What a busy afternoon! Straight after picking William up from pre school we went to the allotment with a job list. Dave wanted to build the shed door (which he did, successfully, apart from some slightly over sized screws which now have to be ground off unless the door is to become a weapon of torture!), I wanted to check on my seeds and organise a few things, and then of course there were the dreaded weeds.

The ground is very dry right now so the seeds actually needed watering. That in itself is quite hard going as the water troughs are at the ends of the plots nearest the road. The walks to and from it kept the children and I out of mischief for a while though. Once the shed is complete we have a large water container ready to collect the run off from the shed roof so we won’t have to do as much walking. As well as watering I went along the rows plucking out any rogue weeds which survived the rotavating (some of them were poking up through the soil and taunting us with their cocky yellow flowers, showing off the fact that they were still standing).

I also discovered that the Mountain Dew bottle bird scarers had fallen over and I had no more canes, but there is a dyke at the end of our plot and some of last year’s tall weeds (no idea what they are but they were definitely dead) had dried out so I picked the stems up to use. They aren’t as tough as proper canes but I really didn’t want to leave things to chance and let the birds eat all of the seeds before they’ve even started growing. Hopefully my improvisation will pay off-I thought it was pretty resourceful, at least until we pick up some more suitable canes.

We have also adopted some plant plugs which we believe are cabbage and calabrese-a local nursery leave their waste compost on the roadside for the public to collect and in our last haul there were loads of plugs. (The end of our plot is covered in pansies as the first batch we got was full of them and we just didn’t know.) We finally got round to doing something with them today-since our plot is currently undergoing a transformation we have put them in large pots and watered them well to see how they grow until we find them a permanent home. They look quite healthy at the moment and they are a good back up in case some of our seeds don’t grow.

At home the tomatoes are doing really well and 7 out of 8 courgettes have germinated too. One of the cucumber plants has died but 3 out of 4 is pretty good. I just have to keep all of these plants alive all summer now!