End of the Harvest

Things are winding down here at Windmill. We've still got a few crops in the ground - fennel, rainbow chard, kale, spinach, brussels and purple sprouting broccolli for spring, but the rest is pretty much done.

Having said that, we just planted our winter onions and garlic, with help from Robert Shaw Primary school, (though we had to shade them against drying out in the heat!), and we'll be putting the broad beans in soon too.

Our last big harvest of the year?

We did do quite a bit of picking and got a nice little crop of beans, mini corn, lettuce and a bumper crop of tomatoes of all kinds, but there won't be much more now, so we have to start thinking of getting the beds ready for the winter. I like putting on a top-dressing of compost and then leaving everything to freeze well, to kill off some of the pests, but then putting cloches and cardboard on the soil to warm it up in early spring, so we can get going early.

Of course, we aim to experiment too, so we may try a very late sowing of carrots to see if we can get away with a winter-growing crop, and the same with some of the hardier peas. We also hope to keep the salads going all winter but that is dependent on no-one else taking a shine to our polytunnel plastic...

And because of that, we've acquired another crop - of barbed wire. Sadly, faced with all the vandalism, we've had to really up the defences, because we need to have a working polytunnel, and we haven't got enough money in our budget to cope with repeated thefts or damage.

Thanks to Nick and the team for their hard work in helping us to make Windmill safer

One job we really enjoyed was taking some of our spare apples and pears to the Acorn Day Centre so that we could spread a little of the generosity which has been shown to us by everyone who donated fruit to us for our Harvest Celebration.

Fancy a pear?

Lots of different apple varieties to try at Acorn

We had enough different varieties to please all tastes, and people were able try before they chose which fruit to take. We also left some spare for anyone who came the following day, so we hope everyone got plenty.