Preparing for winter

The paths have finally been dug. Lovely husband came and dug the rest for me and now they are all straight and wonderful and the raised beds are extremely raised so I barely need to bend down when planting. The tomato plants started dying off so I picked the rest of the tomatoes and pulled up the plants and have planted loads of stuff ready for next year. We have an entire bed full of garlic and onions, and have planted 52 broad beans!

The winter squash have slowed down somewhat so I think they need a bit of fertiliser so I’ll take down some smelly horrible weed tea to feed them with. And we have comfrey springing up all over what is supposed to be the potato patch (so I think I may have to rethink that one and just leave it as a comfrey and herb patch.

Next job is to get herbs on the go in pots in the greenhouse so I can plant them round the edge of the beds companion planting style. I also have heaps of marigolds for next year as well, to deter pests.

Bumps and bruises

Now a lot of the plants are dying off, I am finally starting to put the new design of the allotment into place. So today I started on two of the news bed, making them slightly raised by digging out a path in between them and dumping the lovely crumbly not clay-ey soil on top. Couldn’t do all the way from along the beds because there are some wayward tomato bushes, (and I mean BUSHES) in the way that are still quite prolific. But I did as much as I could, and in the meantime, managed to drop a fence panel on my foot. I was moving it (as we’d been using it as a makeshift path for the past few months) and dropped it on my big toe! Luckily, nothing broken just a little owwie. But after two hours of digging a path, my instep started to hurt a bit and upon inspection I seemed to have grown a rather impressive purple bruise. So I took that as my cue to plant up the onions sets (courtesy of MadamLeBlog) and 5 bulbs of garlic (still got 4 more to put in but thought I’d leave it until the end of the month so I still have bits to do).

At home, plants and seedlings wise, the main pests are the local cats. I was fairly convinced we had foiled them this time but nope they got us back. We had put up a high shelf in the garden and put the plants we had left (mainly basil and aubergine) and some seedlings (parsnips grown in toilet rolls awaiting transplantation) up on the shelf thinking that the cats wouldn’t be brave enough to use them as litter trays up there. We were right on that count, but in their frustration they took the whole shelf down today. I was furious. Luckily the hard won plants were ok (peppers and aubergines) but a fair few of my parsnips and basil plants will probably only be fit for the compost heap now. Will give them a week or two to recover from the shock though.

So tomorrow, our mini greenhouse is going up and all our bits going in there. The only worry I have is that I want to plant out broadbeans in pots before taking them to the allotment but they don’t really need the heat of the greenhouse, but I’m too scared the cats will poo in them!! Think I may have to start growing seedlings down at the allotment, where it is cat free.