Preparing for Winter

Now that the summer is finally over (booo!) it is time to plan for next year. As in the past I am using the Suttons Garden Planner to get my outline plan. I eventually got around to measuring the allotment accurately and discovered that it is 5.5m wide by 17m long, so I put those dimensions in to the garden planner and came up with my plan for next year:

2016 plan

One of the great things that the garden planner does is create a plant list itemising out all the plants that you require and when you should plant them:

2016 plant list

I mentioned in the previous post that all my garlic seed had arrived from the garlic farm and I managed to pickup 100 onion sets (50 red, 50 brown) from wilkinsons, so it was time to harvest the remaining courgettes and beetroot and prepare the ground for the autumn planting of garlic and onion sets. I chose to grow Elephant, Early Purple Wight, Solent Wight and Provence Wight garlic varieties this year as I have had great success with them in the past. Elephant and Early Purple Wight should be planted in September, Provence Wight in October/November and Solent Wight between October and January. I dug the ground over that was home to the potatoes and beans this year, adding some pelletised chicken manure and some well rotted compost, before planting out the garlic and onion sets.

Autumn harvest in the foreground and garlic/onion sets planted behind

The list of things remaining was getting smaller: dig over the ground, top the raised beds up with soil, and dig the bean trench.

Raised beds

My three raised beds are 25cm above the ground, and dug down 25cm into the soil below. Each bed will have 30cm of soil/leaf compost/manure in the bottom, 10cm of regular compost in the middle, and 10cm of sieved soil on the top. I have been raking soil from the whole allotment and sieving it for the top, but so far have only managed to completely fill one of the beds - the asparagus one.

Bean trench

One of the things I remember most from growing all our vegetables at home when I was a youngster was the runner bean trench that we used to dig in the autumn. We filled it with all the vegetable waste - leaves, peelings, roots, etc. along with quite a bit of newspaper. Earlier this year I dug a couple of trenches and filled with some of the rotted leaf manure for my french beans and courgettes to grow in - it seemed to be successful (with the courgettes anyway.)

I dug the trench for next years runner beans, going down as deep as I could - until I hit the clay/rocks at about 50cm down, then I filled with all the waste matter from the allotment¹ and a couple of newspapers along with the contents of my compost bin, before marking the trench corners with four bamboo canes and filling back up with soil.

Asparagus bed (foreground) waiting for the crowns, and the rest of the allotment looking tidyish

^{1. Should I add the potato haulms to my compost?
I have heard so many scare stories about composting potato, tomato and pepper tops so I just choose not to, and dispose of these items in the brown garden waste bin at home that the council takes away... I have found this article that explains the issues in a little more detail.↩}