Allotment Diary–Wednesday 08 June 2016

I took Elona and her sister Grace to the allotment today and they worked hard on the weeding, giving me the chance to dig over more of the area under the trees.  I’m not sure how practical gardening under the tress will be once the wind fall’s start, but it’s worth the experiment to try.  I dug another meter of soil over and stripped out the worst of the weeds and then put in another row of canes, which I purchased from B&M bargains, poor quality but good enough for this purpose. 

I planted a row of manage tout, finishing off the packet, so that’s the end of them for this year.

The ‘girls’ also put straw down around the strawberries after weeding.

I’d already done the same at home.  I bought the straw from Amazon and it arrived next day and is excellent quality and a very good price!

One of my rows of French beans was looking very thin, so I dug up the three surviving beans and put them in gaps in the row of adjacent peas and planted a new row to replace them.

Annoyingly I noticed that something was eating my sprouts, despite the fact that they are nicely netted, a butterfly must have sneaked in there while I was weeding!  I did a quick inspection and found a couple of caterpillars and fed them to my Blackbird, I will have to be vigilant.

Finally I did the watering and then dug out the remainder of the old compost bin and moved it to my new active bin, completely filling it.  I will now start to fill the end bin with green waste from the allotment, gradually layering it with compost from the second bin.  The first bin will then be finished for the year and the second bin will be empty, I will start the same process with the second bin, layering green waste with compost from the third bin etc.