[16th August]
This weekend the children “graded” all the potatoes, so they’re now separated into what’s suitable for baked potatoes, slightly smaller ones for chips and wedges and “the rest”. They also separated out all of the ones with wireworm damage (kind of expected given that some of the plot was grass until March) so we can eat those first.
My daughter also harvested her only melon. The melon plants struggled for reasons we don’t really understand at the moment and all but one died fairly early on, but the survivor did manage to produce one fruit, albeit only about the size of a grapefruit, before giving up the ghost. It did taste absolutely delicious though.
And I have just finished drawing up a rough planting plan for next year’s plot, starting, well, err, pretty much now, actually 🙂
The layout of the plot is going to change for next year such that I have eight beds of 1.2m wide with 60cm paths between them and around the outside. I think the beds will end up about 12m long. That may give me a little less space than this year, but I’m hoping I can use the space more efficiently next year. For example by planting fewer lettuce and harvesting only the outer leaves rather than cutting the entire plant. I’m also going to plant onions and beetroot in “clumps” rather than singly. I’ll be attempting to re-use space, too, so that ground used for early crops gets replanted with later ones almost immediately. As some parts of the plot are still in use and may remain so until into next year (the sprouts, cabbages and PSB for instance) I’ll have to work on parts of some of the beds whilst leaving others until later. I do want to get some garlic and winter salads in pretty soon though (especially the winter salads — the garlic can perhaps wait a little longer).
Another thing I’m going to try starting next month is planting up some hardy-ish salads in trays in the greenhouse for picking over the winter. I’ve never attempted that before, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out.
I’m also going to try to keep better records — when I sowed plants, when they got planted out, when they were harvested and the weight of the harvest. I can be really bad at that, so it may be quite hard work.