We Grow Our OwnThe trials and successes of life on our allotment

Looking back at my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions post, I was pleased to see that I had accomplished some of my ‘resolutions’ for last year, although lack of time and job hunting made sure that I never had the time to get round to doing all of them.

Following on from my post on how to clear a new allotment,I thought I’d share some tips about crop rotation, which will again give your fruit and vegetables the best chance of growing up to be big, healthy, strong and tasty!

I’ve seem a few people recently on Twitter that have been lucky to have landed themselves an allotment, but are a little bit anxious about what they have taken on. I thought it would be a good idea to share my tips about how to start clearing a new allotment.

I know that I’m a little late to the party with this, but after seeing this on other people’s blogs, I thought it would be good for me to share my allotment based resolutions for the year, and also for me to look back in a year’s time to see how many have been achieved.

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.

As you will have picked up from yesterday’s post, I’m a big fan of Cafe Direct’s ‘Sow Your Own’ campaign.

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.

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.

What a fantastic weekend. Sunny skies all the way through, and I ended up with red arms!

We spent all of Saturday building frames for the beans and peas to climb up, and then we planted the “Hugh’s Huge” peas and “Crimson Flowered” broad beans. I have a load more of both, together with runner and french beans coming up in the greenhouse.