Spring has Sprung!

Well, here we are again, finally getting around to blogging after a few months of work on the allotment! We've had some very strange weather this spring so far, excessive rain, drought (allegedly!), frost, all sorts!! Sadly our lovely bargain basement greenhouse fell victim to a rather nasty storm a few weeks ago and all the seedlings we had on the go were scattered across the allotment and sadly met their very watery maker. Thankfully we've been doing all sorts of stuff on the allotment over the past few months and not all of it has been in vain. We've had a couple of sunny weekends and today was a great day to do a bit of pottering about and soak up the sun whilst christening the BBQ.

So far we've got onions, potatoes, beetroot, lettuce, peppers, chillis, strawberries, peas, tomatoes and garlic all peeking out the ground (some much more than others!). We've also recently sown carrots, radishes, squash, pumpkins, spring onions, beans, cucumbers, aubergines and courgettes so hopefully some of these will make an appearance soon.

We've also got some fruit bushes starting to flourish, including raspberries, blueberries and blackcurrants, as well as a cute little apple tree.

The shed has also had a new lease of life, thanks to Matt who's put in a lot of hard work re-roofing and re-painting it and also installing all the guttering and the new water butt. It's looking much smarter and the water butt is a god send!

Winter Progress...

Well, it's been a while since we updated the blog but here we go! It's seemed as though there wasn't much point blogging each time we went down to the plot over the winter as all we did was dig and there's not a lot to write about that! Looking back at our last post though we can see how much progress we made, despite the torrential rain we seemed to have most weekends.

We've totally cleared the left hand side of the plot and dug it over a few times. Our weed mountain has been moved, added to and turned over a few times. A lot of the stuff in there has now died off which is good to see and there is a lot of salvageable soil in there now.
We've marked out a few beds for planting in so we can concentrate on keeping those weeded and tidy. We've had a big pile of manure delivered which we'll spread once we've got ourselves a wheelbarrow. Today we also erected a plastic greenhouse which we bought a few weeks ago. Cheap and cheerful but we hope it'll do the trick. There's plenty of room inside to walk around so we'll pop a table or something in there and get some pots to start some seeds off in.
We've just had a week of frosty weather so we're glad we didn't start planting the week before (we were debating it but thankfully decided to wait). We're now at the stage where we can get planting so that will be our next job. There are some other important things to do such as installing guttering and a water butt as well as re-roofing the shed as it is getting a bit damp and looking a little ramshackle! Matt is also going to get some grass seed as we've set an area aside as a sunbathing/BBQ patch in the hope we get a decent summer so we want to have some nice grass to sit on.
This is my first attempt at blogging from the phone so here's hoping it works!