Summer's here!

Jamie went to the plot in the early afternoon. Did some more digging of the new plot but nearly killed himself in the process - well, it was about 25°! I joined him after work but mostly sat in the sunshine and watered a bit later in the evening. Incredible weather! The little greenhouse reached 45° - we took the plants out and left them under mesh overnight. Sunshine should reduce the number of slugs round the place.

Geoff kindly gave us some of his spare mange tout plants so they're planted the other side of the mesh from the sweet peas. I've protected them with mesh as pigeons love them.
I only took 10 plants; Jamie doesn't like mange tout so they'll be something else for my lunchbox - I think I may need more than an empty ice-cream tub by the amount of veg I'm going to have to eat!!

Mange Tout

Our Lizzano F1 tomato plug plants arrived from Dobies - they're supposedly blight resistant and are tumblers so we'll need to put them in a biggish pot so they don't just tumble on the ground and go rotten.

The coriander seeds have just sprouted and I've put chicken wire over the turnips as the pigeons are rather partial to those little seedlings too - forgot they enjoyed them last year!

More digging

We finished what we wanted to do today and now we're broken! We dug in a peat-based bag of compost from B&Q to aid water retention for the celeriac. Jamie says we should dig to "a spade and a half depth"; well, if he does a spade then I think I do the half! It's so tiring but worth it for the end result.

We added some Epsom Salts (for magnesium enrichment) to the shallots which are looking a bit yellowy. We added some Growmore general feed to them yesterday to give them a helping hand.

Jamie planted out the 3 Speedy dwarf french beans which grew in the pots - none of the other beans germinated but we'll be planting some more in a few weeks.

We moved our Leonaris, one of our peppers and the one Rocky cucumber which has emerged up to the plot - they'll stay in the cloche for a bit to harden off. We put them on top of some EcoCharlie slug deterrent.

Here are some of the weeds (or wildflowers if they were growing somewhere else!) we are contending with...

Forget-Me-Not

Groundsel

Dead Nettle

Not sure what this is but it grows in abundence
on any uncultivated plot

Ow - digging's painful!!

Jamie dug a bit of the new plot during the week and that's what we were doing for a few hours today - really forget how painful digging is!! We're concentrating on digging an area where we'll plant the celeriac.

Angle Shades moth pupa

The weeds are up to our knees and include grass (couch mostly), nettles, docks, margolds, groundsel and others which I'm not sure of yet. Some have terribly long roots. Oh yes, and the previous tenant's potatoes are doing pretty well for the second year - though they're too blighty to eat :-)
It's a haven for wildlife - particularly beetles, slugs and worms. There are masses of ladybirds around at the moment, but not any aphids for them to eat at present. We also found lots of pupae - mostly Angle Shades moth ones but also smaller ones.... 

Waiting to eat our veg before us!

Beautiful ground beetle

A shiny beetle with mites

Oh, I did plant out the sweet peas - 22 of the seeds germinated and didn't get eaten by slugs. They're looking happy so to keep them that way I surrounded them with mesh. Pigeons love peas, I don't know if sweet peas taste the same but I don't want them to get wiped out before they can afford to lose a few leaves!

A growing allotment

Really excited! We've taken over the rest of Plot 8 :-)
It's completely overgrown at the moment but we plan to use it for some fruit - Jamie wants blueberries and I want some little fruit trees (apple and plums). It also gives us room for a pumpkin so we'll have to see!

Plot 8B in all its glory!

Sun, seeds and plans for soup!

So warm and sunny today - it really felt like May! Marsh Lane was the busiest we've seen it in weeks - a really active allotment site.

And we weren't just sitting in the sun - well, not the whole time. We managed to get everything done that we intended to, including trimming the fringes of the grass paths and mowing the one between our two plots.

Plot 7

Jamie dug our home-made compost into pea/sweet pea trenches - either side of last year's pea frame. We sowed the following seeds:

• Scarlet Empire runner beans (into root trainers in allotment cloche)
• Cornells Bush Delicata squash (indoor cloche)
• Butterbush F1 squash (indoor cloche)
• Rocky F1 cucumber (indoor cloche)
• Ambassador F1 courgette (indoor cloche)
• Fennel (buried pot in herb plot)
• Par cel (seed tray in allotment cloche)
• Apache salad onions - red ones (directly into onion plot)

Various squashes

Last week at work I had some celeriac and fennel soup - the first time I've had either of those ingredients - and it was so delicious! I decided that I'd grow celeriac but thought I was a bit late deciding to sow the seeds so when I spotted a trayful for £1.49 at Yew Tree Garden Centre I had to buy them! So, I transplanted about a third of the seedlings into modules and they're in the allotment cloche with the rest of our seedlings.

Celeriac seedlings