I love it when a plan comes together

For the last two years I have stubbornly not made a plan for my patch. It's a waste of time besides I don't want my creative dynamic flow to be restricted.
What a load of arse.
If I've learnt anything it's to measure out your beds, mark where your seeds have gone and make a plan. If you don't you end up with what I have at the moment, beds that a foot wider at one end, seedlings killed by enthusiastic hoeing and a massive surplus of seeds due ordering anything that sounded nice when I had the catalogue open.

Horse Shit

There's nothing like a fresh delivery of horse poo to get the allotment teaming with activity. It's weird, people you have never seen there before come creaking out of their sheds armed with a fork and wheelbarrow. God knows what they do the rest of the time, I'm assuming that they are nestled down in small wooden box carefully lined with newspaper hibernating away. I am, of course, no different except I've got a bottle of sherry to see me off to sleep.

It's Raspberry o'clock
It's time to put my new raspberry plants in. I bought 'Autumn Bliss' because it was recommended by a local commercial raspberry grower (St. Aldams Farm Nursery) and because they are primocanes. This means that they will fruit on this year's growth so I can get my grubby mitts on the lovely fruits this year.
Raspberries like a lot of organic material in the soil so I had grown some mustard as a green manure, the horse shit was just an opportunistic bonus, and dug it all in to the new bed.
The spacing I've used is 15 inches apart. The bed is a pretty generous four feet wide but apparently they use as much space as you give them.

Attack of the Squashes

Another first for this year was butternut squash and cobnuts. Cobnuts are pretty similar to butternuts only smaller and more round, they have the advantage of being better suited to England's climate.

Both grew really well, in fact better than expected. I only put in a couple of each type in so I wasn't prepared for them to take over half the allotment. Each plant took around ten foot square and that was with me chopping off the odd limb here and there. It goes against rational thought hacking away at the plants but next year I'll be more brutal. The plant can then concentrate on growing the fruits it has already made rather than making loads of little ones. Either way the crop was impressive and for an allotment idiot like me the plants were really easy to grow.

Planting
I planted the two seeds per peat pot around about April time and planted them out once I'd removed the early potatoes. While they were small I grew some peas in between. Later on they took over masses of space and did a great job at keeping the weeds at bay.
I'm not sure I'd bother with peat pots again, the idea is that the plant roots easily break through the pot so you can just stick the pot straight in the ground and avoid disturbing the roots. Next year I'm going to plant direct in the ground and use the bottom of a 5 litre water bottle as a mini green house.

Cooking
A simple recipe is to roast them. Cut the squash in two and scoop out the seeds. Then put some crushed fennel and cumin seeds on the top. Drizzle with oil and put in the oven (180 C) for thirty forty minutes. Lovely and massively filling.

Jerusalem Fartichokes

I'm rather pleased with my fartichockes. They have turned out to be really easy to grow and there's loads of them not bad for a fiver.

I bought a couple of the tubers from the organic gardening catalogue, the type I opted for were Fuseau. The idea being that they would be nearer the size of a spud than the other varieties, to be honest I wouldn't say they are that big there's still quite a few of them to be dug up so maybe there's a couple of giant ones left down there. To plant them I dug a little hole about four inches deep and forty centimetres apart. Apart from a bit of weeding that was that. I might stake them next year as they grow amazingly high, I'm talking over seven feet. So the wind blew a few of them over but they're so tough they just kept growing anyway.

I haven't used them yet so I can't vouch for their legendary gruff producing powers. I will, of course, file a report detailing strength, velocity and bouquet once the effects have been accurately assessed. Wish me luck, I'm going in...