Time to start sowing and planting

We've spent a lot of time on the allotment over the last few weeks, with all the good weather that's been around it was best to make the most of it.

The winter jobs are now done and beds are ready for sowing and planting. The first things to plant were the onion sets and it was so good to see veg growing at last. 

The first early potatoes (Rocket) were planted in bags and soon I will be planting the second earlies (Charlotte). Broad beans which I had started off indoors in cardboard tubes were planted last week followed by a double row sowed straight into the ground.

There are a lot of weed seedlings from the sycamore tree all over the allotment and what a nuisance they are. I am constantly pulling them out. I've been taking the weed membrane off the beds which I covered in the winter and what did I find underneath? More of these weeds! So much for weed membrane. 

As I've taken off the membrane I've been gradually hoeing off these weeds. Last week after clearing what is going to be the salad bed I sowed lettuce, radish and spring onion.

The greenhouse is filling up with trays of seedlings. I cleaned out the two cold frames so they are now ready for hardening off plants. 

We bought some wood chippings a few weeks ago from a local log supplier for a very reasonable price. We often get them dumped at the allotment site for everyone to help themselves to, but there hadn't been any for a while, of course after we had bought some they started being dumped again! Never mind at least we didn't have to share ours and they were good quality. So we have managed to cover most of the areas on our plot which needed them with chippings and it looks really tidy now. 

Richard has been busy dismantling the little greenhouse which we decided to move to our garden. It's quite small and will fit in a small corner of the patio. It will make it easier for me having a greenhouse at home as well as the allotment so I can pop out to water seedlings without having to keep going down to the allotment. I will also be able to grow two or three tomato plants there.

There's a nice big space left where it was which we have covered with wood chippings. I think it will become a storage area and perhaps a place for pots of flowers and potato bags.

This rusty old wheelbarrow was on the allotment when we took over and I've been wanting to use it as a planter but never had enough room. It's been propped up under the hedge for years. I think I will be able to use it at last. I'm going to grow flowers in it.

Sunny days

The days are getting more spring like now, it's lovely to be outside in the sunshine. It's only a few weeks since I was enjoying the snowdrops in the garden and now they have gone over making way for the daffodils.  The tulips are starting to flower in their pots on the patio, in fact only last week the first ones burst into flower, an amazing orange which made me stop in my tracks to admire them. 

And this week these tulips started flowering. I planted them last autumn,  I don't know the name of them but they are amazing.

The garden is looking lovely at the moment. The borders have been cleared of all the debris from the dead flowers and most of them have now been mulched. I have been putting ornamental bark down on the stumpery area in the back garden and the hosta bed in the front. All the hostas are grown in pots which seems to help keep the slugs away although not completely.

I love to see the garden looking like this at the start of spring, like it's ready and waiting for the explosion of flowers in the next few weeks.

As I walk around I can see how clumps of flowers are getting bigger. At this stage I have to be careful not to plant anything where I think there is a space, because that space is likely to get filled up soon with plants as they start to grow bigger

Some cold gardening days

It's been so cold recently I haven't wanted to go outside for too long. So garden and allotment work has been limited to short spells with lots of layers of clothing. But so much needs to be done as we move further into February.  

On the allotment we have been sorting out the storage shed. Last year, late summer the roof caved in and as the whole structure has been needing some attention for a while, it was now time to do something about it. So over the autumn and winter Richard has been working on the roof, the sides and the floor. It's almost a new shed now. It was a good opportunity to sort out all the stuff we had been storing in there. All the things we'd saved because they might be useful, but they never were. So along with lengths of rotting wood, metal and plastic items have been disposed of, leaving much more room in this storage area. We will not be hoarding things again, I hope.

The weather although very cold has been quite dry recently and the allotment is looking much better now it's not as wet and muddy. I've nearly finished getting the beds ready. This week I pulled up  the few remaining cabbages, which are not very big but might make a meal. I left the kale in as it sometimes starts growing again in the spring. Richard raked up the compost and manure in the bins and there should be enough rotted manure to finish the beds.

 I went to the garden centre last week and bought seed potatoes and onion sets. A nice indoor garden job was to start chitting the potatoes. I bought Rocket, a first early which I've grown before and always had good crops. Also I bought Charlotte which is a good popular salad potato.

The onion sets I planted in trays in modules, varieties are Sturon, Centurion and Banana. These are now in the allotment greenhouse. I grew Banana onions for the first time last year and they did really well. Chitting potatoes and planting the onion sets are usually the first jobs I do so I feel I've now made a start to the new season.

I  had a tidy up in the garden shed, sorted out my seed box and ordered what I need for this year in vegetable and flower seeds. The pots and propagators are all ready now for me to start sowing. I'll be sowing broad beans and sweet peas in the next day or two, which I will do in pots then move them to the greenhouse. I don't usually start any other seed sowing until the beginning of March. Then things will get really busy. 

The garden is looking quite messy with grass bits all over the place. So I have started clearing debris from the beds and cutting back the grasses. I quite enjoy cutting back and gathering up bundles of plant rubbish and seeing the flower beds starting to look better. I can see plants emerging and then I try to remember what they are. There are more bulbs coming through and some unexpected ones, I remember that I planted more last spring. It's nice to get surprises like that as I work round the garden.

A muddy path and planting snowdrops.

 

A few weeks ago when we arrived at the allotment we found that the path down the lane to our plot had been churned up by someone who had tried to drive a big wheeled truck down it. We weren't very pleased about that as it made the path very muddy and walking down to our plot was quite difficult. The path is not meant for vehicles to drive along. The ground is quite soft on this small stretch of the path and can soon become muddy. We had worked on improving the path a couple of years ago by putting wood chippings down and they worked quite well at soaking up the mud. I don't have a photo of the lane when it was all churned up, but in the photo above you can see on the right some of the tyre tracks, on the left is when I had started flattening them out.

So last week I set to work flattening the tyre tracks and lucky for me someone had dumped some shredded tree chippings further along the lane. So Richard and I spent the next few days collecting the chippings and spreading them out along this muddy stretch. Each time we went to the allotment we dedicated some of the time to barrowing chippings to the lane. It was hard work and my back was suffering each time. But I have to say it looks much better and is so easy to walk along now with no fear of slipping or falling over.

A nicer moment was that Richard found a clump of snowdrops amongst some garden rubbish which had been thrown in the woods across the lane where we are allowed to throw our compostable waste. He dug them up before they got covered in more rubbish. I planted them along the fence outside the plot where I already have some bulbs growing.

Back to work on the allotment

At last some better weather meant we were able to get back to work on the allotment. It's been a while since we last did any proper work on the plot. Back in November we had started clearing the beds, manuring and covering them with weed membrane. Most of them were done, just the ones with veg still growing are yet to be done. 

So there are some cabbages, kale and leeks still remaining in the ground. This week I dug up some of the leeks which were rotten, I'm not sure if the rest of them will be any good , but I will be digging them up over the next few weeks. 

We had a visitor on the plot waiting for us when we arrived on Saturday afternoon, a chicken. It had escaped from the plot behind us and was looking quite lost. Unfortunately its owner was not on his plot and we didn't have his phone number, but we knew someone who could get in touch with him. So all ended well, we were able to reunite them and I could get back to my jobs.

One of those jobs was cutting down the dead asparagus stalks. I cleared the bed of all the debris, hoed lightly to get rid of surface weeds and then spread manure over the bed. Next to the asparagus bed is the bed where I grow most of my annual flowers for cutting. I treated this in the same way.

The next few weeks are the time when I try to get on top of all the winter jobs and get the allotment tidy ready for when I start sowing and growing. The beds are mostly  done now, but there are plenty of other jobs like cleaning out the shed and one of the greenhouses, and some repair work. It all depends on the weather of course but we are hoping we can get lots done.

Getting back into the garden

We've had a few sunny days this week, it has been cold, but not too cold to go out in the garden to do a bit of work. There's been such awful weather the last few weeks where it hasn't been fit to go outside, so I've been keen to get out, if only for a bit of pottering round and a breath of fresh air.

There's always something to do in the garden, if it's only sweeping paths or tidying the shed. I have started clearing the leaves off the borders. They have got quite soggy and were hiding bulbs underneath. 

They were probably providing homes for slugs too. Some of the dead plant stalks which I leave standing over winter for the wildlife are ready for clearing away. I'll gradually clear those in the next few weeks. Last week's storm didn't do much damage in this area, but the grasses in the garden took quite a battering resulting in grass debris all over the place.

Looking round the garden I could see signs of new growth. The snowdrops are flowering now. I love seeing them, the first flowers of the year in the garden. 

Also flowering now are cyclamen, showing patches of pink in shady areas beneath the birch tree in the back garden and under shrubs in the front.

 Daffodils and crocuses are emerging to flower in a few weeks time. The Hamamelis (witch hazel) has copper coloured flowers which I have to walk down the garden to see. It doesn't show up well from a distance. 

January is such a long dreary month and to see signs of life in the garden gives me so much to look forward to.

Allotment--A new year, bad weather, making plans

 

It's quite some time since I blogged about the allotment, but we were kept busy last year. Now a new year lies ahead and I'm thinking of what I'll be doing in the next few months. 

At the moment the weather is too bad to be able to do any sort of work. It's been really cold and wet. We had snow a couple of weeks ago with really hard overnight frosts. It's still quite cold and there is a weather warning for high winds at the weekend. So I have been staying indoors most of the time, but I'm longing to get out and start work on the allotment. 

I am often thinking about how much longer I will be able to do the allotment. Rheumatoid and osteoarthritis  slow me down now and we both get tired more easily. But we managed well last year so another year of growing lies ahead. 

At the moment the things which get me down are not my own physical difficulties, but neighbours who don't look after their plots, fly tipping seems to be happening more too and then there's the rats. On a recent visit to check over the plot we could see evidence of rats again in the shed. No matter how hard Richard tries to seal off any access holes, they will find another way to get in. This time they have been getting in through the floor.

There are changes down at the allotments as a few plots have become vacant and we wonder who we will get as neighbours. So many people take on an allotment full of enthusiasm but don't realise how much commitment is required and how much hard work is involved. Then they give up on it.

For me it's time to start planning what I will be growing this year, sorting through my seed packets and ordering more seeds. And as soon as we get some drier, warmer weather we'll be down there, mending all the holes in the shed and preparing the beds for growing.