Saturday 27th December 2007

What a blimmin' miserable time we've had of late. It's been utter rubbish what with rain pouring down and also the huge amount of work both Tim and I have to do with Christmas time looming. Oh goodness me! Why oh why is Christmas such a miserable time for us? All we wanted to do was dig the ground and all we were able to do was sit at home at the weekend and watched the skies blacken and piddle down with rain. Today, however, we managed to get up there with a little bit of drizzle threatening.

We had a scoot around the plot, saw that the sprouts had been eaten by rabbits, the broad beans had been dug up by mice but the over-wintering onions had managed to sprout. Hurrah! Actually, it wasn't all that bad. The chard was still growing like mad and the swedes, although puny in size, were still looking nice and fresh.
                       
 
                                             
 
                                             
  Hormones, eh? They are responsible for all sorts of arguments when Tim and I want to go up to the plot for more than one day a week. However, today hormones were on our side, as we cut the raspberry canes back. Instead of casting them aside, though, we dipped our raspberry cuttings with hormone rooting powder in order to encourage them to sprout some roots. These raspberries are particularly wonderful as the fruits are just huge and so tasty. Mmmm, it makes me salivate just thinking about them! So, we dipped some of the cuttings in hormone rooting powder and some without to see whether there was a difference in successful growth.

All this time without being up the plot was also a long time not see our allotment chums. We saw Nigel and Sam up there but also found another friend in the way of Roderick the Robin. He seemed very friendly and he kept us company as we finally decided to sort out the bottom patch of the second plot. It had been quite a while since we took on the second plot and it has been quite an effort to sort BOTH plots outs. The weather has been either too wet or too dry to successfully dig the ground. Today was just right. We had really wanted to use the winter time to get ahead with the second plot but so far the weather and soil conditions had negated us from doing so.
                       
 
                                             
 
                                             
 
                                             
  As we took the pallets and wood off the weed suppressant material, it soon became clear that this wasn't going to be easy. There were loads of bits of junk left lying around on and in the ground. We pulled out mesh nonsense from the earth, plastic buckets were left lying around and the dreaded carpet had been left in the ground to stop the weeds presumably. The weeds managed to have found a way of growing on top of that carpet and so it had grown into the ground. Brambles everywhere again. It was like starting all over again back in January 2006. Blimey! We also had the bath full of water and gunk. We tipped it out and the water soon disappeared down the sloping ground. The drizzle started to get heavier and we ended up leaving the plot having a little bit but not as much as we'd hoped.

And that was 2007. It had been a little disappointing at times because of the strange weather we had experienced. Blight on potatoes, blighted tomatoes, rabbits eating our veg. Grrr! Still, it's all a learning curve. We've got bees, chickens, a shed and a lot more experience. Roll on 2008, we're ready for ya!!