Smile

I love it when a plan comes together! The Town Hall steps was a great location for our plant sale yesterday.

Setting up

Our lovely plotholders, from the Marsh Lane and Fairfields sites, provided us with masses of plants: courgettes, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, brassica, chard, flowers, herbs, and more unusual items like ornamental grasses, cucamelon and celeriac. Also bags of gooseberries and rhubarb.

The sales team: Forbes, Kerry, Andy, me and Gill

We had so many plants that we easily covered the three trestle tables and could re-stock each time an empty spot appeared. It was lovely talking to the many visitors about the allotments and how we're getting on with our growing this year. And we managed to advertise our Open Day (8th July) quite a lot - that's the next thing for us to start planning...

Trying to answer gardening questions

The sun shone (most of the time- though I've added a bit of extra sunshine to these photos) so there were a lot of people in the town and the Coffee morning for cancer inside the Town Hall was handy! We made about £100 total profit, which is great but the main point of the sale is to promote the allotments.

Encouraging the younger generation

Adorned with our HAHA aprons (bought through a Tesco Bags of Help grant) we had a great day with lots of fun and smiles.

Song title courtesy of Lily Allen.

Time

February has begun mostly grey, wet and rather windy, but at least it's not January; such a long month - I'm really trying not to wish the months away but it's hard! We're keen to get started now, though it's too soggy to do much, so instead we did a bit of online shopping this morning, from Dobies of Devon. Here are a few of the basics that we'll be growing...

We've opted for grafted tomato plants again - they produce so many fruits and Aviditas is the sweetest, most delicious variety we grew last year. I also have some stripey tomatoes and these 'redcurrant tomatoes' look interesting. It seems they may be tricky to grow, so we've ordered plug plants rather than seeds.

And I ordered a few flowers for the plots too. The silky ones look very pretty and are good for bees apparently. I hope they aren't good for slugs! We're hoping that the frosty weather has set back the mollusk population this Winter - we can see evidence that the thrushes have.
I need to start thinking about sowing these quite soon.

The sun came out in the afternoon so we walked up to the plot. There were quite a few other plotholders enjoying the sunshine and making plans for the year. Jamie and I have planned what's-going-where on our plots. Well, it's a first draft; it's bound to change and more plants will get on our list...

We walked home as the sun dipped low and it started to get chilly.
Aah, here's a dance-along track from 'Jungle' to provide the soundtrack for today's title.

All Routes Lead to the Allotment

Ooh, that's a chilly wind out there! We went to the allotment with a plan and stuck to it but I was happy to be on the way home when I took this photo in the St Lawrence Churchyard - it's looking so pretty at the moment with daffodils, snowdrops and crocus.

On the allotment we now have about 20 cloves of garlic planted (too cold to count) in the little raised bed. I sprinkled onion fertiliser around and dug a bit in before pushing the garlic in, just below the surface.

Here are the leeks that Jamie pulled and we also got some sprouts for tomorrow's dinner. Tonight we've got leeks and Quorn lardons (like little bits of bacon, without the piggy) in a cheese sauce, topped with potato - yum yum!

I pulled some carrots (which are way past their prime, even though they're Eskimo). They're rather slug/fly eaten and the two-legged monster may be rather tough... I may make soup, but haven't got any onions. I may use some of the miso we have left over from Chinese New Year - if the carrots are ok once I've chopped them up. Or I may just have a bath instead :-)

This blogpost got me thinking about the various routes we walk to reach our Marsh Lane allotment (as you probably know, this may be the last year for this particular site). It's pretty much a mile from home no matter which route we take.

• We can walk along the canal towpath from the High Street
• and cut through the Churchyard
• or walk along further to the lock
• We can walk across Freeman's Marsh, along the River Dun and then cross the canal
• We can walk up the High Street
• under the railway bridge and go past the library (currently under threat of closure due to Government funding cuts) 
• or cut through The Croft past the Hungerford Club

What a lovely location we have, but, if we need to move so-be-it. I'd rather have a permanent site, in a not-so-pretty area than go through this lease debacle every year or so! The Council and HAHA are working on a plan - well, there's a workparty which I'm a member of so hopefully we will get something worked out.. soon.

Coming out for the sun, leaving with the moon

Blue sky! How lovely to see!

That's the last of the Christmas Quality Street scoffed. 
 
I love that their plastic wrappers are made of corn starch. It means they can be composted and disappear totally. Our compost is surprisingly looking rather dry - all the runner bean stems in the bin probably should have been chopped up a bit before bundling them in.

The cat was making the most of the heat from the stonepile and keeping an eye on the coal tits in the hedgerow.

It was lovely to see other plotholders around too - we emerge from hibernation as soon as the sun shines! It is still too wet to do any work. Good job! as I really just wanted to play with our new Fujifilm X-S1 camera which we got as an Amazon bargain. 

This is my first ever non-compact camera, though not a full-on SLR (apparently) so bear with me as I've no idea what I'm doing if I move away from the Auto options! I'll be keeping my trusty Olympus SZ-31R on hand for a while yet...

Meanwhile, Jamie was checking the measurements of plot 8B, as the potatoes are going there this year to give Plot 7 a rest. We've got lots of planning to do. We're thinking along the lines of nematodes to protect our spuds from slugs. One thing we've decided is that we won't grow as much of everything, which ends up wasted....

... Did I say that last year?!

Ps. We did leave with the moon, but not because we stayed out for hours; the moon was on show all day.