... apparently only lasts 3 months.
Co-incidentally, it's been about 3 months since my last last post. Unfortunately Mrs D has had knee problems since last December, that got steadily worse and she ended up in hospital over Easter. This has restricted the number of visits to the allotment and the time available to update this blog. Fortunately with the lighter evenings I'm able to get down a bit in the week after the kids are in bed now.
So briefly, since February, we now have a fruit bed of strawberries, raspberries (supplied by my grandad), blackcurrants, rhubarb, a loganberry, a gooseberry and a whitecurrant - last seen (about a couple of weeks ago) looking like they could do with more water than they've been getting. Since then of course they've been getting far too much water... After planting them all I then discovered that according to the terms of the lease, we're not allowed to grow fruit on our allotments! Oh well, can't imagine that's going to be enforced at all.
The daffodils and tulips have been and gone. They looked quite impressive at the time and did the job of brightening up the place when there was not much around. The plan was to have some as cut flowers, but managed to miss the time for that with all of them. [pics to follow].
On the veg front, we have some potatoes (from Vicki in the allotment next door), peas, broad beans, coriander, spinach, carrots and various onions growing (with varying degrees of success).
The nursery (aka the garden at home, complete with min plastic greenhouse) has been overflowing with 5 different types of tomatoes, two different chillies, pumpkins, butternut squash, sunflowers, Brussels sprouts, various herbs and numerous salad leaves - would have pictures but ate most of them for tea the other night...! The wind the other day buffeted the plants quite a bit and we lost a couple - despite them being quite well protected. The slugs and snails have savaged quite a few plants, to such an extent the my organic plans went out the window (temporarily - can you do that?!) in an attempt to save some plants. We now have environmentally friendly slug pellets, together with copper banding on some pots, but I still can't bring myself to use beer in slug traps, it seems like such a waste!
I did use the nemoslug down the allotment during the driest April on record, so that probably didn't work but I guess that's the price you pay for using biological controls like that. Should be due another lot soon, hopefully as it's ideal conditions to use it now.
We've also made huge progress on starting up an association for the allotment site. Had a meeting on our allotment in March where about 40 people turned up! One further meeting has been held and the final 'setting up' meeting is later this week.
Hopefully more pictures and updates as limping wife and demanding children allow!
