I haven't been mentioning the allotment much recently. We've been down there every week for the last few months, but it's been boring work -- digging up weeds, digging up weeds, digging up weeds. The weeds are nearly all gone now, though, so when we went up there on Sunday I had a bit more time to actually appreciate things.

( Pictures ahoy under the cut. )

Last year we grew a small selection of vegetables that could be harvested over the winter. This was supposed to help us keep our interest up during the cold, wet, dark months -- when normally we just forget all about the allotment and then get into a panic in the spring.

Turns out it wasn't a bad plan.

( A couple of pictures of pretty winter vegetables under the cut. )

Matt went away to visit his youngest brother at university last weekend, so I decided to be sneaky and get the new shed sorted out while he was gone. Mum and her husband volunteered to take charge of the project, since they've successfully made six impressive sheds over the years, and I was happy to let them do it. In the end, they did most of ( Read more... )

For reasons I don't fully understand, Matt's parents have a surfeit of B&Q vouchers, so they've bought us a new shed for Christmas. We collected it on Sunday (flat-packed) and it's now stored snugly in the greenhouse until we get around to levelling the patch of plot that we've decided will be the New Shed site. This is very exciting ( Read more... )

I meant to go to the allotment for an hour before teaching last Thursday. But halfway there I drove over something big and noisy, and lo and behold the front left wheel got a puncture. The downsides were (a) a puncture, and (b) all the allotment-visiting time was squandered in reading the car’s manual on how to change the wheel, finding the ( Read more... )

A brief window of sunniness yesterday, so we dashed off to the allotment to gather in the potatoes. I think this has been our best potato year ever, even though they got blight. Hardly any of them -- maybe a dozen altogether -- got infested with wireworm, and none of them were bothered by slugs. Because we were so quick to remove the blighted ( Read more... )

We popped up to the allotment yesterday afternoon, and found the potatoes blighted. ( More, including picture of very heavy onions, under the cut. )

The fridge was looking empty this morning, so we went to the allotment to do a bit of “shopping”.

( Pictures of scary insects and lovely flowers under the cut. )

Matt and I nipped up to the allotment on Friday and harvested some more food (same as last time, really, but smaller quantities (except that we got ten tomatoes instead of three). On Saturday afternoon my chicken-keeping friend and I removed all the uncompostable weeds (bindweed roots and couch grass rhizomes) and dumped them on his sheep-farming ( Read more... )

We spent three hours at the allotment on Sunday afternoon, mostly harvesting.

( A lot of pictures under the cut. Really. A LOT. )