Pulling up the onions

The onions have had a lot to put up with this year.  Soon after planting the sets, the moles moved in, that must have been a bit traumatic for them being pushed up out of the soil before they were ready, but they seemed to recover and carried on growing.

Then as time went on the weeds arrived and took over. Now I know that onions don't like competing with weeds, they like their own space, but we were busy moving house and so the poor onions got neglected, but they continued to grow.

At this time of year it's now time to harvest the onions. All around me on the neighbouring allotments I can see racks of onions drying out in the sunshine. So I decided it was time to pull my onions up. I have to say that although I did try to do a little bit of weeding in the onion patch over the last few weeks, the weeds won. So when it came to pulling them up, I had great difficulty in finding them amongst the weeds. But I managed and I was amazed to find big onions.

I laid them out to dry in the sunshine on the greenhouse staging which we dragged out from its summer storage behind the shed and also in the cold frame.

And so, despite all the trauma of bad growing conditions, the onions have done well and seem as good as in previous years. I'm pleased with my harvest.

Wildlife on the allotment

I thought our garden had a lot of wildlife, but our allotments are even better. Plot 8 has hedging all around the boundaries and a big sycamore tree at the top.  All of this provides shelter and food for the birds.  Outside and across the lane is the woods, which must be heaving with wildlife. We often sit with a cup of tea, quietly watching and bird spotting. We have seen, long tailed tits, blue tits, greenfinches, goldfinches, even grouse. The robin follows us around as we work, there are sparrows, blackbirds and chaffinches.  There are frogs and toads which we often come across when weeding, hiding under bricks or sheltering in a clump of big weeds. The pond has tadpoles early on, but our disappointment is always when we get a spell of dry weather and the pond dries up.

Plot 10b doesn't have much  in the way of hedging, although there is a buddleia and a holly, both of which are good shrubs to attract wildlife.  We are planting up a border there with perennial plants which will attract bees and butterflies and have put some climbing shrubs--ivy, honeysuckle, cotoneaster and clematis along the front to climb against the wire fence.  There are nettles and brambles on both plots, I get rid of those which encroach on our space, but like to leave a clump or two up near the fences where we don't grow anything.

The plots are buzzing with bees at the moment, there are ladybirds and we have started to spot butterflies.  At the moment we are seeing the orange tip butterfly which is mostly seen during May.  I often wonder what happens to it after May because we don't see it later on in the year.

Some of our wildlife though is not as welcome.  We have recently been troubled with moles and on arrival at the plots usually have a look around to see where they have dug up overnight. Their latest atrocity has been the seed beds where I have sown flowers for my cut flower patch.

Even more unwelcome visitors are the rats.  There have been lots of them recently. We see them in the communal manure heap on the lane, but also on our own plots around the compost bins. They have got very cheeky and don't seem the least bit frightened of us. It's good to see though that Ziggy our allotment cat is earning her keep--nearly every day last week we found a dead rat on the path.

Another unwelcome bit of  wildlife was spotted this week in the shed on plot 8.  It was a tiny grey ball like structure with a hole in the base, situated up near the ceiling of the shed.  We soon realised it was a wasp's nest after seeing a wasp going in through the hole.  It was carefully removed by my brave husband and placed in the woods across the lane well away from the plot.

After a week of seeing all these 'nasty' creatures, I was finally cheered up firstly by a pretty lacewing which flew gracefully past me into the sycamore tree, looking like a little fairy with its bright, lime green body and delicate, translucent wings. Secondly  I went to look at the pond and was overjoyed to see it was full of water again and there were the tadpoles swimming around happily, having grown much bigger since the last time I saw them.