Wanting Some Rain

We want rain for our broad beans and a few salad seeds that we sowed two weeks ago. No sign of the broad beans yet, but the radish and salad leaf are coming up. Hopefully the perspex will protect them from nibbles - until they're ready for me!

Here's the garlic - growing nicely under the netting as something (probably a pheasant) had nibbled a couple of the shoots last week.

The funny thing is that there are four rows of garlic now.... Obviously the T&M garlic was just rather slow compared to the Wilko garlic. We're going to have a LOT of garlic this year!!

This is the rhubarb - both plants are showing signs of what's to come - yum yum!

And this is our spuds, chitting under the grow lamp in the hallway. We were obviously a bit late, many of the spuds were sold out last weekend, so we didn't manage to get Anya which we wanted. So, we bought Kestrel (of course) and Rosabelle.

We also have some Tenerife black potatoes on order. Not sure how they're going to manage in our climate, but we'll see...

Gotta Love Fire

What a fabulous afternoon yesterday! 15° and blue sky all the way - really Spring-like.

And, what fun, we had a fire to get rid of all the rotten wood, bamboo canes and clippings that we don't want to put in the compost bin. Who needs an excuse for a fire?!

We used the HAHA shared incinerator to keep it under control as the wind blew up a few times. The sage and rosemary clippings meant the smoke smelled lovely though!

We also spent some time making up a raised bed for our silverskin onions and, probably beetroots. We mixed some manure with the compost from last year's sunflower pots, so maybe we'll have sunflowers in that raised bed too...!

I filmed a timelapse on my phone, unfortunately the wire I used to attach it to the pole managed to cut right across the lens - tut! But I still quite like the video of us riddling, sieving, mixing and having tea breaks :-)

I showed a newcomer round the site and she's now a tenant of one of the larger plots; on such a beautiful day, I'm not surprised she was so taken with the site and wants to start growing straightaway!
The site was the busiest it's been in months, with cars even having to park on the grass - this is the start of the fun times...

It's a grey day out of the window this morning, so we're off to Charlton Park Garden Centre to buy some spuds...

Chain Mail Article (March-June 2015 edition)

It's tricky writing these articles about 2 months in advance, especially in February thinking about the lovely months of March to June. So I opted for a hints and tips article and a bit of encouragement for any newcomers to the site. I'm pleased to say we've had at least three people added to the waiting list as a result of them reading Chain, so I'll carry on doing the articles.

Anyway, here's a link to the article if you haven't seen it already.

We're still in need of new plotholders as we have empty plots and no waiting list to speak of. Hopefully now that Gardener's World is back on TV we'll get a few more sign-ups. And the weather is cheering up which is also a nudge for people to get outside and do something - let's hope so!

And here's a photo of a fossil we found on our plot ages ago, because every blog post needs a pic :-)

Work Day #1 2015

This picture sums up our work day yesterday!

It's a shame it got so wet as I didn't manage to get a photo of all the lovely volunteers standing round chatting and eating at one of the tea breaks. We had some fabulous home-made sweet and savoury snacks and guess who took the bottle of Tenerife Honey Rum (Ron Miel) along?!

We did lots of tidying and hedge-cutting and left the site very wet, tired and dirty! 

HahaWell done all, thanks for helping keep our site looking lovely!

A Bit of Sowing!

A couple of days off work and too slow to get to Oxford for our intended anniversary meal meant, well, guess what we did!

The weather recently has literally flipped daily between grey and sunny, so we had a mostly grey day yesterday but a sunny one today.

We sowed two rows of broad beans today. We used a bulb planter and replaced the earth with seed compost.

Then covered them with bottle cloches. This has previously helped against mouse damage but one they've grown a bit we're going to surround with mesh to (hopefully) protect from the pheasants on site.

I risked sowing short rows of salad leaf, spring onions and radishes in the raised bed. I hope the Perspex surround I put up will offer some protection and extra warmth. Though it did get down to -2° last night.
Oh yes! And the rest of the garlic is up - pretty sure it's the bulbs I bought from Wilkinsons, not the ones I originally planted from the Garden Centre..

I dramatically trimmed back the sage and did a bit of weeding... Nearly March! Yay! Soon we'll risk putting our 'big cloche' up!