What I’m Sowing and Growing in November

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.  September saw us overwhelmed with tomatoes/peppers/cucumbers and plums and October saw the winter squash arrive and apples and pears reached their peak. In November we delight in the late season apples, which for me are by far the best tasting and we’ve been storing these for winter too.

Although this article is focused on November 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.

October delivered was a good month for us, we had an excellent harvest of squash and beetroot. The squash is now cured and the beetroot is stored away in damp wood shavings. Almost all of the summer planting was removed and replaced by winter delights.

We’ve continued to break last years records for every week of the month and we smashed our previous records for October and the year as a whole.  We’ve now harvested more 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 handed Jennie’s plot over to it’s new owner and clearing the shed and tidying it up has kept us extra busy.  We are all very upbeat about the decision which I talk about in this video

Before we take a look at our plans for November it’s useful to catch up on the existing state of the plots, first up is the kitchen garden:

I also did a tour of my plot:

So finally we get to November’s sowing and growing video!  November is such a grim month, for sowing seeds and I generally don’t recommend it, but there are a few exceptions.  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

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. If you take a copy with my data you will have to delete some of the images, as I have breached the limits of the free version.

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 October:

Here’s what we plan to sow 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 December, here’s a hint, not much!