Curtains down

It's the end of the year realistically at my plot and in the garden at home. My harvest for today reflected the dramatic differences in the climate and the effect it has had on what we grow.
A couple of green sweet peppers grown outdoors
Two Butternut Squash
Outdoor tomatoes
Black Grapes
Kale
Beetroot
Chard
Parsley

A few years ago, no one knew about the number of squashes available to grow and fewer ate them. Now no self respecting chef leaves butternut risotto off the menu. Grapes were a sign of student holidays, fruit picking in hotter foreign climes. Even now, most grapes are grown under glass. These were in open ground,unprotected from the weather and produced a few small bunches of very sweet if small ripe grapes.
The odd picture that hit me when I approached the plot also made me question the weather. The leaves on all the squash plants, including the courgettes, had been blackened by a frost yet the tomatoes were untouched, and the grape vine was positively thriving.
Maybe we are going to suffer the benefits of the greenhouse effect before the worst comes along.
The downside of autumn is also one of the great pleasures. The frosty mornings highlight the cobwebs and bring a shimmering haze to the first light of the day. The incandescent reds of the foliage on the trees echoes the burnished crimson hues of the evening sunsets. The spring flowers have their bright colours but the autumn has a palette that warms us like the bonfires I will be enjoying as the days get colder and shorter.
When it gets too cold to handle fiddly seeds and to wet to pull weeds, it will be a welcome change to huddle up with a hot coffee in the potting shed or greenhouse and start preparing for next year.
I have sweet pea , early broad bean and early garden pea seeds to sow in pots. I will sow a few outdoors too but the pot will give me a head start and provide substitutes if those outside get eaten by pests or hit by extreme weather or some other disaster.
I grew my sweet peas a few years ago as show blooms. It means more work than normal but rewards you with bigger flowers and longer stems. If I follow that route again, I can blog my methods as I go along.
It's almost time to put the garden to bed . The beds themselves are being cleared and covered for winter.
In the garden, the shrubs are having the last trim of the year, deadheaded and clipped back ready for the big sleep. All the dried stems of the herbaceous plants have been cut back to the soil and composted and the leaves on the trees and hedges are turning into warm red blankets.
It's been a mixed year and I will review it at a later date but I am quite looking forward to the winter season already!

October chill-i !

A Pepper grown on my plot, outdoors, unprotected. It is a chilli plant that I bought as a seedling along with a few of its siblings. Those perished early on but this fella persisted and now bears not one but two fair sized fruits.
It has been relatively quiet at the site recently but it is a good time to sit back and review the last few months, to reflect on the successes and failures, to decide which to grow more of, which to grow less of and which of this years experiments will never grace your soil again!
I have failed with a number of my crops sadly. I can put some of those unsuccessful attempts down to the usual suspects of disease and pests but I must admit to some mistakes by my own hand.
I tried to grow too much in a small space. I set up a trellis pyramid to train squash and legumes up, whilst salads and herbs grew beneath. The mistake was not packing as much goodness into the soil as possible before planting and for making the area too small. The squash failed to put on much growth,stalling shortly after a pest attack almost wiped it out. The beans never took off, making no more than two feet of growth before the maincrop had finished cropping. The peas which grew up one face of the pyramid gave a crop but it was sickly and short.
In the other beds, the potatoes were passable, not entirely plentiful but flavoursome and I avoided the dreaded blight that many on the same site lost entire crops to.
Likewise, many people saw their tomato plants hit by the tell-tale brown streaks of tomato blight. As I advised one plotholder, the safest way to deal with those plants is to burn them. Putting them, or any diseased plant material,on a compost heap is just asking for more trouble when you spread that compost. Rarely do allotment heaps reach a high enough inner temperature to kill disease spores so the heap acts as an overwintering host for the disease to grow and strengthen before hitting out next year when you spread it all over your plot.
Now is the time to start clearing your beds and as much as possible should be composted but all diseased or very tough material such as brassica stems can be burnt now that the summer ban period is over.
As one plotholder I spoke to this afternoon observed,"You should've seen it here this morning, it was like a warzone. There were fires everywhere.." and he chuckled as he said it. The green lobby may want to stop gardeners from lighting fires but we know some things have to be burnt to make the soil clean and to maintain that greener, environmentally sound lifestyle. The alternative is an increase in pests and diseases leading to more over use of chemicals to counteract them. A fire which burns at a very high temperature also burns cleaner, producing much less smoke,with dry material producing much less smoke than damp.
So, pile your heap high but burn your bonfire hot and fast if you want to save the Polar Bears!