Last week was the hottest week of the year, in September as it’s slowly getting darker in the morning and at night.

Climate change and global warming causes weather instability and this is what we’ve had over the last couple of years. This year was a colder Spring, a hot early summer and then a rainy, miserable summer followed by a week of 30C + days in Autumn…

However hot it is, September is also spider season, they are out in force and I keep walking through webs on my way to watering.

My goal for the allotment this week was to get food plants in the ground (I feel like I’ve been saying that for months now!). After watering, Ma started with cutting off the leaves on the summer squash at the front of the plot and clearing the french beans and I attended to planting.

I needed to look at the red cabbages as they were covered in whitefly. It’s really odd as the other cabbages are more or less ok.

I pulled eight of them up and left the two best looking ones. I planted some of the red russian kale in the gaps and treated all the plants with diatomaceous earth (DE). I very rarely use DE, while it is organic, I know it’s not wildlife friendly. I only use it in extreme measures and on plants that are under mesh to prevent killing bees and other pollinators. But this level of infestation in September is extreme and I made a decision. I mention this because I have been told off about this before and all I am going to say about it is that I garden in an allotment in the city and we have a lot of pests, mostly I live with them. I accept that whitefly is something we have every year and I usually just live with it, it’s not generally a barrier to growing food and I wash all veg throughly, however, this whitefly has killed nine cabbages because it’s happened so early in the season and I have lots of plants that I’m intending to grow to feed me so I need to take measures…

The extra cavolo nero, swede and chard had arrived and I planted them out with the cauliflowers and brussels sprouts. All under mesh. Everything has to go under mesh in the winter. The cavolo nero went into the ex french bean bed, we left the nasturtiums in that bed as well.

I ended up with spare plants and was thinking about where to put them. Ma suggested the widow and orphans bed. I had bunged some summer squash plants, that had spent most of the summer in pots because I had no where to put them, and a stray tomato plant, into the ex potato bed as it came free. Apparently, in Ma’s head that became the ‘widow and orphans’ bed. It’s a good concept and I’m thinking I should just have a spare bed for bunging spare plants in to see how they do, if all they do is feed the birds I can live with that.

There is still lots of weeding to do but this was a good weekend’s work…