Slightly damp and chilly on the allotment

Allotment Tales 30-10-2025

A grey day at Bridgend today, and slightly damp and chilly. Autumn has definitely arrived. And so we continued planting autumn onion sets (Autumn Champion) and garlic. We now have 3 varieties of garlic in the ground – Carcassonne Wight, Germidour (both hardneck) and Caulk Wight (softneck). Hardneck varieties generally do better in our Northern climate so it will be interesting to see how well the Caulk Wight does. All are safely under netting to protect them from birds, squirrels and rabbits.

The Jerusalem artichokes that had invaded the rhubarb patch were dug out, and provided a mighty harvest of tubers. We will offer them to folk at the Bridgend AGM this weekend, and any left over will be donated to the Farmhouse Cafe.

The Phacelia that was sown as green manure at our recent autumn workshop is germinating already – a sign of how the weather has been relatively benign up to now. We sowed more Phacelia and Field Beans today, to cover the ground on beds that have been cleared. The last autumn raspberries were harvested and the sweet peas lifted. Some timbers around our raised beds had rotted or broken and so they have been replaced.

Jobs for next week: continue weeding around windbreaks and annual beds, check on the apples and potatoes in store, finish digging out perennial weeds from the rhubarb bed, thin out strawberry runners, saving the best ones for future stock.