Sunday, November 4th, 2001
A cold wind biting in from the north west today. It is as if we had the season of autumn for all of one day - yesterday! Just too cold and biting to stay for more than an hour or two - I've managed to clear half the fruit bush bed of weeds. Nobody else was daft enough to come and work their allotment today.
I took this plot because of the red and black currant bushes at the far end - and I've pruned one of each right back to the stumps each year. So far, I've had much healthier bushes grow back, so it seems to be working.
With all the fireworks going off, it's hardly surprising we didn't see the fox today. There are plenty fresh tracks in the fresh dug herb bed - so she may well be all right despite our fears.
Still no horse manure - to the disappointment of the children. They enjoy the licence to "chuck muck". We have only one unbreakable rule - nothing over the shoulder height of the smallest!
Sunday, November 11th, 2001
Half the year seemed to go by this week - from the warmest October on record, through gales, rain, frost and snow, and back today to the gentle mildness of spring!
The children had their pub table out on the path again this week - but today they were a band of plucky adventurers sailing the ocean, to liberate African slaves from a dank dungeon! After an afternoon's use as a dungeon, the liberating raids have effectively brought the earthen walls of a half quarried compost heap tumbling down. All good (clean?) fun.
Cleaned out the fruit bushes and put a mulch of compost down - from the "nasturtium heap". I'd sown nasturtiums last year for the bees and our salads. But then I made an innocent mistake - two actually. Pickled nasturtium seeds I'd heard were worth trying - mistake number one, they weren't. Having left them to seed, however, was mistake number two; they grew like weeds all over the plot this year. beautiful weeds, but weeds all the same.
Some of these nasturtium weeds ended up on one of my compost heaps, and promptly took over, smothering out all the real weeds. They appear to have done an excellent job as a compost cover. Peeling back the frost blasted plants this morning revealed the best compost I've had from any of my heaps - perfectly moist, crumbly, rich in worms, and hardly a root to be seen. Something to try next year.
Cleaned the brassica beds, and edged several others. Cutting back the invading couch grass and removing its tendrils is a pretty easy way of controlling it, and I have enough weeds to start another compost heap.
The allotment is loking in pretty good shape for the winter now - but still no manure arrived. A couple of the beds are looking pretty rain battered and crusted - not a good sign. They need their mulch.
Sunday, November 25th, 2001
Winter's blowing in - a couple of days blasting northerly winds, a couple of nights hard frost, and the trees have finally coloured fully and briefly. The beeches are rapidly showing bare branched. The allotment needs a few more hard frosts, night after night - clean out the fungi and the unwanted bugs. It may have been a couple of fieldfares I saw in the hawthorns - more probably blackbirds, but I want to believe that winter is coming in.
Not much to do in the allotment, just a quiet Sunday walk to pick a few romanesco for dinner. Still no muck arrived! This is getting a little worrying as I had most of my beds cleared and dug - whatever rain falls will wash the nutrients out. Worse - the kids are "on strike", and will not go near the allotment until the muck arrives! A mental note to call the council tomorrow.
On the way home, five or more miles away in the northwest, there were a couple of large skeins of wild geese, after the day's feeding, twirling and swirling up into the late afternoon sun, to head for their roosts. So far away. Wild geese pluck at the gut, I resonate - time to move, to wander again to fields green and far away; but I'm no more than a restless domesticated goose, pinions clipped!