We Grow Our OwnWhat we grow, what we cook, what we eat …

Today was time for some long overdue weeding at the allotment, but since it was a Bank Holiday, I had to do what everyone seems to do on a Bank Holiday and do some DIY … lottie style

… everything seems to be growing so far after the frost last week.

I was a little concerned because when I came down to water one day, the plastic on my spray gun had cracked where water had obviously expanded, so I was more than a little concerned for my poor little veggies.

The lottie is taking shape, but there is still so much work to be done.

The encouraging thing is that stuff is starting to grow, so Spring has sprung by the look of things!

It did seem that it was a very short weekend, even leaving aside that an hour of my sleep was stolen on Sunday morning!

Saturday was spent potting on the huge amount of seedlings that had sprouted, so the greenhouse is now full. I also got a refill for the greenhouse heater, just in case the predicted snow/sleet that is forecast for later in the week arrives.

Yesterday was a very grey day, so I spent the majority of the day inside the greenhouse potting on the many and varied seedlings that had come up in the propagators. I still find it difficult to be ruthless and have to constantly remind myself that there is not room for everything that has germinated, and that I can only pot on the strong seedlings!

When I poked my head out of the window on Saturday, it looked like the weatherman was right, and that Spring had finally sprung.

With all the bad weather recently, the good lady wife and myself decided we’d try to crack on with building the structure of the allotment, so that we could get some stuff in the ground sooner rather than later.

It took two nine hour days down the allotment, but in one weekend we went from this…

Well, by the looks of the weather today, Spring may have finally woken from her slumber, and is hopefully here to stay.

We took advantage of the gorgeous, warm weather today to really crack on, and although we were down there from 9am-6pm, the time just flew by, and the transformation is astounding.

We will be back down there tomorrow, and I will post a longer blog tomorrow, together with some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots.

Well it turned out that the weatherman was wrong, and the bad weather missed us. I realise from speaking to other people on here and on Twitter that we were the lucky ones, especially considering the amount of flood warnings around at the moment.

We finally managed to dig over the rest of the beds, so that all the spuds and onions can be transferred from the house next week to the lottie. Good job as well, because I had the rest of the seeds delivered this week, so there are plenty of seeds to take their place in the dining room and greenhouse!

Today’s plans to dig over some more of the lottie were scuppered this morning, when I woke up to three inches of snow on the ground!

Oh well, gives me an excuse to sit on the sofa in front of the fire, and read the new Nigel Slater book that my wife bought me for my birthday.

As it is my birthday weekend, both myself and my better half decided to take a long weekend, so that I could recover from my hangover by clearing more of the allotment.

We were told by the allotment secretary that our hedge would be cut by the local crims as part of their community service.

Unfortunately, when we arrived we found that not only had they butchered the hedge down to 2 feet in places (they won’t win any design awards at the Chelsea Flower Show!) they had also left all of what they cut off, all over our freshly dug beds!

So, instead of marking out more of the beds, we spent four hours taking all what was our hedge off our plot, and piling it outside for someone to collect and burn!

So, by the end of today, we managed to get the plot back to where it was when we left it left it last weekend. Oh well, there isn’t much of the hedge left for them if they decide to cut it again!