The allotment has been dug...

The allotment has had some serious rotovation.

A good days work

What we achived just before we left

First potato's planted

Jen points to where the first potato's are planted

Rotavator-ing

Well well we've been out with the rotavator today! My father kindly lent us one for the day! What a difference it made! The picture's are just of matt when he was at the wheel so to speak but jon, jen and myself all had a go, i would reckon that matt and myslef did 45 percent each with jon and jen just having a wee go!

A New Year

Well Happy New Year one and all, I thought i'd steal the glory of being the first post of 2012, where did 2011 go!
lets get planning for this years crops, what sort of things do we want to plant?

Brief update

I'll try to put some photos on here of the massive marrow (or courgette, the subject of much debate for about a fortnight), and a purple carrot soon.

The broad beans and mange tout have finished now, but there was a fairly good crop from these. It would be good to plant more of these next year. The spinach is still going.... it has been doing well for a good few months now. A few runner beans were spotted on Sunday, and hopefully they will continue grow. The first set of runner bean plants all died, probably due to a lack of water and not very good soil. The second set are doing better, but still not great. Maybe some runner bean research is needed.

Potatoes - after a few plants were dug up with a very disappointing crop, the rest have done well :) I am yet to find out whether the inside of the blue potatoes is blue.

And finally plums. I made two jars of plum jam a few weeks ago. It set, so I was pleased about that on my first jam making mission. And the freezer is almost full of plums, and apples and pears from the garden. It is a good time of year!

Allotment digging and planting.

Today was the first day that Helen and I have done any work (apart from the felting of the shed roof which I helped Andy with) on the allotment.

We were given some lettuce and some sweet corn seeds by Helen's dad - it may be a little late for the corn but we thought that we could give it a go. They will either grow into a great crop or not grow at all.


Here are some pictures ...

Andy watering the poppies of the neighbouring allotment (not sure why).

The four canes in the picture (above) show the lines in which we planted the crops. The first two on the left are lettuce. The two smaller canes on the right are the corn.

Andy and Pam watering in the fresh crops - lets hope they grow.

Fresh carrots and a bunch of potatoes found from the small plot that we turned over to make way for the lettuce and sweet corn (if you enlarge this picture it actually looks quite cool with the droplets of water and the light). 

Some tasty looking fruit in there somewhere. They will be nice in a crumble - if you like crumble.

After investigation (a picture message to my mum) these are Victoria plums (above and below) and will be ready towards the end of August (looking forward to making some plum wine with some of these, some crumble for those that like crumble). 

Hope you like what we've done so far. We'll have some cucumber, beetroot, radish, some more lettuce and some spring onions to plan next week.