Wall-to-wall Sunshine

Such a beautiful day and 17°! So we had a very lovely few hours on the site joined by fellow plotholders, butterflies and bees! We saw large numbers of tortoiseshells and brimstone butterflies.

Tortoiseshells on Dead Nettle

Jamie finished working through the onion plot so that's ready and waiting for our sets to be delivered. I cleared all the dead growth from the strawberry plants and transplanted a couple of runners which had been pegged out in the autumn.

The raised bed is clear of weeds and moss now so I can start sowing some salad - will have to wait till next weekend, at the earliest, though. It may have felt like Summer but it soon goes chilly when the Sun gets low. No evenings on the plot for us yet!



This moss against the blue sky and sunshine is fiery!

By the way, if you saw my post from yesterday... Summer seems to be the time to propagate herbs from cuttings and the cuttings should be ~10cm, not ~4cm like mine. Caroline (a plotholder) told me that rosemary can be rooted in water - well, I can try that if my potted cuttings fail...
 

Springing into Action

At last! We've started! And the birds know it too - the site was alive with bird-song and plotholders again!
Last week Jamie cleared and raked over the Brussels patch, after adding fertilizer and lime - we're putting the sprouts in there again this year. There aren't any pests and diseases there (that we're aware of) so they'll hopefully be ok.

And today the sun shone and the temperature rose so we had a busy day with two visits to the plot. Jamie cleared and dug the area on Plot 8 where the onions are going. Jamie wants to add a bit of chicken manure (because the onion fertilizer hasn't been delivered) to the ground and we're expecting the Santero onions to be delivered in the next few days. We're giving parts of Plot 7 a bit of a rest this year so spuds and onions are out of the usual rotation plan.

I mixed the compost bins. We've seen mouse action in one of the bins over Winter but I didn't come across any in there today. I managed to combine the contents of both bins into one and add a lot of 'brown' waste, that was the remains of the wildflower patch. There's a good mix of wet, dry, green, brown compostible waste which will stay in the green bin for a year now, but we need to keep stirring it regularly.
The worms have had a good winter in the black bin - lots of lovely shiny new pink worms in there! Yes, I do see that slug in there too!

I started clearing the raised bed. It's full of tiny thyme plants which self-seeded. I planted a few up and also a few cuttings from the rosemary and sage. Not sure if they'll work but we'll see - of course, I should have looked up what to do before I did it, but, well, you know how it is!

So another sunny day tomorrow for more clearing, tidying but no sowing yet...be patient...

 

Been Shopping...

Our Kings Seeds order has arrived through our HAHA Seed Secretary's discount scheme. We haven't collected them yet but the news put us in an allotment mood - so we got out the seed catalogues...

Here are a few of the seeds I was tempted by. And note the heart & star mould set - really looking forward to growing some interesting cucumber shapes with that!
I think some of these will be used on the HAHA Plot - they're certainly quite unusual.   The most interesting seeds are part of the James Wong Homegrown Revolution collection. I hope ours grow as well as some of the pictures I've seen online!

Also really looking forward to seeing star and heart shaped cucumbers!!
These I bought from Suttons Seeds

Of course we'll be growing mos of the basics too, but no shallots this year as we've still got plenty of pickled ones left to eat from last year.
These are from Thompson & Morgan.

Excuses, excuses

Wow! A month since my last post - what a slacker!

Jamie and I have had various ailments over the last few weeks and the stormy weather often scuppered our plans when we did feel inclined to move outdoors! Anyway, excuses over (for now).

The mice have been enjoying our beetroot in the meantime. Cheeky things seem to have a nest under our raised bed. There are mouse-sized holes very close to these tell-tale toothmarks :-)

At least it wasn't completely wasted!

For a very brief visit earlier in the month we walked along the canal to see how flooded it was. Hungerford lock isn't doing its job very well - it's being repaired anyway.

 

 

Jamie spent a bit of time spreading 6x and manure around our two rhubarb plants. One is showing tiny signs of life but the other seems to still be dormant.


Raspberry Red Rhubarb

Still haven't actually achieved much on the plots, but it was lovely to be in the sunshine at the weekend's HAHA work day - though exhausting (I didn't do much, so here's a pic of other plotholders working!).

Aah, look at that Spring-like sky!

One sad bit of news - we found a dead barn owl on the site. I've put a bit more info on the wildlife blog. Shame

Leeks and not much else

Just a quick visit to the plot for me this afternoon. Another sunny day today compared to yesterday's rainy one. There were a few plotholders about, doing a bit of tidying, planning and, great to see, people are still harvesting.

Our leeks are looking ok but we want them to get a bit bigger before pulling any more. There should be a bit of cabbage and more sprouts too but there may be too much wildlife involved for Jamie and me to risk eating! The other vegetable that's still in the ground is my salsify. It looks like it's grown pretty well. Need to give that a try in a week or so...
 

There wasn't much to photograph. All the birds seemed to be in hiding, even though it was warm. Hope they're back for the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch next weekend (25/26 Jan).
So, just another cloud photo I'm afraid! Both these pics are taken with my new camera.