Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
Look at the beautiful blue sky. What you can’t see is how chilly the strong wind was yesterday! Though I’m pleased to say that we’re quite protected at our end of the site.
You can see how dry the ground is, so we're already having to do a lot of watering even though there isn't that much in the ground so far. We're encouraging the garlic to bulb up and have been weeding some of the flower pots to help the struggling plants that have been swamped in them for months!
I planted out the celeriac seedlings. I need to remember never to bother trying to grow my own celeriac from seed in future years - the tray I bought had more than double what I needed and cost less than the seed packet (and my home-grown seedlings are pathetic!). I made a wonky trench for them so that I can keep them wet (they need A LOT of water) and earth them up when they need it.
I’ve protected the celeriac with the fleece tunnel as our night-time temperatures are still low and it may prevent some evaporation. I planted the beetroot and that’s under the green tunnel, but it shouldn’t really need protection; it just looked a bit vulnerable in the middle of that plot. Talking of tunnels.... we think that’s a vole in our shallot patch...
I planted some rainbow chard seedlings in a raised bed. And Jamie planted up some strawberries in this hanging planter, these are in the polytunnel (and are also wonky), it’ll be nice to get some early strawbs and maybe the birds won't venture in there.
Our main job today was to sow the wildflower seeds on the HAHA wildlife plot. Lots of different seeds, as you can see; some we bought, most were gifted or freebies. Hope they beat the weeds to the surface! We may get some rain this week... The bog garden isn’t worthy of a photo; a couple of plants died (maybe frost damage) but the irises and a couple of others look like they’ll survive - well, it’s early days.
And last of all today, here's one of the frogs in our little pond. There are at least two that we've seen - they're both small, not ours from last year. The water has a lot of algae so I've been clearing it and need to get some more weed. Oh, and we heard the first cuckoo from across the marsh in the week - I do love having lunch at the allotment, definitely a bonus point for working from home! Although there's a lot of sarcasm from all the retired plotholders when I have to go back to work for the afternoon :-}
The song title is provided by Smashing Pumpkins, perhaps I should have saved it for when we have a plot-ful of wildflowers... no, best not tempt fate ;-)
Maybe buying young celeriac plants is something for is to try. Although it's the growing on that we seem to fail with.
ReplyDeleteMy own seedlings aren’t going to get as far as potting on!
Delete