(Threat Of) Rain Stops Play....

After work today I got back on the allotment, trying to make more progress with the carrot/parsnip/leek strip....

And I did get more done, but it's frustratingly hard work. The compacted end is getting more solid the further along I get, and I've now had to resort to cutting strips into the ground with the spade, parallel to the direction I'm digging in, and shaving off 5 centimetre slices of rock solid soil before bashing it into pieces.

Anyway. I headed off the plot when the clouds seemed to be announcing The End Of The World Was Nigh. Big scary black clouds carry lots of rain, and I had no intention of partaking of my post-dig pint in The Woolpack and leaving a puddle where I stood...

Hard Work

Today was just hard work.

The idea was to dig the bit between the potatoes and the raspberries, then plant carrots and parsnips - I didn't get anywhere near that.

The thing is, I am too much of a perfectionist, so as I dig I remove weeds. And there a a shedload of weeds. The section I am digging is the bit next to the raspberries, and it's obvious that there has been nothing here, except humans picking raspberries, for a long time. The piece is 3 metres wide. The first metre is incredibly compacted, so much so that I have to stand on the spade to get it into the ground. The last metre is completely riddled with Couchweed. The middle bit is a delight!

I only got halfway across, before calling it a day, and I was knackered. But I know that the soil I'm digging is going to be a hundred times better for growing on than it was before I started. Tiring, hard work, but worth it - allegedly.

On the positive side, several pea seedlings (above) have appeared in the last 24 hours, and are now safely housed under wirey protection (below)!

So, a slightly negative time on the allotment, BUT!

There's always a But. I managed to arrive early enough to bag a box of Callum's chickens' eggs! Which I shared with Old Bob later at The Woolpack. All the eggs are different sizes and shapes, I can't wait to try one. And at £1 for 6 it's MUCH, much better value than Tesco

You Take It Easy Sam!

At last Sam returned to the allotment to have a look round....

He really wanted to have a look to see if the potatoes were growing yet - I knew they wouldn't be after just a week but we went to check anyway. The weather was really nice for a change so we had a nice twenty minutes down there.

Sam really enjoyed playing in the wheelbarrow, being pushed around in it and being tipped out. He also discovered that if you lean right back it tips over and rests on the handles (below), hours of fun....he also loved running up and down the communal heap, and found the swan's nest fascinating. I even persuaded him to put his hand inside the compost bin to see how hot it was in there.

So, the potatoes weren't up. The onions? No sign. Lettuce? Nope. Peas? There may be the very first tips poking through the topsoil, I'm going to have a much closer look when I'm up there later today. But the garlic? YES! They look big, Daddy!

The allotments were full of people taking advantage of the favourable meteorology, and so Sam was introduced to Maurice, Sid & Margaret, Callum and Callum's Grandad, Next Door David, Next Door Paul, and Sylvia, her dog Lucy, and Mr Sylvia. We even got a guided tour of Sylvia's patch and we've struck a bet with Mister Sylvia over who can grow the tallest sunflower.....the stakes are high.....five whole pennies....Sam naturally charmed them all.

Half the point of having our allotment is to keep Sam enthusiastic about nature and growing things, and if he's happy with a half hour here and there at the moment, that'll do for me....

Sunflowers Ahoy!

19 of the 36 peat pots now have a tiny sunflower plant peeping out of the potting compost....

And that's amazing, because yesterday morning there were none at all. I took them for another visit to the bath (how pampered are they!?) to allow the pots to soak up some water, stuck them back on a sunny windowsill, and just a day later over half of them have made an appearance. Some of the seedlings still have the shell of the seed held proudly aloft.

.

Even if no more come up, a row of 19 sunflowers will look rather splendid on the allotment.

And there's a sub-plot to the sunflower growing - we're going to hold a competition at The Woolpack. Sunflowers will be "sold" to customers, at £1 apiece, probably, with money raised going towards the KatieChilds appeal. As the cultivator/referee I won't own one myself, but I will treat all the plants equally, same amount of watering, etc. A "Measure In" will take place on a nominated day in August, and the tallest sunflower will win its owner "something". Owners will be free to visit their flower, escorted of course to prevent skullduggery.

.

If YOU, dear reader, would like to take part in Norfolk's Most Important Sunflower Contest, please do email me at trix68@hotmail.co.uk and you'll be in (anonymously if you so desire).

.

We won't raise a fortune. But it all adds up eh? The winner's prize will be announced.....sometime....

Puzzle Time

Can you guess what we've named our water butts?

There are three altogether, but the two biggest ones have been named......

Busy Times, Part Three - Monday

The allotment is half decent….

Yes, half of the plot is now looking like someone who knows what they’re doing has been involved. But you know that’s not true, it’s been me! First name Simon, last name Clueless, but we’ll get there.

Today was my last day off from work, so I wanted to do something worthwhile. And once again, what I did sounds like very little but took a long time. It was nice arriving just behind a fellow, female allotmenteer, and as we walked through to out plots Maurice and his mate yelled “And here’s Simon look! Them potatoes look good!”

You see, I was carrying two seed trays full of beautifully chitted potatoes, namely First Earlies and Second Earlies. The varieties I’ve gone for are Pentland Javelin for the Firsts and Maris Peer for the Seconds. Both simple types, which is exactly what we need for our first year. In the bottom of the trenches I dibbed in small holes at 30cm intervals, not to bury the potatoes deeper, but to hold them in place as I covered them with soil. And then I knelt at the end of the row and stuck the tubers into the holes, three on each side, before trowelling the soil back into the trench and levelling it off a bit. I’d miscalculated! I didn’t have enough potatoes to fill the rows! Buggrit. One lesson learned already, chit more potatoes. Still, once they were in I gave them a thorough watering, and with any luck we’ll be harvesting some lovely spuds in July….I watered them in well and moved on.

So, to the next job. Weeding (yawn). Namely the stretch between the potatoes and the raspberries (skinhead!). Most of the weeds on my patch can be dug straight in, as confirmed by Maurice and David, but there’s this broad leafed bugger than has to be taken out, because it has a huge root ball that spreads extremely wide if left to its own devices. It took an extortionate amount of time too. This strip is where the carrots, parsnips and leeks will live, once I’ve dug it through and levelled it nicely. It’s worth spending a few hours weeding it thoroughly though, hopefully that will make life easier later on. But the weeds are out now, next visit will be digging it over and if there’s time, planting seeds.

Planting is the fun bit! What have we got in so far? Peas, onions, lettuce, garlic, and now potatoes. Other allotments look very neat and tidy, and well ahead of ours, but I don’t mind. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and nor will our plot be made perfect overnight (we’re not Gardener’s World, with their huge team of people - ooops, did I say that?).

I added more Browns to the compost bin….it needs it as it was getting slightly too Green-ish. Namely two copies of The Sun newspaper. The contents of the compost caddy will have to wait until later.

Took a stroll to have a look round Sam’s patch….we’ll get there eventually mate! But I found that there are two rhubarb plants there. Trevor from The Woolpack had asked if I knew anyone who had some rhubarb to spare - the plant, not just the fruit - and I have! Trevor and Sue will be really chuffed. I’m going to have to research how you transplant a rhubarb plant from one location to another, then we can move one of my (well, Sam’s actually, they’re in his patch) rhubarb plants to Trevor and Sue’s place.

As I was leaving I felt the need….the need to pee! As every good gardener knows, wee is an excellent Accelerator for compost, so I used a bucket then transferred it into the compost bin. Straight away I dipped the bucket into one of the water butts to wash it a bit, then chucked the water onto the plot. Mistake. Because of the strong wind, a fine spray blew back into my face and all over me. 99% rainwater BUT 1% urine. DOH! I could hardly contain my giggles though as Sylvia from The Plot Behind was peering through her hedge to ask if I could provide her with a piece of wood. “Did ya just chuck some water?” she asked.

“Yes I did”.

“Well a bit of the spray just cooled me down lovely, thank ya”.

Sylvia is a Serious Allotmenteer. Her plot looks lovely, I’ll ask her if I can add a few pics here. Boarded-in beds, shed with a cooker and a heater, the lot!

So I bade farewell to the garden for a while. Another lovely time spent doing something useful. If you’d like to help me out email me, I’ll provide tools and alcohol….

Busy Times, Part Two - Friday

It's freezing in the trenches....

I was blown off the allotment today by a thunderous easterly wind. I did manage three hours work, but eventually capitulated to the weather, with a blinding headache.

I did manage to complete the raspberries which I'm rather pleased about. They look much neater now, I don't think they'd been tended to for a year or two before now. The weeds were well established and cunningly positioned, nearly always inside the circle of raspberry canes, making them extremely tough to remove. But removed they have been, ha! Try to strangle my fruit eh? It took longer than I thought, because the soil was soaked and very, very cold and unpleasant to kneel on, and towards the end of the row the weeds, grass and moss were worse.

I made several stops to warm up with hot mushroom soup.

Biggest job today was preparing some ground for Sam to plant potatoes on Saturday. He's been wanting to do it for a while, and I promised him he could do it this weekend....so I had to do this job whatever the weather threw my way. As you can see from the picture, my trenches aren't very straight, aren't exactly the correct distance apart, and would probably appal most seasoned allotmenteers. But I am actually quite proud of them, it was very hard work in nasty weather, but I did it. Not sure if I'll drag Sam up there tomorrow if the weather's as bad as today. Mind you, we planted the garlic in worse weather, and that's now doing well.

And that was three hours (hard) graft!

Busy Times, Part One - Thursday

I booked a few days off work to try and get the allotment into shape....today was the first shift....

I started my day off in luxurious style, cooking myself a Full English, fantabulous. Then off to the allotment. It was lovely and sunny, but windy, but much better than sleet or hailstones. So what did I achieve today? When I go through it, it doesn't sound like much, but I was working from 9.30 to 5, with one hour break in the middle. This is What We Did On Our Holiday:

1. Dug out the leftover parsnips.

2. Dug out the leftover brussels sprouts.

2a. Dinnertime at The Woolpack. There's method to the madness though, as an hour after the photo was taken, the lager became compost accelerant, and The Sun became compost.

3. Finished digging another 3 metre wide section, ready for root veg.

4. Prepared soil and planted onion seeds.

5. Prepared soil and planted lettuce seeds.

6. Started weeding and thinning out the raspberries. Got about two thirds of the way along the row.

Doesn't sound like a day's work does it. But here are a few pics from today:

This is two barrows full of evicted brussels and excess raspberries.

This is the legume patch. The dark strip is where the onion seeds are sown,, and to the right are the lettuces. They're only sown quarter way across for a reason! Sow them at 3/4 week intervals to maintain a nice, regular supply.

So right now I am left with this, looking at the good end:

And the bad end:

Sunflower Seeds Go In....

Another rushed Tuesday, but we shoe-horned in some gardening work as well as everything else!

Namely, we potted 36 sunflower seeds, which will eventually make the place look luvverly. Sam loved sticking his clean hands into the mucky compost, and splatting it into the pots - peat pots which we can plant straight into the ground without disturbing the roots of our flowers. The pots will now soak up some water in the bath overnight, then spend a while on Sam's bedroom windowsill until some healthy, strong shoots appear. And then we'll transplant them to the allotment ("our" allotment, Sam reminded me earlier, not "my" allotment!). They'll either go up the fence alongside the runner beans, or just opposite, on the boundary fence, in between the Manure Mountain and The Shed. But whichever place the sunflowers don't go, the tomato plants will. But that's another story.

I thought I'd add a little texture to my Allotment Tales, and include two pictures I took on Sunday.

This is Callum's homemade egg cart. Callum's the 13-year old currently entering his tenth summer on his allotment, and he sells surplus eggs from his chickens. Very cheap and very high quality, and not surprisingly they sell out almost instantly. And BUGGRIT I just missed out on Sunday, grrr....

And this is the swan nest right next to the entrance gates. Do not go too close, or tarry too long unlocking or re-locking, because Mister Swan is absolutely full of attitude right now! The picture is a bit pants because Mr S immediately raised his wings and was about to go for me. Probably.

This is Mister Intrepid (But Cowardly) signing out.

We're Back!

Yes, back on the allotment!

It’s been ages since I was last here. The weather has been “changeable” (i.e. crap) on the occasions I’ve had to get on the plot. Am I a fair weather gardener? Guess so, I just can’t see any point in digging when it’s sleeting or hailing.

So. Today I was expecting a jungle, nay, a tropical rain forest. I was pleasantly surprised. The bits I had dug over were looking, well, dug over. The bits I hadn’t have weeds in abundance. I can handle that. I’d built my lack of visits up to a BIG problem, and the plot had grown, meaning that in my head I had to cultivate an area half the size of Norfolk. Nowt of the sort. It was manageable - and later in the week it will be managed.

The section nearest the shed is earmarked for “Legumes”. Get me! And after a good rake it actually looked like somewhere good to plant seeds. Right next to the fence is where the runner beans will go, and beside them, peas. So I planted the peas today. I shuffled up the row, zig-zagging the peas, and then gently covered and firmed them down. I watered them in too. Apparently that’s a good thing.


But. The one thing that did make my day was seeing our garlic shoots. Me and Sam stuck them in amid terribly windy and rainy weather a month ago. And today I found that they’re going for it. Lots of shoots, from 1cm to 5cm tall. That gave me a massive boost, something we’ve planted is growing! Nothing as encouraging as seeing some success.



This photo is our watering point. It's meant to be a secure little jetty, but in conversation I've been told that it's sunk a lot since last year.....so it was very gingerly that I filled the watering can up......



Eventually I heard the Grammar School clock chiming “pub o’clock” and packed up the tools.
And headed off for a pint.