Cutting the grass

I keep forgetting to take the camera. Today it was a real shame, the sun was out and half of the allotment looks pretty good. The other half is a work in progress! Talking of the other half, J should be arriving back from Amsterdam in about an hour but I don't suppose he'll make it home until eightish so I'm in a quandary about making him any supper. Or not. Hmm.

We did our first grass cutting of the year at the weekend. J on the strimmer and me with the shears. Teamwork. We've got a lot of grass on our allotment, a large patch around the old tree where nothing much grows, all round the edge of the pond and all the paths between the beds - and they all have to be strimmed. The ground is far too uneven to mow with the push mower that I keep at home for the pocket handkerchief sized lawn, so some years ago we bought a petrol strimmer. It's hard work using it but the results are great. Maybe we'll be able to have a barbecue round the tree for my birthday again this year. I love decorating the tree and putting up bunting for when all my friends come to enjoy the party. I do hope I remember the camera then.

The weather's certainly looking up. 21 C with a light warm breeze and I ended up in just a vest (well, not just a vest) as I put in two more rows of carrots and another of spring onions. I'm putting them next to each other to confuse the carrot fly. I also put in a tiddly little row of beetroot and made a bird scarer with canes, string and old CD's to put over the newly planted out broad beans. Useful things, old CD's, lovely and shiny, the light bounces off them and dances around over the patch you're protecting. I think the light moving around scares the birds better than the actual CD's.

When I leave to go home, it's always with the thought of the next thing I want to do. Next time I must find a space for the parsnip seeds. I nearly put some in the other day but it was so windy that when I poured my tea from my flask to my cup it missed because it flew out horizontally, so I didn't think it was a good day to sow parsnip seeds which weigh virtually nothing. They'd have gone everywhere! I've used up that space now, with the carrots and onions so I'll have to find another one.

Happy gardening (and grass cutting)

Invisible gardening

I planted another tray of beans today, in brilliant sunshine again. They’ve got ever so slightly too leggy waiting for me to get them into the ground so I hope they’ll be ok. It’s quite windy tonight (I can hear my garden wind chimes clanging away like anything) and I don’t want them to break.

I also applied the manure compost round the raspberries as I’d planned and even had time to take the black plastic off the strawberries, put lots of compost and Growmore around the roots and the put all the plastic back again. It’s one of those jobs that actually take quite a long time and when you’ve finished everything looks the same as before you started, so J wasn’t terribly impressed when he arrived and found me swigging tea having apparently not started yet!

I was tempted to stay longer than a few hours but I’m really busy this weekend and anyway, I didn’t want to miss Dr Who! How sad is that? Maybe I’ll have an hour tomorrow too. First, I’ve got to finish painting Roo’s ceiling and make sure his curtain pole goes up again. It’s taken a week to redecorate his room and we need to get it finished so he can get on and do some revision. He’s been having a very lazy time of it, sifting slowly through all his old stuff deciding what to take to the charity shop and what to keep, but the holiday’s nearly over now. Back to the AS level grindstone!

Happy gardening (and revising)

Good news about the raspberries

Today was the first time for ages that I've been to the allotment. I'm always saying that, aren't I? No wonder I always feel there's so many things I need to get on with when I'm up there! No time for chillin'!

I took a tray of broad beans and some lettuce seedlings with me and popped those in. The ground was surprisingly dry. If we don't get rain over the next few days I shall have to start watering. Plenty of water in the pond though. Sometimes in the summer we have to add bucketloads to make sure our frogs and newts have got enough to keep cool. The pic shows the pond with marsh marigolds and new rosy leaves emerging from the water lily.

Today's triumph is that the sticks I planted in the autumn have turned into raspberries. Hurray! I weeded all round them and plan to give them some yummy manure compost round their roots next time I go. The main source of food for my plants is manure compost, home made compost and Growmore but I've used a liquid seaweed feed in the past that's very good too. I also grow comfrey which I either add to the compost or make into a different liquid feed by steeping it in a bucket of water for a month or so.

The sun was hot, factor 15 hot, but I didn't have any with me so I probably added to my general leatheryness today. I must remember to put a tube of sun cream in the bag. That'll definitely make it rain! Not that I'm supersticious, you understand!

The leeks are at their peak now so I pulled a few more to take home. I also picked spinach, purple sprouting broccoli and lots of rhubarb. I'm going down to Somerset tomorrow to see my parents and I always try to take some of our own produce with me. I look a bit bonkers on the train sitting clutching a basket of vegetables but what the heck....

Happy gardening

Flu break

This week I've been mostly having a lurgy. I'm still ill and I'm fed up with it now. There have been plenty of bright intervals when I could have gone to the allotment with a tray of broad bean plants to plant out but I haven't been able to face the walk up the hill.

I've started some seeds off though, in between coughing fits. I've put in some aubergines, peppers, two different types of tomatoes, sweetcorn and courgettes in trays inside, and leeks outside on the back steps.

We also rented a movie, Grow your own, which I can thoroughly recommend. Set on a community allotment, it tells a story of the healing power found in nurturing a patch of soil as experienced by some emotionally scarred asylum seekers. I understand it was based on a real life project and it had a good mix of odd characters who, incidentally, weren't played by any actors that I recognised. The asylum seekers and the British allotment holders all had to deal with each other's presence, the petty bureaucracies of the allotment rules and the intrusion of a mobile phone mast and it was dealt with in a way that felt rewarding without being sentimental. I can well believe that having a patch of land to "grow your own" could be the best therapy of all for long term healing and recovery of a sense of purpose.

Now for some short term healing. Another lemsip maybe?

Happy gardening

Thoughts of spring

I've been busy. Really busy. The last few weeks have flown by and I've had no time to visit the allotment or appreciate the gorgeous daffs that I'd planted last year next to the hut.

J and I nipped up today for a quick look around and I was pleased to see that the bulbs had produced such a lovely show, and that I hadn't missed it all. The little tete a tete daffodils under the old apple tree aren't ready yet so it looks as though I'll see them come up too.

Today I "planted" a huge plastic cloche. I've got some lettuce seedlings in a tray at home and when they get a bit bigger they're going under the cloche. Also waiting to go into the ground are the broad beans that I've been protecting from marauding squirrels. They're in pots on a shelf behind some nasty spiky wire netting and so far, touch wood, they've been ok. It's mostly too wet to plant anything yet anyway.

Hopefully, this weekend I'll be able to start off lots of seeds in trays. I usually put them on newspaper all over the dining room floor for a month or so but until I'm able to get rid of a very large stained glass window that's already taking up all the spare floor space, I'm a bit stuck for somewhere to put them. I don't really want to deliver this window to its new owner yet because it's one of five and I want to make sure they all look right together but I can see a time coming when I'll hit a problem! They'd make lovely colourful cloches though! There's an idea....

Happy gardening

Starlings

This is what we saw. There must have been millions of them swooping around. You could hear the wingbeats as they flew over our heads and as it became dark, they flocked closer to where we were watching and seemed to fall out of the sky into the reeds. The field was black with them and the sound was incredible. It was like static when you walk under an electricity pylon - excited chatterings rather than birdsong.

It was a really fantastic evening and there was the most beautiful sunset too. As we walked along the track back to the car the dying sun was reflected in the icy rhynes. Stunning.

Digging for victory

This weekend we've been digging. The earth was just the right consistency at last so we both had a go and between us we dug over the top patch, well, the half that isn't covered with black compost bags.

All the neighbours were there too. In fact, in the photo of J you can see Moira next door, clearing weeds from around her new pond. I'm looking forward to her pond being finished, I'll get the benefit of gazing at it when I'm idling in the sunshine in the doorway of my hut.

This weekend was really good actually, I spend most of Saturday helping allocate fruit trees to their new owners as part of Transition Bristol's Virtual Orchard scheme. Incredibly busy! We all made cakes as well and made as much of a celebratory event out of it as possible, bearing in mind it didn't really get much above freezing in the yard we'd hired. I bought a plum and an apple tree for our tiny back garden so yesterday J and I went to buy huge pots to put them in. They look great. The idea is that they'll be portable if and when we move house. The time is ever closer now that Roo's only got one more year of school. It's a scary thought because we've lived in our house for so long and we love it dearly, but it's always been in the wrong place. Our surroundings are so intensely urban. What I'd really love to do is to pick the house up and plonk it down again on the edge of town instead of right in the middle. Incidentally, I've a cousin in Australia who did just that. Her house was loaded onto a lorry and moved about a mile up the road! Amazing.

This evening J and I are planning to go down to the Somerset Levels to see the starlings roosting and hopefully doing those swooping and dancing patterns in the sky. It looks like being a lovely day for it so J is taking a day off so we can take a little trip. I'll try to get some photos if we end up in the right place.

Happy gardening (and birdwatching)