Compost

Mmmm this is our lovely home made compost. It's gone on our two raised beds in the back garden. Hope the sprouts/cucumbers/courgette/cabbages/lettuces like it!

ooops...

...have possibly planted out four courgettes instead of two courgettes and 2 pumpkins. The pumpkins were meant to go in the non-active compost heaps. Will have to have a really close look at the plants to check (labeling had gone awry) and possibly swap some over before they get too settled. Oopsie!

Flowers 'n all that

Some pics of the flowers on our plot at the moment...

Sage

Borage

Comfrey

Shepherd's purse

Potato! Soon we eat!

Progress

Alas, no time spent at the plot this weekend due to a fantastically fun trip to see friends in Sheffield, but managed to finish work a bit early today to get down there.....earthed up the potatoes, cut back some brambles a bit and did some weeding.......not enough, but it's a start!

Autumn onions in the front, which are starting to bulb-up a bit, yippee! With some early potatoes behind.

Sweetcorn - mixed success, some are doing ok but 3 have pretty much died off so today stuck some seeds in the ground as a last ditch attempt! On Thurs sowed some dwarf french beans in between the corn. Not sure how long they'll take to germinate.

Broad beans - look closely and you'll actually see some bean pods! And little lettuces too.

Wildflower area (this is borage) but has quite a few other species too. Help look after the bees!

More onions!

Poorly peas....the ones at home on loo rolls have started germinating though.


The rest of the early potatoes :0)

The long weekend.....

is already over and I only managed to get down the allotment for a couple of hours! But I was being quite productive at home potting on all the toms, squashes etc and also sorted out the home made compost. We've got two of the plastic dalek style bins at home and the older of the two bins was ready to put on the veg beds at home (plus the other bin was getting really full). I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the compost (though there were still the odd big bits which I picked out) but was really chuffed with the compost in the newer bin. I turned over the newest top stuff into the now empty old bin and found lovely compost about a third down...excellent! That will go on another part of the veg bed once it's cleared of spring greens and spinach, ready for a nice courgette plant :0)

At the allotment I planted out the sweetcorn, runner beans and purple climbing french beans grown in loo roll tubes at home, plus sowed some dwarf french beans in between the sweetcorn. This worked really well last year as the beans shade out weeds and also fix nitrogen in the soil for the corn. Well, it worked ok until there was a population explosion of teeny snails which decided they really enjoyed eating bean leaves anyway. THis year we've cleared a lot more of the plot so hopefully we won't have as much of a slug/snail problem

Anyhoo here's some pics of the seedlings (click for a bigger view)

Tomatoes overseeing the little teeny basil on the top row plus lots of brussels and cabbages on the middle.

Squashes all lined up