Tim and I started the day off with digging a bloomin' great big hole to find a water pipe. We were on a work party and in order to put a water trough on a disabled plot we had to dig along the side of a road and then dig through more clay than an A-level art class. The hole went down around 4 feet and we kept trying to find an elusive water pipe that just wouldn't show itself. We kept making the hole wider and wider until eventually we found the blessed thing! It was much further away than any of us had expected.
After doing our bit
for the allotments, Tim and I returned to our own plot. We looked around
and saw how tall the Jerusalem artichokes had grown. They were easily
7 foot tall. How ridiculous! How much taller can they grow and what's
going on in the earth? Have we got some artichokes or has all the energy
gone into making those ridiculous stems? The raspberries were still doing
well now that the rain has stopped falling nearly every day. A little
bit of sun seems to have helped boost fruit production during August.
We had been letting the beans go to seed and had stopped watering them to try and speed up the process. The trail of tears bean pods had started to go purple and the ones that had dried out were drying out and going brown. Inside were little black shiny beans, with the power to grow into beans plants next year.
Other veg were growing well such as the butternut squashes (finally). The pumpkins were growing ever bigger but still not as big as my head, as you can see. When Tim investigated closely it seemed that the French beans were beginning to flower.
The sprouts were getting bigger and bigger. It's always impressive to see how vegetables grow when you've never seen them grow before. Little sproutlets are forming between the gigantic leaves and I have never seen them growing before. I've seen sprouts sold fresh on the stalks in supermarkets, which I always find amusing. It always seems like a marketing gimmick as if they will be that much fresher, like tomatoes on the vine. They have probably still taken as much time to be transported from Uzbekistan as sprouts that aren't on the stalk.
I
chopped back the weeds growing down on the bottom half of our second plot.
My plan was to clear the area around the concrete base because I wanted
to build a shed. After the disaster that was the shed made out of tin,
I wanted a stronger shed that was fairly cheap to construct, using only
reclaimed materials as much as possible. The panels from pallets would
be the main material I would use. I managed to clear a space so that I
could get to the concrete base but then a couple of bees decided that
I was getting a little too close so I moved away before they jabbed their
arse into my head. I painted some wood and fence posts with some nice
brown masonry paint in the mean time and prised up some pallet panels,
which seemed to take ages. The panels also broke quite often if you didn't
hammer them off correctly.
When I got to the plot today I carried on cutting the weeds back. Tim was all about getting rid of the dying plants and throwing them on our big bonfire. We did our usual scan around the plot to see what was growing and what was failing. The runner beans were still going. The beans have been amazing this year. The sheer volume of beans we had managed to crop was astounding. Our courgette plants were also still cropping. Jeepers! Some of them were jumbo sized compared to the smaller little babies amongst the foliage. The yellow ones haven't been as prolific as the green ones.
While the beans and courgettes were doing so well, the fennel had bolted. They had started to flower so all the energy being put into making the bulbs had been diverted to producing flowers in order to reproduce by making seeds. What a disappointment... for Tim. I hate the smell of aniseed so I was fine about it. Tim believes himself to be the next Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, who loves fennel, so he has an affinity with the stinky plant.
Tim and I were up the plot fairly late this morning. Tim had decided to do some digging but was struggling because he was feeling ill. What bad timing because he was going on holiday the next day! After a bit of digging Tim went home to pack his suitcase... full of medicine, no doubt!
Suey was up with me to help build my shed. My day was mostly spent cutting out notches and cutting the fenceposts to size for the framework of the shed. These were the boring and time-consuming bits but they were the parts that would mean that I could build a good strong shed. I put the front part of the shed framework together to see how well it all fit together. I screwed things together and it stood up without falling down. I put some supports in before I left and I put together the back framework ready.
I'd also reclaimed a window from a shed Suey and I had smashed to bits in our garden. It was rotting away and I had always planned to make a cold frame using the windows that we have removed from our house. I painted it in a nice bright green, so that our shed will look like an After Eight.
I had taken a couple of days off work especially to sort out our shed. Tim had buggered off to Kefalonia so it was up to me to sort it out. I had cut the framework for the shed on Saturday and so just needed to ensure that it all slotted together properly. I added some extra supports and the door frame. I was trying to keep the costs down as much as possible, so I screwed some thick lengths of wood together to make the roof beams. I screwed all of the framework together so that it all stood up of it's own accord and surprisingly it worked. I also screwed the window into the framework as well.
Next on the list of things to do was to take off the panels from the pallets that we had up on the plot and screw them to the front of the framework, either side of the door. I had no idea that it was going to take so long! It took me ALL day to panel the front section of the door. At this rate I wouldn't have the shed finished until November! With Radio 4 keeping me company and only a slight chance of rain it had been a pretty good day but I needed to sort out the speediness of the panelling.
Tuesday 16th September 2007
On the Tuesday morning, I went to Canton, on the other side of Cardiff, as I had driven past a skip with a load of floorboards in it last week and was curious to see whether they were still in there. When I arrived, the builders were there too and after asking permission I started taking the floorboards from the skip and trying to fit them in my Clio. That poor car really has suffered by the hands of the allotment. First concrete blocks, bags of compost, all my tools and now a car full of planks! I said I'd probably return later and after dropping off the first load return I did. I brought with me a saw and a tape measure to ensure that I cut the right lengths so that the panels fit the shed properly. I gave the builders some veg as a thank-you and managed to clear ALL of the floorboards out of the skip. This did set me back quite a bit as it was now midday.
I got to the plot and the rate at which the shed was panelled increased dramatically with the depth of the floorboards. It was fabulous! The boards were also quite smooth so when it came to painting them it was really easy and there was pretty good coverage. I got the right-hand side panelled pretty quickly, then picked Suey up from work and screwed the left-hand side up. Suey painted the inside of the shed with white emulsion to keep it as light as possible on the inside. We finished up when it got dark at 7pm and went home. I was really pleased with the shed so far as it was really strong and sturdy. I tried giving it a push and it didn't budge. It feels much stronger than these sheds you buy from DIY stores... and it was certainly stronger than that piece of steel nonsense I'd bought earlier in the year. This one wasn't going to blow away!
Tim was back after a couple of Saturdays off. Kefalonia, it seemed, was very nice but he still missed being up on the site. I was glad to have had an extra two days on the plot, when I was building the shed, because the weather was lovely and it's always nice to try and grab as much summer time as possible. Tim had come up before me and had dug some of the earth to start preparing for the winter. He had also pulled the remaining vegetables out of the ground of the cauliflower and cabbage patch. We had a few courgettes still growing, red cabbages, runner beans and even had some pumpkins ripe and ready. Yum yum!
We also decided to take a look at the difference in the carrots we had. The first thing that strikes yu hen you looked at the carrots that we had sown was how close together they all were. It was very disappointing to think that we could have avoided this by thinning the carrots out or could have been more frugal with the carrot seed in the first place. The size of the carrots seemed to directly coincide with how close they had grown. The carrots that had space to grow were larger compared to the carrots that were all bunched together and, in some cases, twisted around one another in an attempt to get as much space as possible.
We surveyed the rest of the plot and found that we had some more crops! We had some French beans at the top of the plot. We were really pleased because there was loads of thm and we hadn't ven noticed! We picked a few and added them to our big pile of freshly picked vegetables.
