We Grow Our OwnThe trials and successes of life on our allotment

It’s been gorgeous weather on a Bank Holiday for a change, and I hope you managed to spend as much time in your allotment or garden as I have.

Since I’m now the allotment site secretary, I was able to get advance notice of which plots on the site were becoming vacant, and I have bagged myself what I think is called a “project.”

As it’s getting towards the time of year when people think about planting potatoes, I thought I’d post my thoughts about how to get the best crop of home grown potatoes.

As you’ll know from one of my previous posts my favourite ingredient next to chillies is garlic. I made the fatal mistake of not sowing it in the last week of November, and then as we all know the winter came with a vengeance, and I only managed to plant it last weekend.

So, if you were caught out by the bad weather, or now want to try growing garlic, you can plant it now, and here are some of my tips to ensure you get a good crop.

Now that the first frost has arrived, I thought it would be a good time to share this recipe, especially since I found a motherload of sloes when I took my dog on a different route when I took her for a walk this weekend.

The weather this weekend put paid to all my plans, including a visit to the East Midlands Food Festival.

It seems as if Autumn is already giving way to Winter in my part of the Midlands, so I have been digging up all those lovely summer crops of sweetcorn, late beans, etc, and my mind has been turning to what I can plant over Winter and next year.

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.

As you will have picked up from yesterday’s post, I’m a big fan of Cafe Direct’s ‘Sow Your Own’ campaign.

The lottie took a back seat this week, as I had to pot on the numerous chilli plants from the 19 different varieties of chillies that I’m growing this year.

I was worried earlier this year that the majority of the crop was going to fail, as they took such a long time to get going compared to last year. It must have been the long winter/cold spring, as they have most definitely cranked into life. It is a good job, as I’m now reaching the end of last year’s crop which were either dried, pickled or frozen, as I had more chillies than I knew what to do with at that point.

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.