November on the allotment

Before the cold weather set in we had 2 weeks of lovely autumnal sunshine at Bridgend, where the focus has been on tidying and maintenance tasks.

Enviromesh has been manoeuvred over the plum tree, “Ena Sharples” style, and she is wearing her winter hairnet with pride! The idea is to pull down the higher new growth to encourage fruit budding.

Several new posts were dug into the windbreak to add structural strength and the old woodstore area has been cleared and dug over. The original plan was to try the raspberries here as they’re not happy in their current position, but after discussion, plans were changed. This bed will now be for comfrey, as it is perhaps a bit shady for raspberries and a larger bed (currently shared by much of our comfrey stock and its evil twin, alkanet) will be prepared for the raspberries. Quite a bit of our combined brain power was put to distinguishing between these two very similar looking plants. Alkanet tends to have faint white spots on its leaves, though not always.

Spot the difference

The roots of comfrey perhaps form a more intricate network as opposed to alkanet’s thicker main tap root. On close examination, we also thought the back of comfrey leaves are maybe a bit more delicate (see photo, comfrey is on the right). Anyway, much of the activity has been to clear the alkanet along with couch grass, which currently dominate this bed, and transplant the comfrey into its new home. We’re thinking of leaving the cleared bed for a year before we put in raspberries, to make sure much of these dominant weeds are more under control.

We had the first bonfire of the season – controlled in a brazier of course. Using fire is a very pleasing way of tidying things up whilst at the same time producing ash to go back into the soil and providing warmth on a crisp, bright day.
Our bed of unusual leafy green vegs, containing mashua, chicory and climbing spinach got some attention, with a picking of lush chard destined for stir-fries and pickling. Rainbow chard must be one of the prettiest yet most bullet-proof and long-lasting crops to grow – the trick seems to be finding exciting things to do with it!

Alongside the chard, we harvested Jerusalem artichokes, mainly destined for the Community Café and took out the remainder of the beetroot, most of which has not managed to grow more than table-tennis ball size this year.

We booked our Christmas meal for mid-December at the Community Café, always a date to look forward to! (Perhaps this will involve Jerusalem artichoke soup…)

Jobs for next week: continue replacing woodwork around the beds and windbreak; finish overhaul of the alkanet bed; general harvesting and weeding