It was all set to be a rather cold, wet and lonely allotment experience today as Neil is ‘working’ in Abu Dhabi. And so while he was on the beach in 40 degree heat I was putting on the layers to brave the wintery conditions that befell Manchester this week. Which meant that it was a lovely surprise to be visited by Pete and Suzy and the boys (‘hello William and Alex!). I think that we have two budding gardeners on our hands as they seemed to know what lots of the plants are and were keen to explore the ones that they hadn’t seen before. Alex seems to have an affinity with the chickens but we drew the line at allowing him into the chicken run despite his requests!

I seemed to have quite a few jobs to do today, I think perhaps Neil engineered this for the week that he is away to keep me busy! So what with the monthly meeting first thing this morning it meant it was a longer day at the plot than expected and ironically when I left at 4.45pm it was the best weather of the day.

Good news in the greenhouse – our first fledgling tomato! No, I am not hallucinating, look closer and you will see a little green nubbin of a tomato. Ahh, so proud. Most of the other plants have yellow flowers on, so I gave them all some tomato food. We will have to keep feeding them about once a week from now on.

Our coldframe was stuffed to the brim so it was time to plant out the courgettes. We have both green (Zucchini) and yellow (F1 Jemmer). Courgette plants are notorious for producing a huge amount, the more you pick the more they grow, so I only planted out two of each colour and even then it might be a bit of a squeeze once they start getting bushy. A handy tip from our current issue of Grow Your Own magazine is to sink the top half of a plastic juice bottle upside down into the soil near the base of the plants so that they can be fed and watered via this direct to their roots as they are quite greedy. No sooner had I planted the courgettes out the coldframe was full again! This week the sweetcorn and curly kale are being hardened off.

The next job was a bit of a rescue attempt. Neil had planted out the peas and the dwarf beans in the last fortnight and they were quite ‘leggy’. Neil ran some twine round the peas to encourage them to twist around but had run out of time to do the same with the beans. They seemed like they were perking up a bit last week but in the meantime there has been almost torrential rain for a couple of days so when I arrived on site today they were almost horizontal on the soil! I managed to tease the peas a bit taller on the string but they were actually winding round quite well. I also planted a few extra peas along the line as they can be planted quite tightly. I then ran some string around the beans and threaded them through and they look much better already. In fact one of the plants has its first flower so maybe in the next few weeks they will all be blooming!

Lastly, I planted out some red and green lettuce (lollo rosso and lollo biondi) from the greenhouse and the gem lettuces that Bob kindly gave us a few weeks ago. Fingers crossed they don’t look too tempting a treat for any birds/slugs/mice! Next week will involve more planting out of things from the coldframe and maybe some potting on in the greenhouse but it really does feel like we are on the home straight and the greenhouse is looking positively empty in comparison with the last few months. All we need now are things to eat!