Getting ready for Winter, or not.

Winter may or may not be around the corner. There are lots of confused plants all around us at Windmill. The hazel saplings that we have in pots have put out next year's leaves already, and we have poppies and marigolds in April and May mode springing up all over the place. We aren't seeing many flying insects (apart from the whitefly!), so some things may be getting the idea, but there are healthy populations of aphids appearing in some of our Winter brassicas.

Hassan and friend discuss the unseasonably mild weather

Squirrels seem to be making preparations - we keep finding big juicy hazelnuts when we are digging, and we find various frogs have staked out nice cosy hollows around the grounds. We're hoping the birds don't get confused - a few years ago a pair of robins nested really early and there was a freeze, so we know it can happen. Hopefully the reducing day length will be a sufficient hint to them.

Guy, Mark and Michael take the lid off the fruit cage

We decided we would start to make Winter changes anyway, and took off the net from the fruit cage. It's a fiddly job, but fortunately we had enough help to make it easy, and the net is now safely stashed away for next year. With any luck, as we dig over and mulch the area, we'll be helped to get rid of pests by the birds that can now get into the fruit bushes. We also took the time to cut off the old growth on the blackberry / raspberry cross and thornless blackberry plants that we have planted around the edge of the fruit cage. We then tied in the new growth so it won't be damaged by winter storms and we will hopefully get a good crop next year. We also layered some of the stems - pegging their ends down into the ground. This should hopefully create a rooted plant that we can pot up next year.

Ellie tying in new stems on one of the blackberries

Lunch was a just reward for hard work - savoury gram-flour pancakes with a lentil dahl - filling in just small portions, though the crispy and yummy pancakes meant that everyone had seconds of those.

Chickpea pancake in preparation

New volunteers Dan and Danny lifted some of the vine cuttings taken from Hassan's black grapes on Monday, and Ellie helped to pot up the ones from the bottle bed. They have rooted mightily! The roots are so deep that we had to abandon digging some of them out. We'll have another go next week, as we know some people would love to have them, and we have some ideas about where we want to plant them ourselves.

The few vines we managed to pot up.

Chris showing an idea for a gardener's coat of arms...?!

Another clever way to keep warm!

Maybe the sun decided that Thursday was a good day to shine, because we got lucky with the weather, despite the wet week, so our band of happy helpers got lots done.

De-roofing!

The first job was to get the net off the top of the fruit cage - always important at this time of year so that we can make sure the weather doesn't damage it when it starts to get icy. Another great benefit is that it allows birds into the cage to seek out insects around the fruit bushes, and hopefully they will help us to get rid of any pests that are hiding there. Having a quick look at the bushes, we realised that we'd missed picking loads of redcurrants! They were still edible, so look out for them appearing on the menu at the Christmas!

Hassan picks the surprise
crop of redcurrants.

We also took the chance to tie in all the new growth of the raspberry - blackberry hybrids along the walls of the cage. They are all doing well and we ended up having to prune some of them, so we've taken cuttings. If they take, we'll let you know!

Joyce makes the cuttings

The cuttings in position

More work went on to finish clearing beds, and to mulch with compost. With such good weather, we had a bit of a clear out in the shed because the cooking kit got a bit disorganised in the last month and we needed to know where everything had gone!

We also had a clever wheeze. Because we use tyres to warm up the ground and air around our pumpkins, marrows and squashes, at this time of year, we end up with lots of spare tyres as we take them off. Last year we noticed that the pile of wood chips and leaves, that is delivered for mulch on the allotments, heats up really nicely. Regular readers may remember that we used this to heat up the cold toes of a class from Robert Shaw Primary who were planting trees for us! So - why not use the effect in the polytunnel to keep it a bit warmer? We decided to try it, and we've put the wood chips into towers made from the tyres. These have then been covered over, so we don't get lots of mould spores flying about. They've been christened "tyre batteries" and we'll monitor them to see how warm they get.

Carrie and Annette start making
the tyre batteries.

A plastic base stops the wood chip
from mixing into the soil

Filling the tyres with woodchip

In the middle of all the activity, Hassan organised rice and a nice "end of season veg" meal with lots of the last pick veg from the beds as we cleared them. It was warm enough to sit on the benches outside - so November hasn't yet lived up to the dire warnings about an early freeze. Actually, a bit more cold would be nice, because it looks like we'll need to cut the lawn again...

We'll see what we get next week!

Enjoying lunch in the sun!