Know your onions

Today the onions from the cold frame were moved into the old potato patch following the age old "crop rotation rules". The ones I harvested this year should last a while and then these ones should be ready just as they run out (fingers crossed).

A second bed of carrots were then planted (Autumn King 2 and James Scarlet Intermediate) where the peas and beans were, again to follow on from the ones that are ready at the moment. The whole of the bean harvest fitted into a single hand but having a word with an owd boy on the plot next to me, these might have been dwarf beans whereas he plants climbers which were much more successful. You live n learn in this game.

The first lot of spinach I planted all went to seed and died off so I've tried another bed of this where the onions (first lot) were. There's perpetual spinach, which should last all year, and "Popeye" which I got just for the name ;-)

This now fills the first three beds of the plot with the second lot of veggy comestibles.


The Chinese Gooseberry from my coldframe has also got planted out into the covered cauliflower bed as it seems to be coming on a treat. Apparently Chinese gooseberries are the same as English ones, but you want another one an hour later ;-)


The sprouts (planted by Harry, age 5) are also starting to appear. the small blobs you can see next to the stalks are what will be on the side of my plate at Xmas along with unfeasible amounts of turkey.


Finally. the courgettes I planted are starting to bear fruit (or veg... I'm not sure what a courgette counts as).



Finished off with a mammoth weeding session (I thought they were extinct myself) and copious quantities of lemon puffs and custard creams (cheers Morrison's who put these on Bogoff)

Spud U Like

Today I dug up the last of my spuds, sacrificing yet another fork to the allotment gods in the process. These have gone into a hessian sack (cheers Louise) to stop them going green until I can turn them into various spuddy comestibles.



I also pulled up a cracking crop of shallots and onions, filling a fairly big tub with each.





The onions on particular grew to enormous proportions.


However, to compensate for this, the french beans have put on a pretty poor show as the following picture shows.



Four beans per plant appears to be all I'm going to get from them :-(. Better luck next year.

The Cambourne Pygmy Vampires

The garlic that I planted earlier in the year has now died back so has reached it's ultimate size. However, on digging it up I found it was somewhat smaller than I was hoping for.



As you can see, rather than forming a bulb with a number of cloves in it, there is a single bulb of garlic making it perfect for banishing very small vampires. As I've not seen any of these on the allotments recently, they obviously are doing the trick ;-). Apparently the reason for there being a single bulb is that I planted these too late in the year so they didn't have enough time to grow before dying off. Next time they need to go in in the autumn.

The first row of early spuds also were ready for harvest so I dug them up, and baked one with some slices of the garlic on the top. Mmmmm..... cracking spuds grommit.



The courgettes that I planted only a couple of weeks ago are also coming on great guns.



The leeks also got replanted today in 6" deep holes which hopefully will make the bottom half of them white and the top half green.




And finally I harvested the first of my shallots and tied them up in dainty bunches along with the dwarf garlic. This should let them dry out and keep for longer.