CHAPTER 1
November

By November in the UK, the weather is usually deteriorating noticeably, although there’s still hope for some nice bright days. November for the year of this project began for me with a torrential downpour and gales; however, I did manage a quick overview of how things stood.

My Balcony at the Start of November

Plants still alive and growing:

Herbs: rosemary, thyme, bay, oregano, chives, and parsley (both flat and curly). All but the rosemary and thyme were in the cold frame. I also had one basil plant which I’d moved inside onto a windowsill.

Half a dozen tomato plants, still with a handful of unripe tomatoes on.

Salad vegetables on the railing: sorrel, bronze arrowhead lettuce, rocket.

Salad vegetables in the other cold frame: bronze arrowhead lettuce, rocket.

Some slightly pathetic-looking pak choi.

Seeds and cuttings:

Several pots with broad bean and pea seeds in. No sign yet of life.

Four sprigs of mint, cuttings taken in late October; as yet unclear if they were going to live or die (but mint is quite tough).

Miscellaneous other:

Possibly some volunteer potatoes hiding in the really big pot.

Stacks of empty or half-full pots that badly needed to be tidied up.

A black plastic sack of leaves, busily turning themselves into leafmould.

The shed (been on the ‘to-be-deconstructed’ list for at least two years, currently full of random bits of wood rescued from skips across London).

Wormery, empty at the start of the month.

The plastic tub of kitchen scraps to go down to the allotment compost bin.

Things to Do in November

Beans and Peas

Broad beans and early peas can both be overwintered: this means that you start growing them in October or November, in order to give them a head start in the spring. They won’t do much during the winter itself, and that’s fine – just keep them watered and wait till it starts getting warmer. You should expect to see a little growth, but you don’t want too much, or they’ll be more susceptible to frost.

In particular, if you have an aphid problem (which I do on the allotment, and to a lesser extent on the balcony), broad beans are particularly prone to infestation, and in previous years I’ve lost a whole crop. If you overwinter your plants, you can get them cropping before the aphids really wake up from the winter. You won’t get quite as good a crop as you might without the aphid problem, since eventually the aphids will catch up and you likely won’t get the later beans; but you’ll get enough to be worthwhile.

Beans and peas sown in the spring are a good candidate for succession sowing; this is when you sow a handful of seeds at weekly or fortnightly intervals, so they’ll be at slightly different stages of development and you can extend the cropping season. This isn’t much use for overwintered plants, though, since the plants tend to catch up with one another while they’re growing very slowly over the winter. However, it may be worth staggering your sowing a little bit in case of other accidents (marauding squirrels, for example!).

If you have anywhere else to sow beans or peas (an allotment, or a patch of spare ground somewhere), then a few extra baby plants can be useful, too. Beans and peas are pleasingly easy to care for, so they’re a good choice for extra or unexpected spaces. See the March chapter for more on increasing your crop and harvesting.

Compost and Leafmould

Compost is incredibly valuable to a gardener, but if you’ve got a limited space, especially one which is on hard standing, the traditional compost pile won’t work well. If you’ve got enough space, you can set up a rotating-style bin and import some worms into it (much as with a wormery), but even with only a small amount of space, a wormery is well worth the effort of setting it up. Wormeries should be fairly odour-free, so you can even keep them inside if you have a suitable cupboard.

My subsidised wormery.

A happy worm on a bed of shredded paper (there were kitchen scraps underneath).

Setting up a wormery

I got my wormery subsidised by my local council (Southwark) a couple of years ago. Lots of councils do this, so it’s worth investigating. Unfortunately on my first attempt at worm farming, the worms died. This time around, I got a bigger batch of worms (0.5kg instead of 0.25kg, ordered from www.bucketofworms.co.uk) and was determined to pay closer attention to what was going on in there.

The worms arrived looking incredibly healthy, so I damped down the existing coir bedding a bit, tipped them and their surrounding compost on top of it, and added a small amount of food scraps from our compost collection bucket. Then I topped it with a layer of cardboard, put the lid back on, and left them alone for a few days.

Worms take a while to settle in, and you don’t want to overfeed them while they’re doing it. Just ignore them while they find their lack of feet. After 2-4 weeks, you can start feeding them a little at a time. Keep an eye on how much of the food scraps are being eaten, and don’t feed the worms more than they can handle. As they settle in (and breed!) they’ll eat faster. Bear in mind that they also take longer to process food in the winter, as they’ll slow down in the colder weather.

Tips for Good Wormcare

Making leafmould

Leafmould is what happens when autumn leaves rot down. It becomes a crumbly material that’s good to use in potting mixes, and can improve your soil. Potting compost used more than once tends to dry out and become dusty, losing a lot of its goodness. Before you replant in the spring, you can tip out the old compost into a bag or container, mix it up a bit with leafmould and compost, and reuse it (see the March chapter for more on this).

The bad news about leafmould is that it takes at least a year to make, so the leaves you collect this autumn won’t be usable until the spring after next. But the time will pass whatever you do, so you might as well get on with it now!

Leafmould is incredibly easy to make. Gather up fallen leaves (from deciduous trees – those that lose their leaves in the autumn – not evergreen ones, which take much longer to rot). Stick the leaves in a black plastic bag, and water them a little bit if they’re dry, to encourage the rotting process. Poke a few holes in the sides of the bag, tie it loosely shut, and leave it for a year or so. Be aware that waxier leaves, such as plane tree leaves (which is what I have most of locally, unfortunately) may take longer than other types to rot; you may have to leave them for two rather than just one year. If you want to get a bit fancier, and you have the room, you can buy or make wire mesh containers. The advantage of black plastic sacks is that they’re more moveable, although they too can rot a bit and be prone to developing holes. Heavy duty bags may be a better bet than the regular dustbin liners.

You can pick up fallen leaves more or less anywhere in the autumn. Local parks are one of the best places; you can also pick up leaves from pavements, but avoid roads as the leaves may have picked up too much in the way of pollutants. Also avoid disturbing drifts of leaves in corners or under hedges, as wildlife may use them to hibernate in. Stick to the huge piles of leaves out in the open under trees. We have a dog, so for a couple of weeks I stuck a plastic carrier bag in my pocket and spent a couple of minutes filling it every time I took the dog to the park, then emptied it into a black plastic sack on the balcony on my return. As I’m terribly lazy, this worked better for me than doing it all at once.

Leafmould is free and easy to make, and it saves the council the energy of taking dead leaves away and doing whatever it is that they do with them, so it’s an excellent permaculture option.

If your leaves are rotting too slowly, or if you’re otherwise impatient, another option is to use a layer or two of leaves to pad out compost when filling a new container. This should be a largeish container or raised bed, though, rather than a small pot, to be worth doing.

Leafmould in a black plastic sack.

Green Tomatoes

You may find that as the weather starts getting colder, and the tomato plants start looking steadily more pathetic, that you still have a few green tomatoes left on the plants. By November, you need to harvest them anyway, as they’re certainly not going to ripen on their own now. Really, you could conclude this a little earlier, but I’m a hopeless optimist; and in sunny autumns have been harvesting fresh tomatoes from a south-facing wall until early November. Tomatoes will sometimes ripen on a window ledge, especially if you put them next to a banana (bananas give off a strong concentration of ethylene gas, which is absorbed by other fruit around them and which encourages ripening). Or you can make green tomato chutney, which is my preference.

Green Tomato Chutney

This quantity will produce a kilo or so of chutney:

500g green tomatoes

250g onion (one small onion = 70g)

250g apple

125g raisins

250g brown sugar

a lump of ginger, finely diced

a couple of chillies, finely diced

pinch of salt

250ml malt vinegar

OR (alternative version for calculating weights given your own quantity of produce):

green tomatoes

half the tomato-weight of onions

half the tomato-weight of apples

quarter of the tomato-weight of raisins

half the tomato-weight of brown sugar

a lump of ginger, finely diced

a couple of chillies, finely diced

pinch of salt

half the tomato-weight of malt vinegar

Dice the veg fairly finely – but remember, it’s basically savoury jam. You needn’t worry too much about how neat the chopping is.

Throw everything in a thick bottomed pan, bring to the boil, and stir while the sugar dissolves.

Simmer for at least an hour, until it is jam-like in consistency.

Meanwhile, THOROUGHLY wash enough old jam jars to hold the chutney, and stick them in the oven briefly at 100ºC to dry them off and make sure that they’re sterilised

Once the chutney is done, ladle it into the jars (be careful! the glass will be very hot) right up to the top, cover with clingfilm or a jam jar cover, and put the lid on tightly. Leave to cool thoroughly. It can be kept in a cool place until you open it, after which it should stay in the fridge. It will benefit from being left for at least a couple of months before opening, to mellow a little.

This recipe makes reasonably spicy chutney; some people might want less chilli than this. Alternatively, you can chop the chilli and ginger a little larger, and use a bit of muslin or a teaball to hang it in the chutney and pull it out when cooked.

Building a Cold Frame

A cold frame is basically a very small, unheated greenhouse. It’s a way of providing your plants with a little protection and warmth over the winter: the see-through top lets in the sun, but the enclosed box keeps the plants a little warmer. It also means that you need to water less often, as any water which evaporates will condense on the lid and drop back down onto the plants.

You can buy commercial cold frames, but they’re very easy to make with reclaimed bits of wood.

For your base, you can either use an existing wooden box (one of my cold frames uses a wooden wine box that I got from my parents, or sometimes you may find old drawers in skips), or nail together planks. Old pallets are a good source of planks, or again, you can check out nearby skips, or watch for your neighbours doing redecorating work.

Use the planks to create a couple of open rectangles, the same size. You’re going to stack these up on top of each other to make the cold frame big enough for the height of your plants. The advantage of making ’rounds’ like this is that you can start the cold frame off quite short, and add further rounds as the plants get taller.

You’ll also need one round, to sit on the top, which creates a slope, so the cold frame will catch the sun better. It’ll work without this, but it’s slightly more efficient and effective with it.

Cut the front plank lengthways to leave it a little less than half its previous width. The back one will remain the same. Measure the width of the front plank, mark it on one end of each side plank, and, again on each side plank, draw a diagonal line from the back edge to your mark on the front. Saw along this line, so you end up with two sloped sides. Nail all four planks together.

The final stage is to create a top for it. The classic cold frame top is an old wooden window; again, keep an eye on the local skips. I managed to get hold of a couple of very large bits of transparent plastic, which I cut to size. If you’re using cut plastic or glass, gaffer tape the edges to avoid injury. Again, you can also of course buy something transparent for the top. Plastic sheeting may also work, but it’s likely to degrade over time; glass is the longest lasting material.

You can either just balance the top on the cold frame base (my personal preference!), or make hinges (this looks a bit better, and will also avoid potential storm damage if your area isn’t sheltered). You’ll need to prop the top open a little, to allow air into the box. Also bear in mind that if you’re using a wooden box with a base (rather than just making a frame with no base), you should line the bottom with a bit of plastic to catch any water which might drip when you water the plants. An old compost bag is ideal.

Another way of getting a similar effect for a single plant is to chop the top off a plastic bottle (at least 1 litre size, and 2-3l bottles may be better) and place that over the plant with the lid off. You can also make cloches from old bits of glass, but those are better suited for larger beds.

How to make a simple cold frame

I used a wine box; you could construct with planks.

Exact measurements are not important: big enough to cover top with a little overlap.

Measurements in cm

Growing Winter Herbs

Some herbs simply won’t grow in the UK over the winter: basil is an example, and chives will survive and return exuberantly in the spring, but won’t actually grow, even in a cold frame. However, quite a few herbs can be kept going, especially if you have access to a cold frame as above.

Rosemary is cold-hardy, and will do fine even out of a cold frame. You should be able to crop a little from it if it’s a well-established plant, but be careful not to overdo it. It’s unlikely to put much new growth on unless the winter is quite mild, but taking some of the old growth is fine. Good for roast potatoes!

Mint and parsley are both cold-hardy, and parsley in particular will keep growing even through a little snow! It’s slow growth, though, and you won’t be able to use that much of it unless you have a lot of plants. If you’re keen to keep it cropping, it’s probably worth moving it into a cold frame to encourage more growth, especially if you’re a bit further north. Happily, parsley self-seeds with abandon, so after a season or two you may well have plenty of small plants in the corners of pots, and perhaps not even be all that bothered if you accidentally kill off a couple by over-harvesting.

Bay trees are cold-hardy, but like rosemary, there’s a limit to how much you can crop over the winter as the plant won’t be growing very much if at all.

Sage and thyme will survive without any protection over the winter, but you probably won’t be able to crop any of them unless the winter is unusually mild. They’re unlikely to put on much new growth and you don’t want to chop off all of the old growth for cooking or you’ll take away all the plant’s reserves. All of these will do well in a cold frame and should grow at least a handful of fresh leaves, in which case you should be able to keep getting (limited!) quantities of fresh herbs from them over the winter.

Oregano will die back altogether over winter, and even in a cold frame may not put on any new growth (though it’s worth a go). However, it will return in the spring unless the winter was unusually cold.

In general, though, bear in mind that the plants won’t be doing much in the way of new growth (although especially in a cold frame, you may get a little), so you should be careful when cropping. Don’t take so much that the plant can’t keep itself alive!

Keeping the more delicate herbs (thyme, oregano, even mint and parsley) in a cold frame will mean that they will pick up again much earlier in the spring than they would if just left outdoors, so it’s worth it even if you can’t use them very much over the winter. Parsley is biennial: it sets seed in its second year. So a parsley plant will keep going happily for a full year, before flowering and setting seed in the second year, after which it dies. Either save the seeds, or let it sow itself in the surrounding pots.

Bear in mind as well that you can freeze or dry fresh herbs through-out the year to give yourself a supply of your own herbs through the winter months.

Herbs doing well in the cold frame over the winter.