Gardening Blog – Delicious Oriental leaves?

With the house move out of the way there’s been time to get back to the new allotment. A peaceful walk across the river to pick some  Oriental leaves should have been the perfect antidote to the many frustrating hours spent trying to get the telephone and internet provider to do as they’d promised. But there’s a problem. Those leaves must have been particularly delicious because there’s nothing left to pick.  Every single plant has disappeared. That’s gardening for you.  As someone pointed out, if everything we planted grew perfectly, there’d be nothing for me to write about!

Without the Oriental leaves it will just be leeks, leeks and more leeks for us this winter.  We left behind the purple-sprouting broccoli, chard and spinach we planted last spring when we moved to the new allotment.  Never mind. It’s best to look forward rather than backwards.  2015 will be the year of new discoveries. Time to find out what’s growing in our new (to us) garden and to get settled on our Greencroft allotment.

For a start, there are a couple of old gooseberry bushes that need sorting out.  As November is a good time to prune then, I’ll cut out any old branches and make sure there’s plenty of space in the middle of the plants for air to circulate.  I’ll wait to see how productive they are next season before I decide whether they need replacing.

I’ve found masses of healthy looking strawberry plants hidden under a forest of creeping buttercups.  The simplest way to separate the plants from the tangle of weed roots has been to dig up the strawberries and re-plant them in a patch of ground that I’ve already cleared.  It’s a bit late to be planting strawberries now so they won’t be at their best next year.  On the plus side, they won’t spend the winter competing with creeping buttercups.

Tips from the allotment:

-Plant new fruit bushes

-Take cuttings from gooseberries

-Harvest root vegetables (unless leaving them in the ground for later in the winter)

-Sow broad bean seeds 6 inches deep

-Plant garlic and rhubarb sets

-Dig over the plot, removing perennial weeds