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

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.

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.