November? Or July?

This weather is seriously messed up. It's the middle of November and I've turned my central heating off! It was over 15 degrees Centigrade outside here yesterday (for those who work on old money or live in the colonies, that's about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), and warm enough inside to have the windows open. We've got buds forming on the Beech tree outside our house before it's even lost all its leaves! It's Madness, I tell you....

Ancient Gardening Wisdom says that you can still plant new stuff into the ground in November because the soil is still just about warm enough for a decent root system to form before the cold really settles in - no kidding?!? This year I could probably plant pineapples outside right now and they'd take! Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration but I'm taking the opportunity anyway to transfer all the rooted strawberry runners that I took off my tubbed-up strawberry plants this summer into the new fruit garden bit up at the allotment. There are 42 plants to go in (so far I've done 21) plus I've got another 10 or so plants of a different variety to be delivered at some point. The picture shows the ones I've put in. They're a bit measly at the moment but I'm hoping they'll fill out next summer.

Actually, thinking about it, I've got quite a lot of fruit bushes and plants on order - I wonder when they'll be delivered? I might have to drop the nurseries an email to find out....

So, as you can see, I popped down to the allotment yesterday just to see what's going on, harvest some sprouts, pick off yet more cabbage white caterpillers (cheeky buggers got one last egg laying session done without me noticing), dig up some more comedy carrots, hoe the onion patch and plant the remaining strawberry runners. Well, I managed everything except planting the runners but I'll do that either today or tomorrow. Time was a bit short yesterday because it was my nephew Riley's 3rd birthday party in the afternoon that we were attending, and I'm a sucker for birthday party catering!

Anyway, just to keep you posted, here's the current sorry state of my allotment (they always look unattractive from now until late spring).

The Savoy Cabbages are coming along a treat! Forming nice hearts albeit a little small just now, I'm sure they'll be scrummy! You can also just see the Kale in this pic as well (top left hand corner) - we've eaten a lot of it but I suspect they're coming to the end of their lives. I must find out if I can pick and freeze Kale in order to store the last of it....

The 200 onion sets that I planted a few weeks ago are growing away merrily - there's a mix of white and red onions, plus quite a lot of garlic too and, thankfully, the birds have left it all alone, which is a relief as I didn't fancy having to replant that lot!

The leeks are coming along although the size is not consistent and they're looking a bit fleabitten but I'm reasonably pleased considering I've never grown them before and they do seem to be a bit temperamental. Fortunately I can't see any signs of rust, so I'm hoping they'll fatten up a bit more before I want to start eating them.

Finally I just wanted to apologise to Paula from Locks Farm for not posting her comments - for some reason I didn't get notification in my email that you'd sent them so only saw them when I logged in today. They've now been posted!