Today the first morning with a nip in the air. For the past week the clouds have sat low over the surrounding hills, skimming the treetops. Skeins of mist snake along the bottom of the valley, drawn by the colder air down there by the stream. The line of beech trees on Freezing Hill shrouded, sometimes invisible. Strange to lose the focus they provide to the west. The ‘caterpillar’, as locals call it, erased to a blank horizon.

Everything is drawing in, not least the evenings. The time for afternoon dog walks becoming earlier every day. I avoid the gloaming, as that is when the deer are abroad, and suddenly you find the dogs have disappeared, charging through undergrowth in the wood, unresponsive to call or whistle as the sky darkens. Tramping through the brush to find them the smell of rot, mould and fungus fills your nostrils. The ground slippery underfoot with wet leaves.

In the orchard the very last of the ‘Peter Lock’ apples hang in the branches, waiting to be picked or pecked at by rook, blackbird and mistle thrush. The windfalls at its feet show the telltale teeth marks of squirrels and other, smaller rodents. Nearby critters have also been at the celeriac in the beds above the polytunnel. Last year, in the kitchen garden, they succumbed to celery mosaic virus, so I changed their location in attempt to avoid it this year. I had not anticipated the population of mice and voles, which spoiled a good number of pumpkins and now have eaten holes through most of the celeriac roots. This weekend I will dig up and store those that can be salvaged.

The climbing beans and their frames came down last weekend. The last pods picked and drying in the barn. ‘Greek Gigantes’ to be added to the earlier harvest for eating this winter, ‘Princess’, ‘Cosse Violette’ and ‘Supermarconi’ saved for sowing next year. This weekend I will sow an overwintering green manure crop of forage peas in this bed, to protect the soil and enrich it with its nitrogen fixing properties when it is dug into the soil next spring. I will sow the peas in all of the beds where soil is bare, apart from those where I will plant potatoes, carrots, parsnips and swedes next year. In these I will sow a type of mustard – Caliente Mustard 199 – which has biofumigant properties that deter the nematodes that can cause disease in potatoes and wireworms which damage the other root crops.

I dragged the papery skeletons and ghostly remains of the courgettes from their bed and in their place planted six rows of garlic. Two rows each of three varieties; ‘Thermidrome’, a hardy, softneck variety, ‘Germidour’, a fast-growing softneck for an early harvest and ‘Precosum’, a very early hardneck variety, ideal for using as wet garlic. These were all organic bulbs from Tamar Organics, the cloves planted 5cm deep and 15cm apart in rows 30cm apart. In the bed alongside went four rows of broad beans, two of early cropping ‘Witkiem’ and two of ever-reliable and slightly later ‘Superaguadulce’. These I will protect with glass cloches, both to keep the mice off and to ensure that they make it through the winter on the dry side, since last year almost all of my young winter sown plants rotted off due to the prolonged wet.

Also under cloches this weekend will go the young winter lettuce plants that are still in the cold frames. ‘Winter Density’ and ‘Marvel of Four Seasons’ will continue to grow for a little longer and stand well through the winter, reactivating in late January to provide the very earliest salad just as the crops in the polytunnel start to wane. Any spare plants will go down to the polytunnel where the only job remaining to do, having sown pr planted spring cabbages, oriental greens and spinach before we went on holiday in October, is to transplant seedlings of parsley, dill and coriander from a nursery row into the pots that held basil and chilli plants.     

The cabbages and kales are looking good with ‘Stanton’, as always the best cabbage I have grown. Tight heads of crisp green outer leaves and sweet white hearts. Every year I say I will only grow this one, as the savoys – ‘Vertus’ – always seem to succumb to slug damage and the red cabbages never make large heads. The kales – ‘Red Russian’, ‘Redbor’, ‘Dwarf Green Curled’ and ‘Cavolo Nero’ are all ready to pick, and the very first spears on the (very) early purple sprouting broccoli have appeared on the variety ‘Santée’. The kalettes are starting to develop their distinctive ruffled sprouts, which form in the joint between leaf and stalk like a Brussels’ sprout, but are much more delicious as well as producing wonderful sprout tops, which are rich and silky when steamed and dressed with butter.

With the shortening days there is less time to get these tasks completed, so after dark it will be time to go through my seed boxes, discarding any seed that is too old and making a list to order for the coming season, staring with those that need to be sown just after Christmas – the aubergines, peppers and chillis which, even as I write this, create an instant jump forward into the heat of next summer.

Words & photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 9 November 2024