summer ones. I start eating mine in May or whenever my stored onions have run out. I don’t wait for them to be ‘ready’, I just start using the biggest ones straight from the ground until I harvest them all. It is too late to start these onions from seed but you can buy sets, small onion bulbs, in the garden centres now and plant them.

Garlic can also be purchased in the garden centre if you have not previously grown it. If you have grown it before and saved some of the cloves, you can plant those. It is always best to save the biggest cloves to resow because those will develop into the biggest bulbs of garlic.

If you are buying them, buy whatever is in the garden centre. You might find that some of the packs are labelled hard neck and some soft neck. There is a slight difference between the two and describes the stalk that comes up the middle of the bulb.

Soft neck varieties are supposed to store better and produce more cloves. Examples are Germidour, Picardy Wight, Solent Wight, Maddock Wight, Mersley Wight, Provence Wight and Rhapsody Wight.

Hard neck varieties produce slightly fewer cloves and need eating first. Examples are Caulk Wight, Lautrec Wight, Carcasonne Wight, Kingsland Wight and Roseland Wight.

Much of this garlic is available in the Kings catalogue with the ‘Wight’ in the name showing that the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight brought them into production here.

There is only one type of Elephant garlic and it is expensive so buy it once and grow the cloves on year after year until you have a large enough supply. The flavour is not as strong as the garlics above, but it is delicious.

If you did harvest some elephant garlic this year, you might have noticed some small bulbils attached to the bulb or left in the soil when you pulled the plant out. I imagine that these develop into cloves if there is enough time but these small ones have yet to develop. They can be harvested and then planted out and left for two years. The first year they will develop one clove and then the second year they will split and produce many. This year, I have sown these into modules to monitor what happens more clearly. I was a few short of a whole tray so planted some onion sets into the remaining cells. You can see them as there are the red necks just sticking up above the compost. Next week, I will plant the rest directly into the soil.

We plant garlic mainly in the autumn because it needs a spell of cold to split. If there isn’t, you tend get to one large bulb which is particularly true for elephant garlic and happened to me last year for the first time. I will be replanting them next week.

The broad bean that most sow over winter is Aquadulce or Aquadulce Claudia. They work well from a late October sowing and an early spring sowing, so if you like them, make sure you have some ready. If sown too early, they become tall and then the winter storms knock them about. Smaller plants survive the winter better.

2025 - a mast year

This year we have had prolific fruiting on apples and pears and probably other trees as well. When this happens across a population of fruit, all the apples for example, it is known as a mast year. We have had a mast year this year. Mast comes from an old English word, mæst, and is the acorns and other tree seeds that lie on the forest floor which pigs and other animals would eat to fatten in the autumn. It is suggested that a mast year occurs every three to five years but I think this one has been exceptional and must be linked to the weather in part.

And finally, my last tray of fennel seedlings. They are a bit dry which you can see because the compost has shrunk away from the edges of the cells. I’ll give them a good water and then plant them out in the polytunnel.

Happy gardening.

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It’s also a time for tidying up and starting to make the changes that I want to make over winter. I have planted an outdoor grape called Venus which is blue/black and seedless. The vine in my tunnel is supposed to be seedless but isn’t so I will take that last bit with a pinch of salt. It is also grafted which I think probably means it will be fairly/very vigorous so I have placed it where it can have a bit of a run but is easily controlled through pruning.

The veg course is back

After a year’s break, the veg course will be back in 2026 in real life, starting in March and running through until the end of September. It is open to anyone on the waiting list for a plot on either site, Hamilton Lane or Pound Lane.

The communal plot at the end of 2024.

If you would like to know more, I am holding two session: 28th of September and the 19th of October on the Hamilton Lane site, meeting outside the shop at 10.30am. This will be a chance to find out more about the course and whether it would be suitable for you. We have had complete beginners to those who have been growing for some time but want to know a bit more or to be a bit more organised in their sowing of seeds.

I’m looking forward to it.

Weeding

Now is a good time to weed your beds, if they need it. I didn’t do much over the summer as none seemed to grow but that is not to say that weed seeds were not falling or being blown in, and so some of my beds look like they are growing a new lawn. It is quite a good time to be hand weeding, which is my preferred method, because I can inspect the plants, pull off leaves touching the soil and find many, many snails. If the bed is empty, I sow phacelia which is a green manure that can be cut down, added to the compost bin or left to flower for the bees next year.

Living plant roots in a bed ensure that micro-organisms in the soil are fed through the root exudates and those organisms that are adapted to survive the cold will thank us for it. Many slow down rather than die, and wait for the soil to warm up again in the spring and then resume their activities. Digging at these times of the year exposes the soil organisms to the air, disrupts their micro-habitats and slows down their activity and kills them if they are not in the depth of soil that they prefer.

A mulch on top of the soil will also prevent the soil from becoming too cold and so protect the micro-organisms. The mulch I use is compost, 2 to 3 cms deep which means that everything is ready in the spring to get growing again. The challenge is to make enough compost and I may not have quite enough this year, particularly as I have two large beds that have had raspberries in them for twenty years and I am in the process of removing them. These beds will need a lot of compost and probably manure.

The mini series

Continuing the mini series where I show you mini veg I have grown that are meant to be bigger, this week I have a mini Meyer lemon. The plant has had a hard life. Three winters ago it was covered in scale and thrips and so I chopped it back to a small stump. Now it is a respectable size and is producing fruit and has flowers. Citrus plants have fruit at all stages of development all the time on the plant. The only thing is, they are tiny. I feed it citrus feed but will repot into a bigger pot in the spring and will use some of the expensive citrus potting compost that I have seen in the garden centre.

The first picture doesn’t look too bad but it is magnified. This lemon is sitting on the same teaspoon I used for my mini melons and this is captured more realistically in the second image. I think I am going to use the whole of the lemon, peel and all, in a Moroccan tagine.

Happy gardening.

I have been using them for a variety of purposes for some years now but found Charles Dowding’s recent video about them particularly useful.

So, lets look at how chippings are used on the plots. The chippings are mostly from conifers and leylandii, I would say, although we do get deciduous chippings as well. It is important to note that once broken down, conifer chippings do not make acidic compost. I think this is the research he referred to.

Firstly, paths. I would say the majority of plots use them for this and they are great. They can be topped up regularly and provide moist, nutrient rich root runs for plants, particularly those plants at the edge of beds.

I don’t normally do this but where I have autumn raspberry beds, the paths have a layer of woven plastic with wood chippings on top. This is only two paths, one either side of the bed and here, I can scrape the decomposed chippings up and use them as brown material in my compost bins. Then I can put new chippings down. I don’t recommend black plastic for a path normally, but autumn raspberry canes run and it seems to stop them.

Decomposing wood chippings

I also have bins with chippings in that are rotting down. One is two years old and the other one year old.

The sieved compost from the two year old bin is wonderful, and like the video, I have added a small amount of dried seaweed and some rock dust to it and will try it as a seed starting mix.

It is remarkable to think that this was conifer wood chips two years ago.

Wood chippings and raspberries

I do put wood chippings on the raspberry bed but this is the only bed I do that. Raspberries originally come from Scotland - the names give it away, Glen Ample, Glen Prosen - and so are used to a much cooler, damper growing medium than the sand I have. The one thing I do before putting wood chips down is to put on a thick layer of manure and then cover it with wood chips. This protects the soil from nitrogen robbing whilst the wood chips are decomposing. After this, I just put more wood chips on top of the old ones because the older ones will no longer use nitrogen as they rot down.

The list!

I am also filling up my bins again with new chippings ready for next year’s sieving. You don’t have to have a bin to put chippings in, so I would recommend making a pile on your plot if you don’t have one so that the work can start. A little something to add to your list of things to do once the weather turns a bit colder.

The rain can stop now, but this summer was a bumper one for squash. These twenty five came from three plants of Queensland Blue, an Australian variety that enjoyed the sun. The plants were not fed and only watered once a week each with one full watering can.

And so to pears . . .

I talked in a previous newsletter about how to harvest and ripen pears. My first lot are off the tree now but I am watching them very carefully because they are ripe when the colour changes slightly from green to yellow. It is easy to miss and then your pears rot from the inside out, get it right and they are delicious.

Happy gardening and eating.

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Whenever this happens, what we can probably all agree on is that it is very easy to get carried away and end up with 30 different types of tomato, 15 of squash and fogetting to order the peas. We can all also tell tales of seeds we have tried and then wondered why. Cucamelons, I am talking about you!

Seed catalogues have a language of their own and if you are not sure which variety to order, it can be tricky.

What to grow

Make a list of what you like to eat and start there. Why I grew runner beans for fifteen years when I hate the things, I will never know. Sarah Raven is particularly good at identifying those veg that taste best when home grown so if these appear on your list, definitely grow them.

Sweetcorn, tomatoes, early potatoes, peas, cucumbers and strawberries.

Some of these appear in the top twelve list of veg which have the highest levels of pesticides on them and are known as the dirty dozen. If any of your favourites are in the dirty dozen, that is a another great reason to grow them.

What to look for in seed catalogues

• If taste is mentioned. If it isn’t, it doesn’t mean that the crop will not taste good but it might be the deciding factor between two varieties. My main reason for growing is taste.

• If it might suit your growing conditions. If there is a drought tolerant variety, I am interested. Your conditions might be different, but what are you looking for?

• Do you want to be able to save seed from the veg to grow next year? If so, don’t buy F1 varieties as they will not come true from seed. I will talk more about this in the future. However, if uniformity in shape and size is important, F1 varieties are your friend.

• Do you have a particular pest problem to overcome - blight on potatoes or tomatoes, carrot root fly, club root on your brassicas? These are some of the pests and diseases that veg are now being bred to provide some resistance. And just a hint here, resistance is not the same as stopping it completely.

• Do you want an early or late variety to extend the growing season of some of your favourite crops?

• Does it have the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) Award of Garden Merit (AGM), usually a cup in a green circle. If it does, this means it is a reliable variety.

Where to start?

A good starting point is the varieties that we grow on the course. These are main crop, steady varieties that many people grow. They are not designed to be the earliest or the latest but more the most reliable - if such a thing exists - in the world of plants.

Click here to see what we grow on the veg course. (Pictures to be added as we grow and harvest in 2026)

But, if you have been growing for a few years and want to try something new, which I do every year, then looking out for new varieties in the seed catalogues is a great activity. It is the first thing I do. This means flicking through everything to find the ‘New’ logo but it often turns up a few exciting things to try.

Let’s have a look in the Kings catalogue.

Next year I need to grow some aubergines as back up for my grafted plant in case it fails, which it did this year. I want to try different types of melon, one more tomato (I grow 10 varieties already so I may have to ditch one to try another)

Aubergines - if you don’t have the catalogue, click on the link.

Looks in the aubergine department are very important and you see things such as a ‘pretty plant’, ‘one of the finest aubergines we have seen in years’, ‘glossy black’ and ‘striking, striped fruits’. The one thing I do know is that when cooked, all aubergines look the same no matter what they looked like when they were picked. There are plenty here to choose if I wanted something interesting to look at.

When they ripen is important with aubergines as sometimes you can wait until September, so Jackpot F1 and Genie F1 both mention that they ripen early which is a good thing in this country.

Genie F1 and Moneymaker F1 both mention the fact that the plants are productive and so produce larger quantities of aubergines than other varieties. If you eat lots of aubergines, one of these might suit you best.

Only one mentions flavour - Long Purple - so I will grow that one but I will try Jackpot F1 because it is so early. Also, look at the difference in price. F1 varieties are much more expensive than those which are not. Finally, with these two, I can perhaps have an extended season and if it is a grey, wet summer, then the Jackpot F1 might at least ripen.

Melons

I have grown Emir F1 for several years and this year they were superb although small. The catalogue says it is tasty, fragrant and tolerant of low temperatures all of which are important qualities during a UK summer.

Several people online have grown Minnesota Midget which is not in the Kings catalogue but I fancy trying as I can grow small melons. The description says

A very early-maturing plant, producing many small, delicious-flavoured fruits of 4 to 5 inches in diameter. An excellent 'designer' American melon, developed at the University of Minnesota around 1948.

Early maturing is the winner here because it means that if we don’t get a great summer, there may still be time for it to ripen. Plant World seems to be the only seed company that sells it.

Time to start thinking about what you want to gro.

Happy gardening

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I love it best after Christmas when I long for fresh, crisp food with bite and crunch and so grow lots outside but also about forty bulbs in the tunnel. They are usually ready mid-January and continue until about April when they can start to bolt. They look so spindly when you put them out but soon bulk up. This year my outdoor fennel are very strong tasting, possibly due to the lack of water. They have really only started to swell and round out after all the recent rain.

My celariac were a complete failure. I planted them out hurredly before going on holiday and when I came back there was not one survivor. They have to be started early and it was too late to start them again. So, no celariac for us this winter.

I am sowing my final tray of fennel tomorrow.

Herbs and spices

These are also very important and I love to harvest large bunches of herbs each week. They too have a much stronger taste than those from a supermarket. I made a Greek Bean Stew with dill I have grown and only needed about a quarter of the amount that I would use if I had bought it. It’s too late to sow them now but start to plan what you would like to use next year and make sure you have space for them in a bed and the seeds ready for next spring.

From the top there is mint, lemon verbena, dill, basil, sage, jalapeno and Lemon Drop chillies all to be eaten this week - although not all of the chillies!

Seeds I have sown this week are radish, Red Russian kale, fennel, yellow beetroot for the leaves, over-wintering onions and Kalibos which is a red cabbage. I want to see if I can get plants through the winter under cover and then plant them out in the spring for early cabbages.

Pests

There is always a pest about and my poor rocket has been the winner in the pest department. I didn’t put mesh over it and so just about every leaf on the Apollo rocket - the one with big leaves - has had cabbage white eggs laid on it.

They are easy enough to squash and rub off and so I have started. But also on the underneath of these leaves is whitefly. If you move a leaf they float off in large swarms. When you pick the leaves they have a white powdery substance left on the underside which can be impossible to remove from something like curly kale.

Moral of this story? Cover all brassicas - Rocket is a brassica - to reduce these two pests. Some of the plants have also been pecked by pigeons. AAAArrgh! The wild rocket is much less affected because it has smaller, serrated leaves.

I have radishes to plant out and they are a brassica so I will cover them with enviromesh as well.

And I really didn’t want to see these on the root of an old lettuce they may well be lettuce root aphids. Yuck!

Harvests

Here is the main harvest for last week. I harvest over a couple of days just because I can not carry it all home in one go so this isn’t all of it but it is enough. Not in the picture, but we also ate our last melon this week. It was a mini one again but delicious.

Happy gardening.

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