More brassica disaster!

I put the seedlings out in the garden on Saturday to harden off. The chickens ate all the brussel sprouts, plus two sweet peas and some onions/leeks. (not sure which as they seem to have pulled out all the labels as an appetiser...)

It's not straight forward this gardening milarkie is it?

A riddle

Q. What do you need to keep a small boy happy on an allotment? A. A riddle. So here is a riddle and a happy ys who likes getting his hands dirty. And his face judging by this picture.

Small harvest

Well I moved the cloche from the winter carrots.I wanted to take them up to plant my second sowing of broad beans. Now I'm hopeless at growing carrots for some reason but my overwintered carrots excelled. From a 2.5 metre row I got 2 carrots which I very carefull divided into 4 portions. We all declared them the best carrots we had ever tasted but since we had such a small taste we couldn't be sure. One is waiting for the chop in the photo. A perfectly good (if small) carrot. It just needed a few more friends. It was a small harvest.

tattie bye

Will I ever run out of bad puns?
We took the plunge this weekend and planted the early potatoes. I plant quite a lot (eight rows or one whole bed, we have five beds in total) but I find there is still time to plant a second crop later in the year. This year I have gone for Swift and Rocket, not that I'm a girl in a hurry or anything. We also have one dustbin of Charlotte at home and one dustbin of Pink Fir Apple at Grandma's house. We said goodbye to them and tucked them up with some well rotted manure and garden compost. I hope I don't live to regret getting them in so early but I got all excited (again) by the lovely weather.

The boys extended their hole and trampled all over my strawberries. We had fun.

Going going gone

Are you a man or a monkey? We had a tree removed today and although it was pretty exciting, it was also quite sad. It had stood us in good stead casting shade over the patio where we eat in summer. It feels wrong to cut down a living healthy tree but it was the wrong tree in the wrong place and was encroaching on the house, so it had to go. We promised ourselves we will plant another tree soon when we have got used to the new levels of light. Maybe an apple tree?

Parsnips

Parsnips are very had to germinate apparently. So I've never tried. Until this year when I decided to chit some seed to see if it might be worth giving it a go. So I put some on some kitchen roll in a sandwich box and so many have grown that this afternoon we found that we'd run out of toilet rolls to pot them up in. A sucess I hope. So will I be enjoying a nice bowl of spiced parsnip soup this time next year? Time will tell.

what a picture

We didn't go to the allotment today - we had got far too cold watching os play football. So we painted it instead. I though os's was rather good, but I am biased!

Ladies who lunch

I like recycling, it hangs well with me.
These are next doors chickens they visit us at lunchtime and later in the year after dinner too.
Today we had a ricey vegetabley concoction which goes down well inside the house. The onions and garlic were from the allotment but the rest of the veg were bought else it really would be the hungry gap around here. The ladies hung around for the scraps, then the "presents" that they left on the patio went into the compost bucket. Later we played football at the bottom of the garden and the ladies had left us an egg behind the compost heap. What goes around comes around!

A place in the sun

It was a beautiful day yesterday I thought you might like to see the whole plot. As you can see there's not much of it but we do pack a lot in. Anything that looks like a weed is either:

1) ryegrass sown as green manure

2) a grass path or

3) a weed. Glad we got that sorted. Don't make the picture any larger else you will see that 3) is a popular category.

Highlights of the tour include the shed, compost corner and the water butts. We have a tree house in the summer but we have taken it down until any March gales are past. We also put a table out under the tree in the summer so we can picnic in the shade, I realise eating next to the compost bin might not catch on with everyone but if the compost is working well it doesn't normally smell. If it does we move.

The plot Marches on

What a lovely weekend. OS had the school bear this weekend. You have to take it with you wherever you go. Barnaby has seen some allotment action I can tell you! I guess not many kids ask how to spell rhubarb forcing as part of their homework.

The boys were archeologists this weekend, the've dug a big trench where I was going to plant some early carrots. Their finds include stones, stones and er, stones. I will negotiate filling it in again on another visit. I'm planning to get them to excavate the compost heap next. I feel it will need sieving and the "spoil" tipping onto the potato bed - I thought I might slip a few artefacts in there for them to find.

Things are beginning to look quite green and I've planted some peas out in the legume section. I seem to have already run out of room in the miscellaneous bed and the brassica bed is looking fullish too. Which is a pity as I have at least 6 more trays of seeds in process and I haven't even started with the mini green house yet. I must persuade my Mum that flowers are overrated and do my own landshare...