What I’m sowing and growing in October

I love writing these monthly reviews and plans for the following month, so much seems to happen in such a short time and our diet changes as each month clicks by.  The fruit changes the most.  August saw us awash with berries, September with tomatoes/peppers/cucumbers and plums and October sees the winter squash arrive and apples and pears reach their peak taste.

Although this article is focused on October I also have a summary of everything that I’m sowing for the whole year, if you’re interested please take a look at my month-by-month sowing guide.

September delivered very welcome relief from the rain of August and I managed a holiday and lots of cycling as well as allotment time.  The polytunnel tomatoes delivered and the low tunnels protected the peppers and gave us a brilliant harvest.  We also had an amazing harvest from the Tumbler tomatoes that enjoyed their protected sunny corner, adjacent to a brick wall.  The early potatoes were superb, but the main-crops all finished early and the yield is a little below average, at about 2 KG per tuber.

We’ve continued to break last years records for every week of the month and we smashed our previous records for September and the year as a whole.  We’ve now harvested more by the end of September than in the whole of last year and we still have a huge amount of food in the ground and being actively planted out.

We’ve now decided to give up Jennie’s plot at the end of this year.  Jennie and Jon will have less time to manage it and we’ve also got so much better at growing that we just can’t find enough family to gift it to.  We are all very upbeat about the decision which I talk about in this video

Before we take a look at our plans for September it’s useful to catch up on the existing state of the plots:

So finally we get to October’s sowing and growing video!  October is such a critical month, even one or two weeks delay can spell disaster, so don’t dally.  Also note that I’m starting a lot of my seedlings under grow lights, so you might need to sow a week earlier if you are growing under natural light.

October sowing and growing video

If you’re interested in the databases that I used to manage the allotments I also have a video and associated blog post about them.  The blog post has all of the details on how to get your own copy of the database (with or without my data) to customise as you wish.

I also have a fancy new database for tracking all of my seed packets.

Here’s a complete read-only view of the varieties database with all of my data.

Here’s what we sowed in September

Here’s what we plan to sow in October:

For completeness here’s a view of my sowing database for last year

Here’s a complete list of the varieties that I’m planning to sow in 2020

Watch out for the next video showing what I’m sowing in October, here’s a hint, quite a lot!