It was only one year ago today that I planted my first seeds in the allotment beds and I cropped my first salad leaves about a month later. This year I’ve improved those times considerably, in fact I’ve been eating almost all of my veg from the allotment (or bartered)...
It’s taken me a while, but I’m now in a suitable mood for setting new years resolutions. December saw me laid up with man flu and January had me mostly confined to the house with food poisoning and a torn stomach muscle, but all these problems are now fading and...
Although New year’s resolutions seem to be going out of fashion I still like them. I print them out and stick them on my desk wall but I also have them on my phone in Google Keep, each one decorated with a nice photo as a visual reminder. I think...
This post isn’t for me, I’ve already committed to retirement, it’s an answer to the regular stream of friends and colleagues who ask me this question, it’s my attempt at a well thought through answer, rather than a quick email reply. To get started it might be worth taking a...
I’ve come to the end of my first calendar year as an allotmenteer and it’s been life changing, I expected to enjoy growing my own food, but it turned out that there were lots of benefits that I really didn’t expect to get from the allotment: the wonderful sense of...
I put up a cheap wind sock this morning as I’m obsessed by the wind strength and direction. While I was up the ladder I also trimmed the willows. Sadly I had to cut out a third of my sprouts today, party because they were too cramped, partly because of...
I’ve been putting off turning the compost bins again, as a result they’ve sat too long at a high temperature and collapsed a bit. Fortunately I’ve been accumulating compost in the other two bins and as I turned the two mature bins I consolidated in the quarter filled bins to...
This week has been a big push to get all of my phase 2 changes finished before mid September, as I will be travelling for the rest of the month. That has meant finishing and planting all of the cold frames and hot beds – done Cutting down most of...
I pulled up the butternut squash today and harvested the last three fruits, I’d planted them through weed stop membrane which had worked well, but under that were a lot of slugs and snails, so next time I put it down I need to make sure it’s well prepared –...
I was on baby sitting duty this morning and then rain kept me home for a while, but I eventually set off for the allotment at around 11am. I went in the car and popped into Liddell on my way and picked up 5 large grow bags for £1.29 each,...