Blinking Bindweed

Oh dear, bindweed is back with a vengence. There is loads of it. Everywhere. Its horrible. I quite like stinging nettles and thistles compared with bindweed. It nearly swamped the strawberries and nips, only the artichokes are holding their own - i think that the mistake i made in planting them a bit close together may pay off! We have sprayed the remaining unplanted area with weedkiller and as soon as the weeds are dead, we will cover the lot with old carpet and fabric.

We've now got runner beans, martock broad beans, leeks, onions (red and white) and sweetcorn all growing away happily. Just have to prepare a bed for pumpkins, squash, tomatoes and some really late purple sprouting broccoli will go in at some point. Its hard to keep up with everything! I think that the gooseberries won't be long - woo! gooseberry crumble and goosegog & elderflower jam to fill the shelves with. Can't wait. Someone tell me that we will win the battle against the bindweed....please..

Will post some pictures next week

Strawbs and Nips

Wow, what an
amazing weekend. Simon and I worked really really hard on the lottie. By the time we gave up at 3pm on Sunday afternoon, we had cleared and planted two beds - one with parsnips and leeks, the other with 50 strawberry plants of various varieties. Its looking good - more like an allotment and less like a massive field.

Also stuck a few strawbs in amongst the fruit bed. In theory, by the time the fruit bushes get to be really big in a year or two, the strawberries will no longer be useful. The fleece is doing a fantastic job, the soil underneath it was lovely and moist, unlike the rest of the plot which was worryingly dry. I think water is going to be a huge issue for us. We do have a cunning plan which involves the construction of a wood store, some guttering and a large hosepipe.

Checked the squash plants I left at Mums, they are growing into fine, sturdy little plants. Looking forward to planting those out in the coming weeks.



The next plan is to rotivate the rest of the plot again to try and break up the big chunks of soil that were left by the plough. Then I think we will mark out the remaining beds and then we can plant the rest of the beds. We won't have enough to fill the whole plot but we will be having beans, sweetcorn, tomatos, onions, squashes, pumpkins, beetroot, spinach, parsnips and a flower bed. Only loads of work to do then..

Mini update

Well, weather looks better for the weekend so we will be up there planting about 5o strawberries of various varieties that arrived a day or two ago.

In the meantime, here are my artichokes doing quite well thanks! The little seed leaves are yellowing because the plants don't need them anymore. The plant's proper leaves are sprouting nicely and they are doing well outside, toughening up for life on the allotment. They germinated inside and then were placed outside for two weeks in the cold encourage more chokes per plant. There is a proper term for this and it begins with v but I can't remember what it is.

I think they will go up to the allotment in a week or two when they are a bit bigger. i have to admit to being a bit proud of my little chokes.

Why no update?

Well simply put, the weather has been rubbish so we've not managed to get out there.

Depressing or what.

Oh but we did have a week in Tunisia, which was nice.

Fingers crossed for the weekend

We've planted stuff!

Yes, how exciting. We planted our first fruit bushes yesterday! We've put in about 10 mystery fruit bushes in along the fence after carefully digging and clearing a lovely bed for them. The digging bit took ages - the roots and stuff in the soil were unbelievable. It wasn't helped by there being a force 10 gale blowing but never the less, we have a fruit bed. However, a bit of a boo to Aldi who didn't label the bushes in the packet so we have no idea what has been planted where. Still a monoculture isn't always a good thing - a mystery is more fun. Here's to scoffing lovely fresh berries in a few months' time.

The Plough

No its not just a beautiful star, often seen in a clear autumnal sky, or even a difficult yoga movement designed to detoxify the liver (more cider anyone?) its also the savior of our allotment. As you can see from our pictures, the plough has done an amazing job and broken up the soil so it just makes it a bit easier to dig and root clear. I know not everyone agrees with this course of action but needs must. Our lottie is mahoosive and I think we needed to have a a bit of a psychological boost. Our plan is to make some 4ft wide beds with paths in between, and cover the beds with weed control fabric, planting through them as we go. We hope that this approach will keep the weeds we have undoubtedly stirred up by ploughing down and still keep the beds nice and productive.

In other news, we have stated to dig by the fence. This area will be our soft fruit beds. We currently have 21 bushes in total. We are going to grow gooseberries, tayberries, raspberries, black currents, red currents, and something else that I have forgotten. We also bought a cherry tree (cheap from Aldi) so we are going to find that a home at some point too.

Anyway, here are some of the latest pictures from the lottie, taken this afternoon, just before the hail started....















Some bad news, unfortunately, Mr Scarecrow didn't make it. I think the ploughman must have driven into him and knocked him down. All is not lost, we will try and resurrect him at somepoint, possibly with the help of small nieces and nephews.















View of next door's lottie, something to aspire to!















Admiring the fine, tilled earth

Preparing for the plough

After a lot of deliberation, we have decided to get our patch ploughed and rotivated to help us prepare the soil. We feel it is just too big a job and too de-motivating to clear it all by hand. One of our lottie neighbours lent us a lawnmower and Simon spent a lovely afternoon in the winter sunshine pushing the mower to get rid of the last of the tufts of grass. The whole plot is looking much better now, we have cleared many of the clods of grass and dug out some of the bigger bramble roots - its just impossible to get them all. More photos next time but i think we are nearly ready to start planting stuff. I have bought a huge number of fruit bushes and have my site already marked out. Next update and photos after the ploughing

Well, its a start....January and early February 2008

Our Allotment Welcome to our blog. We (Simon and Jo) welcome you to share in our successes and things that are not quite so successful in our new adventure...the allotment. Just so you know who we are, this is what we look like. We are both fairly new to gardening, I (Jo) have grown a few veggies and flowers in the past, while Simon has created the lovely, natural garden that forms the outside space of his very old cottage. We have a lot of plans for our allotment, we would love to grow our own veg obviously but also find space for flowers and herbs, composting and an area to encourage native flora and fauna to share the area too. Now, for the bit you have been waiting for....what our plot actually looks like. This is what it looked like when we were first give it to work on. The weeds were waist high with a great deal of dried thatch from grass that had died off, nettles and dreaded brambles everywhere. It also gives you some idea of size. We think it is about 20m x 17m - I think that is a mahoosive plot This picture shows the length of the plot. Ours ends more or less at the end of the brambles This one shows the width - roughly from where I am standing to take the picture, right down to the chain link fence you see there. We also usefully found a water butt with a hole in it and a water carrier thing, a lot of bricks and about 10000000 golfballs.





This is where we are now as at 4th February 2008




Rubbish cleared, thatch cleared and some clods of grass chopped out. Also see the bonfire we had - that burned really well!









Good picture showing full length of plot with Simon at the far path. You can see how much has been cleared!











Again showing the length of our plot - the blue bucket in the far north corner is the end of our plot!