Sorry for the lack of photo’s in this post, someone* forgot the camera today.  Well it feels like it has been quite a weekend – we are tired enough to suggest that we have got a lot done, but our plot it doesn’t particularly look like we have got anything done.  Why? Well, we had a community job to do on Saturday – a job which we volunteered for last weekend then promptly forgot about until we were half way round Sainsburys on Saturday morning – helping clear out an unusable plot for  some allotment chickens.  We have put our names down to look after them with a few other people.  Having chickens is something we have pined after for a while but it was never going to happen whilst we don’t have a garden.  The allotment rule book says you can have chickens and one plot holder has a couple of geese, but looking after them on your own requires a dedication to visiting the plot that we probably couldn’t commit to.  However, sharing this with a few others seems to make perfect sense.  Plus, what were we going to do with 6 eggs a day anyway?

So we spent Saturday afternoon in the sun with quite a few other plot holders (and a few beers) and made some great progress clearing the plot.   It really is quite amazing how much you can do when everyone gets involved, by the end of the day we’d even laid a lawn and dug out a pond.  This was good – especially so given that we weren’t dressed for the allotment (it’s pretty hard digging a pond when you are wearing pumps for example).  I must also thank Pilla for having the foresight to put some suncream in the shed – if anyone can get burnt in Manchester in April it’s me.  We then realised we had stayed a bit longer than we meant to and had to rush off home before going to a comedy gig in Warrington.

We only managed to get to the plot after 12noon today and we had to leave before 4pm to get home for the football (which I wish I hadn’t bothered about now!).  We had quite a lot to do and actually could have stayed and done a lot more.  First up, some of our seedlings needed potting on. We don’t really have many appropriately sized pots so we had to visit the store.  50 bigger pots, 5 grow bags and 15 eight foot canes later we were all done (this is not the last of of our grow bag or cane needs either, more to follow).  Before we started on the seedlings we had our onions to plant out.  Spacings are bothering us right now – the packets are pretty vague (15-30cm between rows? That’s quite a big difference!) and you can plant tighter together in raised beds, so how close should they be?  Well, we don’t know so we just guessed a bit and we’ll see what happens.   If the onions don’t grow so big we’ll just tell everyone they were shallots!  Planting always seems to take a surprising amount of time for us, once you have hoed the soil for lumps , weeded it, discussed spacings, found something to make a hole and finally planted, you don’t get change from a hour.

We then moved our broad beans into the cold frame to harden off (no giggling in the back there) and set about potting on.  I guess we both thought that would be a pretty easy job – pop the seedlings out, into a new pot, done.  Well it didn’t really work like that for us, we both seemed to think we made a right mess of it and it took ages!  We’ll see what happens with the cabbage, sweetpeas and sprouting broccoli we did.

Speaking of sweetpeas, we need to figure out what we are going to grow them up (we actually need several things because we have about a million of them).  I’ve become slightly obsessed this week about this and the support for some of the beans.  I’m going to have a go at bending some canes over between the two rows of beds to create some arches – they are not long enough to do this without some sort of prop at head height so I had a test with a couple of canes and I think it will work pretty well.  I’ll also thread cane between the vertical pieces to form a kind of cane trellis.  We’ll just do the one bed for now maybe (I have designs on creating an arch for the front of the plot too)  if it works it’ll give us quite a lot of extra growing space as we should be able to hang baskets from the top – although this really depends on my cane bending and knot tying skills.

* It was me.