June is bustin' out all over......

Things are looking good at the plopment! I'm managing to get down there most days, especially during this current spell of very hot weather, and "I'll be gone just an hour" turns into "Whoops - where did the last three hours go to?"

I recently invested in a stainless steel hoe and I have to say it's worth its weight in gold; because the ground's so dusty-dry at the moment, it really doesn't take long at all just to push it through the top inch or so of ground to cut through the stems and roots of the opportunistic weeds! You then leave it all on the top to dry to a crisp in the sun - brilliant! Of course, the Mare's Tail is more than a little recalcitrant and I'm fully aware you can never really get rid of it properly so I just pull up what I can when I find it. Now if there were only recipes for Mare's Tail.....

As I've mentioned previously, I make and sell jewellery at craft fairs and the most recent one I exhibited at was last Sunday (8 June 2008) at Chiddingfold in Surrey. We had a fabulous day - it was unbelievably hot and attendance was really high. It's a typical English fete with lots of stalls, tug-of-war, maypole and country dancing, beer tents (hooray!), etc., and I managed to pick up two gorgeous-looking and extremely healthy Cucumber plants that I thought I'd have a go at growing outside. They are both Telegraph which I believe is traditionally grown in a greenhouse but with global warming is apparently starting to be grown outdoors as well these days. So I thought I'd give them a go. I built them a little wigwam and planted both of them at the base (shame there wasn't a third available but guess you can't have everything!). I believe I'm meant to leave the main growing stem to produce 6 or 7 leaves and then pinch it out. It then produces side shoots/stems which need to be tied to the poles. The fruit will then hang down and grow straight. Alternatively, you can leave it to sprawl on the ground but then I understand the fruit tends not to grown straight (not sure what shape it does grow into though - corkscrew? square?) This is all new territory for me so I'll keep you posted. I also planted my first 10 decent sized Parsnip plantlets (bigger than seedlings but not quite plants) just beside the Cucumbers, as you can see from the picture - they're the plants at the bottom of the picture, the ones on the left are my Sweetcorn. The black plastic at the top is covering the weeded ground that's going to be home to the Leeks when they get big enough to transplant.

I've also extended the brassica net cage yet again, sideways this time, in order to slot in the last of my Red Cabbage plants. And, yes, I can't either dig or plant in a straight line, it really is all as curved as it looks but as long as stuff gets put in the ground and grows successfully, who really cares? I've left enough space now for the Savoy Cabbage which should be going in fairly soon.











This picture shows a better view of the first six Red Cabbage and six Sprout plants that went in. I'm so pleased (and desperately smug!) that they're looking so healthy AND I grew them from seed - yay me!!

Yes, I know this is a picture of lettuce under a small polytunnel but I'd already put the tunnel back over them before I decided I wanted to take a picture and it's so fiddly to do that I decided you'll be able to see the size of the lettuce anyway! I'm very pleased with them, they're all totally untouched by both slug and pigeon so hopefully we'll be able to start harvesting some leaves from them soon.






Finally, because they've not made an appearance on the blog for a long time - check out my onions! This is a variety called 'Turbo' grown from sets and look pretty fantastic, although the round bit at the base that you eat has yet to get round. I cleared some soil from around the neck of one of the onions and it just looks like a massive spring onion, so I'm hoping they'll fill out before long.

Plop for the Plopment!

Blimey! Can't quite believe it's June already - the year's half gone!!! In three weeks it'll be the solstice then it's all downhill to winter. It's only 205 days to Christmas, dagnabit.

Anyway, apologies for the delay in updating the blog - I've no excuses really, just haven't had that much to pontificate about although I've been working like a Trojan at the site.

As you can see, the makeshift brassica cage has now been properly constructed with net that fits and everyfink, plus I've also extended it and planted it up a bit more. It's now got the original Red Cabbage and Early Sprouts - which are looking very healthy indeed - and I've just added Late Sprouts, Broccoli and half the Kale (the rest aren't quite big enough to plant out yet). Within the next few weeks I'll extend it further and pop in the rest of the Kale and the Savoy Cabbage and that'll be it! I'm hoping that the holes in the netting will be small enough to at least put off any Cabbage White butterflies that decide to have a go at this tasty buffet. I've also found what are purported to be organic slug pellets so I've scattered those liberally around the plants. I'm sort of semi-organic-ish - I don't use fertiliser and pest control is limited to the plants that really get attacked, such as blackfly on the broad beans and slugs pretty much everywhere. However if nothing gets attacked, such as my onions, raspberries or climbing french beans, then I leave them well alone.

I've also finally got round to putting some lettuces in the ground. This year I'm growing Salad Bowl which is a loose-leaf, 'cut and come again' type of lettuce - you just take leaves as and when you need them. Seven have gone in so far and I've put a small polytunnel thing over the top of them until they get established. Hopefully this will keep the pigeons off 'em too. I've also just sown some Lollo Rossa (the red crinkly leaved lettuce) which will go out eventually too.

What is new at the site is that The Husband and I this past weekend built a Plop Corral! I found a company selling through Amazon who make wooden slatted compost/manure bins for the surprisingly reasonable price of £27 and, being a lazy sort and unwilling to trawl skips for unwanted pallets, I coughed up and it was delivered last Friday. It's pretty good - slots are pre-cut in some (fairly rough) planks which you just slot together and, voila, job's a good 'un. I now just have to start filling it up with horse manure from the stables where I go riding (small plug here - www.sariaharabians.com), leave it to rot down for the best part of a year and then start digging it into the ground next Spring. One downside is that it looks like I'll have to dismantle it in order to get the manure out but I don't mind. I also took delivery last week of a 330 litre compost converter. If you go to www.recyclenow.com/home_composting/ and enter your postcode, it'll tell you whether you're eligible for a half-price converter! It's a good deal - I paid £15 for the one in the picture and they're easily twice that, if not more, at garden centres. Unfortunately the little square door that covers the hole was missing when delivered but I'm following it up. So there we have it- Plop Corral and Companion Dalek!

Finally, then, this is how the plopment is looking at the moment - all is well and doing pretty much what it should. I've only lost one Sweetcorn and one Climbing French Bean plant so far, which is an acceptable level of collateral damage. I think the next thing I'll be doing is starting to dig the long side bed where the Leeks are eventually going to go - I may start this afternoon...watch this space!

Rassin', frassin', pigeons.....

Last Thursday, gentle reader if you recall, I wrote that I had forgotten to put down slug pellets around my newly planted Climbing French Beans. And so I returned on the Friday to do so, only intending to stay for the amount of time it would take to shake said pellets onto the ground, allowing me to skip away while merrily flicking the Vs at the soon to be annihilated slimers.

So imagine my surprise, nay horror, to discover that my lovingly nurtured Red Cabbage and Brussel Sprout seedlings had been CHEWED BY PIGEONS OVERNIGHT111!!!111!!!1 Now, normally, these lumbering, comical birds don't bother me, in fact I rather enjoy watching them peck each other on the head while waiting in line to eat the nuts from my wall-hung peanut feeder but this just takes the biscuit (or brassica).

The only option, of course, is to create a net cage and, of course, I didn't have any net with me and so, of course, I had to scoot back home and return with the only net I had which I'd just got for my newly planted Strawberries and which, of course, wasn't big enough to go over the brassicas and so, of course, I had to stitch the edges together with hairy garden string, like some really incomptent sutures [*takes breath*]. This is a real pain in the bum as I've not finished planting brassicas yet (I've still got Broccoli, late Sprouts, Savoy Cabbage and Curly Kale to go in yet) so I'm going to have to ask The Husband if he'll design (and build, pretty please...) something a bit more robust and easily manageable to go over all the plants when they eventually go in. Still, I'm pleased to report that my ham-fisted efforts do seem to have worked, a week later the cage is still in one place/piece and no pigeons have gained entry.

So let me guide you gently by the hand into this week's efforts. Well, I've extended the bean poles, I now have 16 poles (8 on each side) with two plants for each pole (i.e., 32 plants). Good job, then, that we like French Beans in our house. I've also finally got my 23 Sweetcorn plants in the ground as well although I can't help feeling that I may be being a little premature here, but others on site have planted theirs so I suppose if we get hit by a late frost, we'll all lose them together!

I have monumental colonies of Blackfly nestling very happily thank-you in the tips of my Broad Beans so I started spraying today until I read the bottle halfway round and it said something like, "Extremely dangerous to bees - do not use on open flowers" and what was I doing? Naturally I was spraying onto the open flowers of the Broad Beans, so stopped immediately. I've kind of decided to use this as a controlled experiment though, to see which of the plants do best, those that were sprayed and those that weren't.

I noticed that Henry opposite had planted Marigolds underneath his Blackfly-free Broad Beans (try saying that really quickly three times) so went and bought half a dozen to plant amongst mine before researching why. Apparently, the Blackfly don't like the smell of Marigolds so will avoid them and find somewhere else. I'm going to buy some more tomorrow (they also look good).

Anyway, enjoy a picture of the current state of the allotment and I'll see you next time.

Feels like home...

The weather report stated that the fabulous weather we've been having recently would break overnight and today in the south we'd wake up to heavy rain, hail and thunderstorms. Well, they got it partly right, we've had more in the way of light showers than a downpour but it does mean that I was right to take the opportunity to spend about 8 hours over the last two days at the plopment getting stuff into the ground before the rains came.

Tuesday I dug out the rows of invisible Rocket seedlings as I couldn't find them and replaced them with Spring Onion and Carrot seedlings. I don't hold out much hope for the Carrots as they've already been attacked by a snail in the plastic-house but I'm fed up of looking at them in there so into the ground they go. I also started to weed around the row of Second Early potatoes because the chickweed, couch grass, bindweed and mare's tail were coming back. I had hoped that walking on them would kill them off but all it did was flatten and harden the earth.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I decided I was going to put up the poles for the Climbing French Beans. For the past 6 or 7 years I've been growing French Beans in two huge round pots at home so I've never done the traditional, all in a line, pole arrangement before. Last week I'd bought a batch of 8 foot tall canes and was worried they were going to be too tall but the ground at the plopment is so soft they easily sank in about 1.5 feet or so. I tied them together and then added smaller ones through the top to stabilise it. There are ten canes in the ground but I currently have 12 plants so two had to double up. I've more coming on in the plastic-house so they can go in later. (I woke up this morning though and realised that I'd completely forgotten to put slug pellets around the bean plants! I'll have to pop out later on when it's dried up a bit and just hope they're still there and not in some snail's belly...)

But I've come to realise that two really quite major things have happened since Sunday - I think it's probably more of a matter of perception within me than what's been happening at the allotment but, even so. Let me try to explain: putting the shed up and being able to use it properly since Sunday has made a big difference - I now feel that I actually own the land, it's a space that properly belongs to me now. I have somewhere to store my things, where I can sit in the shade. It all feels more permanent somehow - before it was just a plot of land that didn't really mean anything even though I've been working it for the last 3 months. I almost felt like a bit of a fraud and I shouldn't really be there - the shed has made a statement, it claims ownership. It denotes that I'm going to be here for a long time and I'm serious about it. I built the shed (well, not me, but you know what I mean), I cultivate the land - I have a place now and it feels like home. When I was doing my various archaeology degrees I was always interested in the Archaeology of Landscape and how the ancient mind related to ownership of space/land, what they did with it and how it was demarcated. Perhaps I should put up a (fake) burial mound on my boundaries.....

Secondly, bizarrely, putting up the bean canes has turned the site into A Proper Allotment. It looks like a real, grown-up one now, not just the results of me fannying around in the dirt hoping to get things right and praying that I wasn't making an idiot of myself and that people weren't laughing at me for getting it wrong. I mean, check out the pictures - the top one here shows, from the bottom of the picture, my little Raspberry bed, then on the right are two rows of Broad Beans, the dark square above them are the newly-watered rows of Spring Onion and Carrot seedlings and above them are my four rows of Onion sets. The light green 'row' next to them all running the width of the plot is actually my row of First Early Potatoes (the plants are actually in the row between the two boards) - yes, I know I need to weed it. Then there's the (weeded) row of Second Early Potatoes running the width. Next to that you can see the bean canes and, lastly, from the canes to the pathway is where the Red Cabbage and Brussels Sprouts are. It looks good, it looks right and I did it all. Yes, you may call me Mrs Smug.

This picture, taking from a slightly different angle, shows the shed in use! It also, unfortunately, shows how much is still left of the plot to be dug, weeded and cultivated. I'm going to try and get it all done this year - I still have Broccoli, Kale, Savoy Cabbage, Parsnip, Lettuce and Sweetcorn to go in yet! - but I also realise it might just be too big a job and it'll have to wait until next year. The remaining seedlings will just have to find a spot in and around what's already been done! The picture actually gives a distorted image - there's quite a lot of ground left to do, probably as much as I've already dug. But, hey, it's stopped raining so I may be there later...

It's Shedtastic!!

It's only taken 9 days since it was delivered but my shed's finally up at the plopment! Yay! The difficulty has been that although I live really close to the site, vehicular access is via an extremely narrow track and if I was unsure that our car would get down there, I was darn certain that a flatbed truck wouldn't make it, so the shed had to be delivered to the house and then we'd work out how to get it on-site. This was eventually achieved through use of stepdad Da's estate car and Shanks' Pony.

Before the shed could be built, however, I had to move the carefully constructed pile of couch grass weeds because I had (of course) put it in the best location for the shed. This was no easy task, especially in the current unseasonably warm weather, and took a couple of hours of sweaty shovelling and forking to move the pile from one side of the plopment to the other on Thursday.

I decided that it would be too warm to do anything in the middle of the day, so resolved to get up early on Friday to start digging out the ground where the shed was going to be placed in order to level the surface. I actually managed to get there at 8.30am (and wasn't the first person on site either) and put in a good couple of hours of digging and levelling before deciding that a headache, sweat rolling down your bum cleavage and feeling sick was not worth it for a bit of flat ground so stopped at about 11, but I don't think I did too badly, as you can see in the pic.

Saturday (yesterday) we discovered that the car does actually fit down the track (this opens up possibilities of being able to fill black bin bags with horse manure from the stables I ride at and get it on-site with the minimum of fuss) so The Husband and I brought up what we could - the paving stones mainly and sundry bits of smallish timber that could fit in the car with a view to Putting Up The Shed on Sunday.

Step-Dad Da agreed to come along early on Sunday so that Putting Up The Shed could start in the earlier part of the day and hopefully wouldn't take too long. At 9am then we started loading the car but soon found that the two large side panels wouldn't fit at all, so The Husband and I carried them! We were not the only people on site this morning, in fact I've never seen it so busy, and everyone said hello and waved, and even a very nice lady who I've not met before offered us cups of tea! It's such a friendly site.

Anyway, below is a montage of pics of Putting Up The Shed for your edification:

Don't they look pleased with themselves?!? And quite rightly too, it was hard work in such hot weather, but isn't my shed absolutely fab? I so want to stain it an outrageous colour, but Cuprinol doesn't seem to do woodstain in Hot Pink or Neon Purple so I'm not sure yet. Perhaps I'll just live with it for a bit, after all it's a fairly vivid shade of golden yellow as it is. Might be nice with some really garish purple flowers growing around it, Morning Glory anyone? [ponders]

While the boys were Putting Up The Shed, I took the opportunity to continue weeding the space that's going to be for the birthday Raspberry canes so I think I'll put them in tomorrow, and the six Red Cabbage and Brussels Sprouts seedlings I put in last week are still there and in one piece so stuff is hanging on in there. When I put in my onion sets I decided to have a go at companion planting and sowed a row of carrot seeds between a couple of rows of onions (the idea is that the smell of the onions disguises that of the carrots and so the dreaded Carrot Fly can't find them). Trouble is I have no idea if any of the carrot seeds germinated because I couldn't spot them among the weeds that also grew so decided just to dig that row out again. I've also had the same problem with my 3 small rows of Rocket - put in the seeds, can't see the seedlings now for the weeds - so I think that's got to go as well. All a tad unfortunate but I have also been raising Rocket and Carrot seedlings in the plastic-house as well for just this eventuality, so all is not lost.

Anyway, enough rambling from me for today - I hear the siren call of a Gin and Tonic on the terrace while dangling my feet in the swimming pool and admiring the peacocks on the lawn, so one last pic and that's the view from inside the shed looking out:

First Swifts of 2008!

I know I've only just posted today but as I'm stuck indoors until the shed arrives, I've nothing better to do and I really can't stomach watching Sky News which will have nothing but election news (albeit piddling local elections) and whether Ken is still Mayor of London so I decided I might as well do some washing (I know, such an exciting life) and hang it outside while the big round yellow thing is visible.

For the last few days I've been keeping an eye out for the annual return of the Swifts and this morning, at about 9.00am, I saw them! The first three have successfully made the monumental journey of 14,000 miles from southern Africa to spend a measly 12 weeks here to breed and raise young before the trek back again. Others will soon join them and eventually they'll be dashing around and squealing with delight at being all together again. Every year I look out for them in the hope that they'll return, bringing the summer with them. Of course, the sad thing is that they're gone by the end of July, save for a few stragglers, and the skies are so much quieter then, and we're heading on the downward slope to winter. But let's not depress ourselves just yet.

I decided a little while back that if I were to come back as an animal, I'd choose a Swift. They're the UK's (if not the world's) fastest flying bird, are very sociable, live for around 22 years and always look as if they're having the best time, chasing each other about, flying REALLY high and then plummeting to skim the tops of the hedges. It must be brilliant.

So excited!

Today's the day my shed's delivered! This is good. The bad thing is that Wickes did that enraging thing of saying, "You can expect delivery any time between 8.00am and 5.00pm" - grrrrrr AND IT'S A SUNNY DAY [shakes fist at sky in cartoony fashion]. Still, I did manage to spend 4.5 hours at the plopment yesterday, dodging the storms, and have decided where to put my raspberry canes (ooer). By expanding the plot sideways, I can get quite a few extra feet of growing space and I'll put them in there. As for the strawberries, I've decided to get a patio planter for them, not one of the fancy terracotta ones but one that looks a bit like a green woven plastic buckety-baskety thing that can be folded flat and stored when not being used. I can keep this at home in the garden.

After being at the site now for about 3 months I finally got round to discovering a fellow allomenteer's name (I can be a bit shy like that sometimes - an admission which will, frankly, amuse the hell out of those that know me, but there it is). Anyway he's a lovely older gentleman called Henry who told me that only about 3 years ago hardly anyone was digging on the entire site and it was being threatened by the council who wanted to build on it, so he and a few others started marking out plots and working them like fury to show they were occupied. Consequently he still has 2.5 plots that he's working. I'm quite fond of reading the www.allotments-uk.com website with its many busy forums (fora?) and the fact that some people dig several sites while there is a waiting list is pretty controversial but I say let's give three cheers for old boys like Henry who've saved sites like this for amateurs like me to potter around in.

Apologies for the lack of pictures but I'm stuck indoors today. When the shed arrives I'll take its pic and stick it here. Me and Hubby are at my mum's 70th birthday barbecue tomorrow (pray for good weather) so I think the earliest we'll be able to start work on this will be Sunday.