The plot so far

Spent a lovely sunny hour and a half at the allotment with Maggie today. She painted on cardboard, watered randomly, dug holes and spacehopped. I couldn’t dig much as the ground is like rocks (rain forecast this week though so no more excuses), but that allowed me to potter about doing some light weeding and a bit of gloating. Gloating is important.

The first early potatoes are looking jolly nice (photo).  My garlic and shallots are looking lovely too although I have just this minute read Sarah Raven’s book which tells me garlic needs a wet spring or lots of water, neither of which it has had, so we’ll see what comes out at the end. I have broad beans, Jerusalem artichokes and mixed salad coming through well, although something is nibbling my peas. All in all I have about a quarter of the land properly cleared and another quarter roughly cleared and planted with spuds. A third quarter is destined to remain carpeted for the rest of the season – I am planning to plant squashes (currently in the greenhouse and potted on today) through holes in the carpet – so that just leaves me with another quarter, currently carpeted, which I need to clear reasonably well to put tripods on for beans, cucumbers and some flowers.

And then there is The Unclearable section at the end, all sapling trees and ferocious brambles, which I am pretending I haven’t seen. I have my compost bins there but it is otherwise a no man’s land.

None of this bears any resemblance to The Plan, but that was always going to be the case.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under allotment life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.