It’s Pilla’s 29th birthday today and we celebrated it in style.  Allotment style of course.  We’ve had another big break in blogs, for which we are very sorry but it’s been a combination of a) not getting down to the plot that much recently and b) not much going on at the plots.   Well, I say not much going on, this is actually my favourite time of year.  The weeds are not growing, the place is quiet and you actually feel like you are making progress with the plots, it’s just that there is not that much interesting stuff to report.  The day was slightly interrupted today with the annual allotment task of signing up the other plot holders and payment of rents but we managed to get lots done over the weekend none the less.

On Saturday Philippa spent her last few hours as a 28 year old by removing all the old plants from the greenhouse which is now almost completely empty and giving it a good clean out.  It only seems like a few weeks ago we could hardly get in there and now there is not a single plant growing!  I tidied up the raspberry canes on plot 97 by removing the canes that had fruited this year and tying up the new growth.  There are probably about three times as many canes as last year and we were overrun with raspberries so it’s a little bit frightening how many we might get next year.

We’ve been talking for a while about getting a little tea shed on 118, before we could do this we needed a shed base, which I made on Saturday with a layer of sand and 8 of the 2″ by 3″ flags.  It started level enough but by the time you have laid a few of those flags you get pretty tired and in the end it’s probably best described as ‘level enough’.  It now sits proudly next to the greenhouse base.  We did have a plan to put the greenhouse up today but we probably couldn’t have done it in the time we had available, so instead I decided to make a brick path to both the shed and the greenhouse.  I think they are best described as rustic!  No-one could describe them as level and if you hit the right bricks there are definitely a few wobbles, but it is a good way of using up lots of the bricks we have dug up over the plot.  Pilla sorted through the many pots we had of spent compost and grow bags from the greenhouse and spread it all over the asparagus bed.

We’ve harvested our first sprouts since the last blog (of which Pilla ate three, a record!) and today took our first parsnips.  What with the beetroot, cabbage and kale we are well into our winter crops already.