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

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.

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!

Yesterday, the brains of the outfit, (in other words my wife!) said that instead of mindless digging and clearing, we should draw up a plan of where the beds are going to go, so that we only clear what we need to.

The plan for this year is on the ‘Masterplans’ page.

We spent the majority of the daylight hours at the allotment this weekend to try and make a start on it.

Those very nice people at Figo Frames gave me a ‘taster’ pack of their new product, to show me how easy it can be to build things to protect my crops in my allotment, or to help them to grow.

I had tried various other products to build things like fruit cages, or tripods, and always got frustrated because they never allowed me to build it how I wanted it.