mid-May update

I thought I'd check the growth rate of my plants by taking some pics last week then again today and compare. Here are last week's:


Onions & garlic, PSB, should've taken the fleece off to get a pic of the beans!


Strawberry plants - year 2


Asparagus - just the one spear last week


Potatoes, earlies just earthed up.

Random Plants

Many things I plant deliberately. These just turned up.


Opium Poppy?


Canary Creeper and a euphorbia peeping under the fence.


Wood sorrel. Flowers will be yellow.


perennial cornflower - deserves to be transplanted somewhere showier.


muscari


lovage?


aquielegia

lovely (free) pale pink flowers! Very delicate looking.


sedum "wallpepper" (?) Will have yellow flowers.


blue lobelia - I had some in a hanging basket above this spot and it has seeded.

April Update

On the 6th the lottie looked like this:

But not for long!

Three weeks later...

The onions and garlic are doing well, the PSB is ready for beheading and I've planted out peas, broad beans and French beans. They're under the fleece tent - my neighbour lost all her pea plants to hungry pigeons.


The Arran Pilot first earlies and Anya spuds are up!

In the plastic planthouse: lettuce seedlings are doing well (and have been transplanted into the bath in the lottie) ...


Garden Cat is taking every opportunity to "help"...


and enough tomato seeds have germinated.


However, last year's leftover snowball cauli seeds have not germinated at all.

Busy day on the plot

Wow - a whole day of sunshine! I made the most of it by spending almost the whole day at the allotment. I cleared out the shed and took the wire shelving that wasn't being used to the plastic planthouse to be my new staging. A few tent pegs and it was fine. After that, I got my old bath out of the junkpile and took it to the plot. I chiselled out some drainage holes and wedged it so it would be stable.



I sowed:
beans french
broad beans aquadulce
chives
coriander
brussels sprouts can't remember variety
leaf beet (perpetual spinach)
leek Autumn giant
lettuce cos
stock
night scented stock
french marigold
poached egg plant
sunflower
dwarf sunflower
delphinium
nasturtium
hollyhock
convolvulus
sweet pea

I also planted up two hanging baskets for the front door with plug plants (impulse buy from the Garden Centre) and left them in the planthouse to get a head start then repotted a clematis for the archway to the back garden. Now the plastic planthouse is getting rather full.



I used leftover bamboo slat edging to make plant labels.



A very nice bloke from freecycle brought me some bags of topsoil, carried it to the allotment and tipped it into my old bath. I gave him a bucket full of leeks in exchange. Then I scrounged some sharp sand from a neighbour to add to the soil for better drainage. A good mix up and the carrots & salad onions can go in with a perspex cover on to keep the cats out and the heat in.

New Plastic Planthouse

I planted some grasses and bulbs around the tree.


Not quite visible but the lillies I planted last year are coming up again.


I have a new plastic planthouse - bigger than the old one and with tent pegs & guy ropes. Due to limited staging space it will hold fewer trays than the wardrobe-style one, but that is easily fixed!


I'm trying a successional sowing approach this year so that (hopefully) I'll always have a choice of what to crop - unlike last year's glut of greyhound cabbage. You can have too much of a good thing...

Today's sowing session for the allotment:
Cabbage copenhagen market
Cabbage greyhound
calabrese marathon
cauliflower grafitti
cauliflower snowball
cauliflower sunset
chili anaheim
courgette Zuboda
florence fennel zefa fino
lettuce ice king
lettuce lollo rossa
lettuce red salad leaves
peas meteor
squash winter festival
tomato Gardener's Delight
tomato Sub Arctic Plenty
basil
parsley


and for the garden:
3 different kinds of dahlia (5 tubers)
6 montbretia "lucifer"
10 pastel trailing begonias


I'm always watched when I'm in the allotment - probably because I've got into the habit of feeding the chickens with leftover leaves through the fence.


Still to sow:
Potatoes and onions - the ground is still too wet
leeks
carrots
salad onions
parsnips
PSB
beans - broad, French and borlotti
kohlrabi
sprouts
leaf beet
chives
coriander
lots of flowers!

It must be Spring again!

The pond has been full of Very Busy Frogs since Friday. I counted over two dozen at one point.





Can we eat these?


I found a pretty purple Christmas Rose hiding under the leaf pile so I planted a white one next to it.


Still alive!

Recent activity

In the allotment:


Dug over half of the far plot and removed what remained of last year's leaf beet. There were still a lot of twisty white bindweed roots, but (I dearly hope) not as much as last time this was dug over and certainly not as much as when I first attempted to clear it.
Had a bonfire with the hedge trimmings and some woody stuff that would take too long to compost.


The view from the plot. Guess where the leaf beet went?


Ooooh freshly dug... Can I?

Manured. What's wrong with the litter tray, you little ***?


Hunt The Garden Cat.

In the garden:


This shrub was being crowded by a penisetum in front of it and a dahlia behind it so I dug out the broom (dead) that was here and put this (alive) in instead.


I've split some ornamental grasses, bought some herbs and potted up some bits'n'pieces.




The salad bar is at an increasingly jaunty angle. It needs moved somewhere sunnier and strengthened.

Esmerelda's spurs and Mathilda's wings

These are new - if you look really closely at her legs you might notice spurs about an inch long.






And the rest of old Esme...

She seems quite happy and is still laying but there's something not right about a chicken suddenly sprouting spurs.



You might just be able to see where Mathilda's wings have been clipped. She is the only one to have had the wit to get out of "Borkatraz" and now we've raised the mesh, extended it, plugged all the gaps we could find, shears provided the final option.