This years harvests in photos

These are photos I have taken on my phone throughout the year of things we have harvested at our allotment and I thought I would share them with you. Also a big hello to wherever you are in the world reading this, going by stats I see a lot of people who read this blog are scattered all over North America, Asia, Far east, Austrlasia and Europe. Thank you once more for taking time to look at my blog.

Bountiful plot

Managed to get down our allotment today and take some photos and as you can see the plot is still very much alive with winter veg, crops planted earlier in the year that can remain in the ground and next years crops emerging ie garlic. Harvested the last of the tomatoes and peppers today and cut all the peppers right back to roughly 30cm height and trimmed to barely nothing in an attempt to overwinter them. They are within in the tunnel and will be doubly insulated by placing old water cooler bottles over them, I have also dug some up repotted and they are going to live in spare bedroom overwinter, fingers crossed some will come through and start new growth in the spring. Nice to see the garlic emerging I have had to put some pea netting over it as the allotment cat has decided it is a nice bed to shit in which did not impress me, on the plus side he does keep the rat population down.

                                                    The chopped back pepper plants

                                              Cauliflower all year round and Kale hungry gap.

                                                              Florence Fennel Tauro.

                                                           Swiss and Rainbow Chard.

                                                       Winter lettuce unknown name?

                                                                 Kale Scarlett.

                                                      Sweet peas old spiced mix.

                                                           Rosemary cuttings.

                                   Garlic in pots to plug any gaps if any dont germinate outside.

                                                            Garlic just emerging.

                                    Leeks now being harvested these can stay in all winter and picked as required.

                       Savoy January King put on alot of growth due to mild weather, no real frost yet this year!

                                        Brussel Sprout Maximus, slightly decimated by whitefly.

                                   Globe Artichokes putting on new growth due to unusualy mild weather.

                                 First harvested fennel which I will be having with some smoked haddock.

I hope to add more photos of this years harvests soon until next time goodbye.

New plot

We have taken on another half plot which has been cleared and dug over and is ready to go for 2012, we will cover it now with a thick black damp proofing plastic to stop any nutrients being washed away in the winter rains. That is not to say nothing has gone in the ground on our new plot, we could not leave it all empty as that is not in our nature. Garlic music which we had spare after planting out on our other plots was put in 2 rows of 32 cloves also our Blackcurrant, Redcurrant and Gooseberry bushes have been moved to the new plot as they needed more room.

This week also we manged to bag ourselves some cheap bareroot fruit trees from Asda they were priced at £7 but when at the checkout they came in at £3.50 so we got the following trees and they are also planted on new plot.

Conference Dessert Pear.

Bramley Culinary Apple.

Sunburst Dessert Cherry.

Cox's Orange Dessert Apple.

Spartan Dessert Apple.

Idared Culinary Apple.

Beurre Dessert Pear.

Golden Delicious Dessert Apple.

So as you can see by the above list hopefully over the next couple of years Our Allotment will be providing us with lots of fruit to go with all our bountiful vegtables. The rest of the allotment and tunnel is still providing lots of goodies including Parsnips, Carrots, Tomatoes, Chard, Chillis, Celeriac, Celery, Leeks, Sprouts, Kale and J Artichokes. Plus what we have planted and growing for spring more Kale, Savoy cabbage, Offenham spring cabbage and not forgetting enough garlic to sink a small ship. I will try and get to plot this week to take some photos to post but due to inner ear infection everything I do at the moment is a struggle so no promises.

 Hope you enjoyed the update on our allotment take care Jamie.

Saving seeds

 To save money on seeds and to have your own strain of seed now is the time to think about saving seeds, as we have only had our allotment a couple of years this is something we have only started doing and with time we want to save as much as we can. This year we have grown french marigolds,poppys, runner beans and mangetout from saved seeds with great success. Peas and beans are really easy to save as you just leave the pods on the plant to grow to full size and when the plant dies back and they dry out pick and shell them and stick in an envelope in a cool dry place. Flowers like marigolds and poppy's etc will produce their seed pods just collect them and store them the same as before and sunflowers like in the picture above have their seeds in their heads. One of my favourite blogs vegtable heaven which I have link to on my home page goes into more speacilised seed saving and crossing of breeds and heritage varietys, well worth a read and something I would like to be doing in the future.

On another note what is going on with this weather again this year it has been wall to wall sunshine in Bristol the last few days with temperatures in the mid 20's and today looks set to be the hottest October day on record it really has been a funny year. I have taken some more photos for you to see we now have our winter cabbages and kale all planted out and the squahes and the strawberries are still producing, a couple of disappointments something is causing the leeks to wilt and yellow an whitefly have decimated the sprouts.

Until next time enjoy the pictures and this lovely indian summer bye for now Jamie.