I take back what I said in my previous post about not
overwintering crops. This year in a break from tradition, and because I got
excited when I was buying daffodil bulbs, I have planted two onion sets on the
plot to overwinter and hopefully grow into nice fat onions next year. I’ve
never successfully grown more than two onions so it’s a bit of an experiment
and if I get more than two, I’ll call it a success.
I have planted a set of white and a set of red. I tend to
use red onions more for cooking, I think I just like the colour better. They
are in a well-dug bed which has had gravel and sand added this past year in a
bid to improve drainage. I need to go back up and just cover them over with
fleece to protect them from any frosts, and then I shall leave them be until
around March time.
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| Five rows of onions. Not spaced properly. I don't do things properly. |
In other exciting allotment news, a few years ago my Momma
went on a guerrilla quince acquisition programme (she nicked loads of quince
from a friends neighbours garden cuz we fancied some with christmas dinner
& to make jelly from…), and we kept some seeds and grew them. For the last
two years or so there has been a quince bed on the allotment with about eight
little shrubs in it, grown from seed. We put them here as Momma ran out of room
in the greenhouse at home, and they are spiky little things. They have flowered
for the last two years, but this year now that all the foliage has died down we
can see that… dun dun duunnnnnnnnnn… we have a quince! Our first quince! It is
tiny and glorious and yellow and has been slugged but I am SO EXCITED – we didn’t
think they’d actually grow and fruit so fast, I was expecting to wait a few
more years for fruit off them.
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| Quince! |
Now that we know the quince are happy there, I now have a
new Thing for my To Do list – dig over, earth up, and fertilise the quince bed.
It’s never ending.
But I love it. It’s very satisfying tinkering around for an
hour or so. It’s very calming and relaxing; I’m in suburban Birmingham but the
plot site is generally very quiet. My company tends to be a robin, some long
tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, a jay, a couple of woodpeckers, some
pigeons and magpies, and sometimes I see the fox.
I have a lot to do come December when I will be unemployed
again!
