Strawberry Fields Forever

October 23rd and I was picking strawberries. Some of the plants have decided to give it a second go as it's been so hot and dry. The weather has been so strange that I have been watering my savoys and kale. Who'd a thought it.

Despite that I have started putting in garlic bulbs, white ones and the large purple cloves I saved this summer. The purple garlic did have some rust like the white this summer but on the whole grew bigger. So I'm wondering why I bought three heads of white garlic, errr. So let's see whether those big purple cloves produce even bigger heads of purple garlic.

Talking of eugenics, I noticed when shelling the old dried pods off the runner beans that one pod produced almost totally black beans, while a few others produced almost totally pink beans, rather than the usual patterns using both colours. So I wondered could I take those four black beans, grow them next year and see if they produce more black beans, and the same for the almost totally pink beans? To what point ? Well just to see if I could, maybe they will have qualities or maybe not?

Though I did sow some of my saved runner beans this spring and very few came up, which was a bit strange, and I was forced into buying some cheapo packets from Wilkos.

The Millennium

I thought something had happened. Possibly it was the long line of people wandering around the allotments whipping themselves, and calling on god, or as you know him the chair of the allotment committee, to give salvation, or maybe it was those four horse men that cantered through the other day. But I definitely thought something was up.

And lo it came to pass that the thousandth reader has been and gone. Mmmm I should really try to do more updates about the allotment if I'd persevered and written a bit more, well who can say what the marketing rights might have been worth. Maybe I should put Allotment Porn in the site description ?

Everything has gone pretty swimmingly this year apart from that really dry spell in the spring then that really wet spell in the summer, but the tomatoes seemed to like it. Hardly any blight at all. Talking of solanums, the potatoes did well, and loads of them.

I embraced change and planted some sweet corn that came up a treat. I normally don't like sweet corn but if I've grown it myself, well stand back and let the bear see the dogs. I think I quite like it now.

A right disaster were the runner beans, there was a flourish and then they just dried up, while everybody else's were so much more fecund. Maybe I'll move away from the Scarlet Emperor and try something else. I only plant it as me old dad used to. Well, looking at Marshall's web site the Celebration looks quite good and with pink flowers, but I may plump for St George which is supposed to be the heaviest cropper in RHS trials, and it has red and white flowers. But maybe White Lady might be worth a try. Perhaps all mixed in together, they'd be easy to spot which was which.

Another success were the peas, the earlies sown in October, and the main crop ones, tons of peas. I used four packets of peas seeds for one bed (11' by 5' odd). Also quite high yielding were the broad beans.

An utter abject failure were the cauliflowers. Not a head, not nothing. And the giant winter ones that I had planted have been wiped clean by the wrath of the slugs while I was holidaying.

Still there's some savoy cabbage on the go and kale, along with a small horde of spring cabbages ready to spring.

It's all go.