Episode #16: Winter has arrived
Sweet peas, avocados and Storm Bert blowing through.
Weekend 23-24 November was one of weather. Storm Bert blustered in, blowing things sideways across the site, and there was the first proper frost which finally did for any dahlias still outside.
(There are a *lot* of photos in this post, and it might not all fit on your email. Hitting the View Entire Message button at the end should sort this out, as will reading via the app or online versions of Substack.)
This week’s Plot Shot
Not much happens on an allotment in winter, and it can be hard to see any progress through this end of the year. The week’s small signal of growth were the saffron crocuses, pushing fresh green up through fallen leaves.
Plot work in progress
The greenhouse is starting to fill up with seeds sown to overwinter slowly, ready for planting out next spring. As I’ve probably already got enough broad bean seedlings for the entire site, if not most of Walthamstow, I sowed more sweet peas. This batch, the last leftovers of mixed varieties from Sarah Raven last year.
Most of these are from Sarah’s ‘Brilliant Buckets’ collection, which she describes as “sweet peas on an outing to Ibiza”, which was exactly the vibe I was looking for.
I don’t really ‘do’ pales and pastels on the plot - it needs bright, zinging jewel colours for a big open space to look its best. The orange-with-a-touch-of-coral-pink ‘Prince of Orange’ is my particular favourite, but any of these are winners for colour, grown up cane frames with climbing French beans. I’m aiming to go all-out and grow nets of sweet peas between the rose arches for summer 2025.
Last year I grew these from Sarah Raven up against a different collection from Benjamin Raynard at Higgledy Garden. Benjamin, or Higgers, runs a seed business for cut flowers from a narrow boat with a bonkers dog called Flash for company. His 2024 sweet pea bundle is still available, but no doubt there will be another one for 2025. There was a beautiful dark blue one in this mix, ‘Midnight Blues’, I think, which did well last summer.
I figure that if Benjamin can grow flowers from seed on the roof of a narrowboat which periodically has to move its mooring around the UK canal network, it should be a doddle to have great flowers all summer from a greenhouse fixed on dry land. Time to get sowing more for 2025 and not leave the flower seeds languishing this year.
Harvesting now
The first frost arrived this week, and the temperature in the greenhouse went below zero for the first time this winter. Just -0.5. First frost always feels a marker in the year - proper winter now. Good job I’d kept the lids on the root trainers and thrown fleece loosely over the plants.
Last winter there weren’t many frosts at all, let alone good hard frosts and enough deep cold to freeze the soil. Net result - the relentless armies of slugs and snails in the spring and early summer of 2024, more of them than usual becuase of the lack of frosts to kill off their eggs in the soil over winter.
Making and eating
This weekend included Stir Up Sunday for those who celebrate the approach of the festive season by making their Christmas fruit cakes and Christmas puddings. We’re not fans of dried fruit and mixed peel at Chez Mitten, so no stirring here. We opted for the new deliveries of citrus fruit instead.
Usually we make citrus marmalades, blood orange, clementine, lime, lemon, whatever is available. But as we are still overloaded with marmalades from previous years’ over-enthusiasm, there’s some experimental baking on the horizon instead. When these ripen, husband Clive has in mind a Jaffa Cake, the clementine version of a lemon drizzle cake with a dark chocolate top added. Watch this space for the result1.
E17 Local Hero
Also traditional in our house at this time of year is a resurgence of our efforts to grow avocado trees, usually from the huge, thin-skinned green varieties from local Caribbean greengrocers, rather than the knobbly brown supermarket ‘Hass’.
We’re pretty good at getting the huge seed (or pit) to root. A few weeks wrapped in wet kitchen roll, sealed in a plastic zippy bag sorts that out. Once the root is growing, we put them in water in a bulb vase, and leave them to it.
Last year we had five small trees on the go in the kitchen, but all bar two have died. Their leaves don’t like a hot blast of air from a fan oven or the dryness of an indoor space with underfloor heating, it seems. But we’ll go again this year and see if we have better luck.
Community of Practice
The allotment community was pretty grumpy this week. We had some sheds broken into by someone looking to steal power tools, and a messy bout of fly tipping outside the main gates.
Walthamstow is experiencing a blight of fly-tipping. Neighbourhood social media groups are awash with complaints about piles of rubbish appearing at the end of quiet residential streets. This is what we got at the end of the road which leads to the allotmnet gates - three builder’s bags of rubble and debris from a building site somewhere, heaved off the back of a truck by tying the straps to the bollards outside our gates. Working as a pack, we’ve all shared photos, lodged multiple reports to the local council and to our Allotment Officer, so we’ll see if anything happens.
If that comes to nothing, we’ll do what we do best as a group and shovel it away ourselves so that the vehicle gate is accessible again. We probably don’t need more practice at shovelling, after all the manure of previous weeks, but needs must.
The Weekly Fox
The winds of Storm Bert this week did not meet with the fox family’s approval. There were big gusts of wind across the site, blowing netting and fleece across the plots. The foxes were twitching at every gust, their fur ruffled and hearing disrupted.
Until next week, hold onto your fur like lovely Chips here.
Ang
No produce this week. We’re static on the total to date since Episode #5, £196.59. Twelve weeks’ produce tally, based on current supermarket or local farmers’ market prices.
Watching your endeavors from just over the reservoir...lets hope for more deep frosts to kill off the predators!