For everyone who´s asked where I´ve been, thankyou for your concern! It´s nice to know folk are reading this. The answer is getting married, which really does take up huge amounts of time chasing arrangements etc. Hopefully I can now get back to the important things, like getting the garlic in and freezing my fingers off doing the winter digging.

Sunday November 7^th

Oh dear - what a gap! At a time when keeping a record of wedding prep might have been useful, that's precisely what you don't have time for! So the poor allotment diary's gone west too. But now I'm back with only a few work-related distractions, so here goes.

 Now all I have to do is work out next year's rotation so I can see where I'm supposed to put stuff. Since I´ve given up on the strip beside the raspberries (as it´s really too close to the apples for much to grow, and the raspberries are spreading sideways into it) there has to be a rotation into the second plot. Just as well I have it! But this also means I can get a proper 4-way rotation including the potatoes.

Saturday November 27^th

Not such a nice day as last time but not raining, so off to sort out the rest of the garlic. Took longer than I'd expected to finish going over the old sweetcorn bed, possibly because I kept stopping to chat with Chris, who had very kindly strimmed all the paths. Finally planted the Thermidrome garlics (and learned there really is one called Thermidor!) and also a few rows of ones which had been missed at harvest and were growing anyway. Think they were more Marco. This time I've planted them quite far apart, straight into the ground which may mean better roots, and deeper than I have been in the habit of planting them. Hopefully this will trigger them to grow bigger. Last year the roots never really got out of the shape of the modules, possibly because I left them too long before planting out. Oops! Also took the opportunity to level the bed a bit, thanks to some pieces of slightly charred wood which some kind person had stuck on my plot 2 compost heap (weird). It´s now considerably better for it. I shall probably use the bits of wood from my poor collapsed frames to do it to other beds and gradually end up with easier to manage plots, part of my long term plan :-)

Need to do the runner bean patch next so it´s ready for squashes, then the old onion area which will get brassicas. I am determined to get sprouting broccoli this time! Then I can move on to plot 2. Need to go and get some carpet pieces first though, now I've got to the point where soil is now dug over and waiting for next year. It could do with being protected (and stopped from growing anything weedlike!).

Currently there´s stuff in the way of several crops, but they should all be out of the way before new plantings. The leeks are doing really well this year (even if I did cheat and use punnets in the end). Will gradually freeze them as the winter progresses in the hope that I will get them all safely packed away before the flower spikes form.

The next dilemma: what to do about the frames. The frames worked really well until the nails started working their way out of the wood, and so they lost their shape and couldn´t be tipped up for weeding. Screws probably wouldn´t have been any better, and so I have lots of bits of wood floating about. The carrot frame would have been great if I´d managed to block the last gap, but eventually the flies got in. So, should I follow the example of Lorraine and use hosepipe with netting over? I need to get more enviromesh, sadly (and expensively). I´m sure I can reuse some of the current mesh, despite it being damaged by the tacks holding it to the wood. It would have been fine if the foxes hadn´t jumped on it and pulled it...

So, what´s the solution? I could trim the existing bits of wood to remove the mangled ends (and that would shorten them, as they were a bit too long in the first place) and bolt them together with L-shaped plates which may also lose the nails/screws after a few months. Or I could disassemble them completely and use the pieces to build bed edges, stacking the bits on top of each other to get the right height. And use hose. Probably this latter option, using the rescued nails to make the edging more solid, and use bits of the wood along the edges of the net, to stop invaders (but which stop me tipping them up for weeding, though that didn´t happen much as I never seemed to have time anyway).

Either way, I´m not going to do nothing. I´ve got much nicer carrots because of the incomplete covering,  the leeks are great too and the cabbages don´t have caterpillars even if they didn´t grow in the first place! The big broccoli frame is still just about going, albeit with crossed wire supports. I can add more of those to keep it upright which should help.

Christmas Dinner and Food Miles.

Well, despite the lack of effort I´ve put into the growing this year, I will have marrow, leek, carrot, runner beans and potatoes for Christmas. The remaining onions I´m hoarding for stuffing, so I can do the whole Christmas dinner (and I´ve certainly got enough sage too!). And thanks to the freezer I´ve still got some French beans, and thanks to Chris I´ve got red cabbage, both required ingredients for P´s Christmas fare. The turkey is going to be free range and locally raised by Richard Waller and so I think, incredibly, the food miles for Christmas dinner will be virtually zero and the produce mostly organic. Hoorah.