A bit of fair weather gardening

 The other day one of our allotment neighbours jokingly described us as fair weather gardeners.  It was a lovely day and we'd not been down there for ages because of the bad weather except to pull up a few veg and feed the allotment cat.  But there's not much to do on the allotment when the weather is as wet as it has been lately. We can't dig because the soil is wet and sticky. We can't even go in the polytunnel at the moment because the path up to it is too muddy and slippery.

I suppose we are fair weather gardeners really. We watch the weather forecasts avidly and quite often plan the week, looking for the days when it is expected to be fine and we will be able to go down to the plot.  I'm sure most gardeners are the same.

Once Christmas was over, fired with the enthusiasm of the new year I was longing to get down to the allotment. Well we were lucky last week, we had some good sunny spells.

One of the first jobs on our list planned for the allotments this month was to manure the beds.  Being fairly new allotments they still need plenty of improvement to the soil. Some of them got done last autumn, but we didn't manage to finish them before Christmas.

We have a supply of manure delivered to the allotments every week from a nearby stables.  I was really pleased to see that the bin which we had filled last year was well rotted down, so I set to work shovelling and barrowing.  I started on the rhubarb bed, where there are signs of new growth. Then I did the fruit beds and finally some of the vegetable beds.  Some of the beds still have winter veg growing, so they didn't get done and I didn't cover the ones where we plan to grow root crops this year. 

That was plot 10b done, plot 8 needs weeding and manuring yet, but I was pleased with the work done, it all looks much tidier.