Paint it Black

Yesterday Arts for Hungerford arranged for the painting of a community mural, depicting aspects of the town. Luckily we were led by illustrator, Simon Jardine.

Zoe (friend and fellow plotholder) and I spent longer than you would think adding the Marsh Lane allotment site to the mural.

Zoe's are the neat, well-defined parts whereas my approach was more splodgy :-)  OK, so it's not exactly a work of art, but it kind of looks like allotments!

Here's a small video that was taken during the process. I'm hoping I will be able to find a photo of the completed painting quite soon. It looks lovely and colourful. I may have to wait until it's hung in the library.

In the afternoon Jamie and I spent a few hours in the warm sunshine on the allotment. The weeds have gone crazy! Here's a photo of our salad bed, which has some Chinese lettuce as well as 'normal' lettuce and one lone Pak Choi. In the 'before' photo it was less obvious that there was any salad there!

Jamie planted up our strawberries on top of the weed suppressant-covered compost bed. He's secured their watering pots as this year they kept popping out of the ground.

I spent a long time straightening and securing the Glass Gem corn.

There was a lot of snapping involved but if the weather stays warm then there may be a chance to get a couple of cobs for the food festival in 3 weeks time..

I also did a lot of weeding on Plot46. I don't think our swede are going to work,

but we have some lovely small beets which we intend to pickle.

We left with a bagful of giant Desiree potatoes - Jamie didn't continue excavating the plant as this lot will keep us fed for a while!

Thanks to The Rolling Stones (obviously) but I didn't use any black actually - poetic licence :-)