Thursday 14 November 2013

Final Roses?

Once again Wednesday wasn't a bad day for mid November although there was a cold blustery wind at times just to let you know that it really is November. I decided on an hour down the allotment to start digging out the weed and roots from the blackberry bed under renovation. Not that I thought I’d get the the bed dug over in an hour more that an hour would be long enough digging out and breaking up this well compacted soil.

Like you do I had a look around the plot and decided these roses might as well be picked for home. Whilst not the best blooms of the year they are a bit of a treat in mid November.
After an hour I’d had enough digging and decided to harvest a few vegetables.
Our carrots are still in excellent condition and haven’t so far suffered any damage from slugs and snails which are the main pest problems over winter.

We've also started harvesting our leeks which have been grown through weed control fabric for the first time. It certainly cut down on weeding through summer and the leeks have grown really well.
One difficulty of using weed control fabric for our leeks is that it makes them a bit tricky to harvest. Each leek is planted through a hole in the fabric so at harvesting time it isn't a simple matter of using a fork to lift them out of the ground unless that is the fork goes through the fabric too. As we want to reuse the fabric that’s not an option. I'm managing to dig the leek out through the same hole it was planted through. This slows the harvesting process down a little and it will be much more difficult to do the bigger the leeks are. It’s a price worth paying though for all the weeding it cuts down on.

4 comments:

  1. Lovely roses, especially the darker pink one. I picked the last four from my allotment yesterday. Battered but still quite pretty. They're in a jar in the living room now, the last until next summer. The veggies look good too. I grew a handful of leeks at home, but they're tiny. I was just looking at them wondering if I should leave them another year!

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    1. Amazingly the roses still had a little bit of perfume left too. We have some leeks left in a large pot on the plot that never got planted out. They're not even pencil thickness more thick blade of grass. Thought they might be a bit like a mild spring onion. Haven't tested any yet.

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  2. Your leeks look so stunning. You still have a beautiful roses on your unfriendly weather.

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