HAHA Seed Night

We held the HAHA Seed Evening & Get Together on a wet Monday evening. Not many turned out which was a shame but we had a good time up the legion. I had arranged a quiz but that's been saved to be used another time when there are more people to make up teams!

Instead we had a few drinks and a nice couple of hours of chat. We had an interesting discussion about the best potatoes - so many different opinions and this year was such a poor year to base a decision on!
We picked up the 2012/13 Kings Seeds catalogue - they've printed in colour, it looks so much better than the black and white one and is surely more enticing to buy from :-)
As members of HAHA we get an excellent 40% discount off all their seeds.

Kings Seeds Facebook page

So, Jamie and I now need to go through that and decide what we want. We have so many old seeds at home but many of those will be from 2009 when we first got the allotment and bought everything we saw :-) It's time to actually start planning...

First Sprouts and Kohl Rabi

We had a few hours on the plot this afternoon - mostly socialising and a bit of HAHA chat but also did what we intended to do. We took the fleece off the squash. The temperature had got down to 3.5° so the squash are fine but the Leonaris has succombed a bit and the asters are flat to the ground :-(

We pulled the sprout plant which had the mouldy section. I tried to pull it in one go but it snapped so not sure it would have stayed intact much longer anyway! We got quite a few sprouts from it which will go into bubble and squeak tomorrow.

We also pulled a few of the kohl rabi - I forgot to sow the next lot of succession but as the slugs are starting to eat them it's not a bad thing! We grew some in 2009 and 2010 but they have always got ravaged before we can eat them - that's why they're under mesh this year.We should have another harvest and then that area can be cleared - it should be where I'm putting fruit trees in next year..

I also pulled the last good carrots - two are really good; the other two would have been perfect for the funniest veg competition in September!!
All our onions are gone so my carrot and coriander soup is being made with spring and silverskin onions - I'm not sure they'll add much flavour, but waste not want not...! I'm using coriander seeds which I picked and dried yesterday.
The last thing in the trug is two Atlantic turnips (thanks Malcolm!) - we swapped a kohl rabi for them. That's another great thing about the allotment - swapping and freebies!

October Clearing

We had a lovely sunny afternoon on the allotment today. We had the place to ourselves for half the time but after lunch more plotholders turned up.



Cleared potatoes

The picture shows the potato quarter with no potatoes left (just the leeks). We pulled the last couple of Chopin plants today. Got some good-sized spuds but slug holes a-plenty - just hope there's enough potato left to cover two dinners!

Cleared runner beans

Most of the time today was spent clearing - such a shame, but it is October (though it didn't feel like it at 17° in the sunshine). Jamie saved the last of the tomatoes and cleared the three plants - it wasn't worth saving the green toms this year as they're rather blighty, but the plants did do fantastically well for us. The tomato plants couldn't go to compost because of the blight, so they went home to the Council recycle bins.
I cleared the runner beans and put them in our green compost bin - I transferred the contents of the green one into the black bin first and gave it a good mix up.


The Cornells Bush Delicata squash are looking good, we have about 8 squashes which are ripening nicely. There's a risk of frost tonight and because we really want these to ripen a bit more before they get frosted we wrapped them up with fleece for the night. It's surprising that they haven't already got frosted - seems that our plots may be being protected because of the hedge/stone piles/canal (take your pick!) because other people's squashes were frosted a couple of weeks ago. I had to scrape off the car windscreen again during the week so I was expecting the worst.


 

We got everything sorted, chatted with our fellow gardeners then made a quick exit with the trug so that we could eat our sweetcorn as soon as possible after picking it!

The two biggest sweetcorn hadn't formed kernels right to the end but were delicious and plenty big enough. We had to have the third one because the plant had fallen down - the cob wasn't really ready but we scoffed it anyway :-)

Fruits and Diseases

We had a lovely few hours on the plot today. When we first arrived there were a lot of butterflies around as it was sunny and pleasant. Jamie got down on his knees for some serious weeding around our leeks.

Whilst weeding he noticed that we have rust appearing on quite a few of the leaves. Rust (Puccinia allii) on leeks is apparently quite common and the fungus spreads due to poor air circulation (the usual humidity problem on our plots) and is often worse on nitrogen-rich soils with low potassium - not sure whether this would be the case with our potato quarter... It doesn't look very nice but shouldn't have a big impact on the actual leeks - we may remove some of the worst affected leaves.

Rust

I was dead-heading and ripping up cardboard to add to the compost - we have so much green going in there at the moment and not very much brown. I also cleared yellowing leaves from the sprouts - this helps with air circulation and prevents disease - though we're a bit late with one of the plants which has gone really mouldy, but luckily hasn't spread to the other plants. We'll be pulling that this week or next weekend.

Strawberries round Marsh Lane have been great this year - and they're still going for it!

Sadly I can't say the same for my raspberries which I transplanted this year - they're very sporadic. Hopefully next year they'll be better...

 We've had some lovely peppers though and took some home with the last of our onions - not sure how much we'll get to eat from them - and Red Duke of York and Chopin spuds.

 

 

Loads of interesting wildlife

There was a lot of wildlife around today. Mostly hoverflies and some lovely butterflies but I also saw a stoat (pretty sure it was a stoat). It ran really fast across one plot then made a flying leap into stingers on another plot!
The radish flowers and calendula are still attracting most of the insects. This noon fly probably arrived on site with someone's manure!


A noon fly - great gold face!

A colour-match hoverfly!

Jamie spotted a mass of these tiny caterpillars on the raspberries. I think they're Yellow Tail moth caterpillars but again I'm checking on the Wild About Britain forum. They're great looking though! Will check how much bigger they are tomorrow. Correction: This is a Dark Dagger moth caterpillar!

 Neal was working his plot next door to us  and found this hairy caterpillar.

It looks rather like a ruby tiger moth caterpillar we found before but it's a different colour. I'm checking this on the forum too to see if they agree with my identification. Correction: This is a Buff Ermine moth caterpillar!

Wild About Britain is a brilliant site. So full of knowledge and willing to share. It's brilliant to share pics and get beasties identified.

Lastly we found this common green shield bug. It's slightly more mature than the one we found on 1st September and is getting more green.