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!