Spring has sprung…well, almost.
Today being the 1st of March it was appropriate that there was a definite feeling of spring in the air at the allotment. Quite a few people were there working their plots ready for planting and it was warm enough to sit outside in the sunshine.
We had yet more generosity this afternoon, particularly from Bob who gave us some wallflowers for our front and a couple of rhubarb crowns. The flowers grow quite tall so we have put them at each end of the front soil so that we can plant other flowers in between. As part of our seed order we included some flowers, so we will be putting sweet peas, dahlias and sunflowers all about the plot to bring some colour to the place other than the predominant brown!
Thanks to Bob we now have bed that is flourishing with rhubarb. One of the crowns he gave us was one of the biggest he (and us) had ever seen and this was even after he had left some of the roots in his plot! We put it in our soil just as it came and so we will probably get fruit off it this year. This is good news as all of my recent cookery magazines have been full of rhubarb recipes and so the thought of waiting another year to harvest our own was too much to bear! As an interesting aside, when Bob dug up the giant crown I noticed a cluster of wet looking spheres on one of the roots. Now, I guessed that they were eggs of some sort, but I wasn’t sure what they would grow into. I saved one for a photo as a bit of a quiz for you readers:
Drumroll please…….it is a slug egg! Now maybe it is just my ignorance, or perhaps I have never sufficiently pondered the origins of a slug before, but I genuinely did not realise that slugs produced eggs. I am not sure where I thought they came from. But now I know. It just shows that every day at the allotment is a lesson in something or other.
Whilst I was having the nature lesson from Bob, Neil was busy with the staging. He had managed a visit to the allotment yesterday so he was able to complete the staging this afternoon (even with a slightly earlier finish to allow for football watching). And very beautiful it is too. Note the slight gap on the bottom right hand side to allow Tammy continued access to what has become her sunspot.
I got on with planting the shallots which we pictured about a month ago. Advice dictates that they should be planted between mid to late February and late March so we had held off putting them in for a few weeks. But now that March has arrived, along with the sun, the time was right. Plus, a couple had started to sprout or go a bit soft so we didn’t want them to spoil. I had a bit of a dilemma, as our book recommended that they should be planted with their tips at the top of the soil but their label said that half of the bulb should be proud of the soil surface. Our expert Bob had gone home for the day so the decision was left to me. I decided to follow the book’s advice as it didn’t look quite right having so much of the bulb on top of the soil and I was worried that this might leave them vulnerable. Time will tell whether I made the right choice! I labelled the shallots, and everything else we have planted thus far, with a little wooden lolly stick which includes the variety for future reference.
The rest of my afternoon comprised of planting our apple and fig trees which arrived mid week. The apple tree is a Braeburn variety and as well as putting in a sturdy stake, we also followed a handy tip and sunk a piece of spare drainpipe just next to the tree. This has a few holes drilled in the bottom so that we can water down the pipe to get directly to the roots. The fig tree is a Violetta and didn’t really have an allocated spot. We knew it was going into a container of sorts but we didn’t have any to hand other than our wastepaper bins which are too small and the large black bins which looked too rubbishy! So Neil removed the top part of the bin until it looked a bit more like a container. This was not without incident however. In his excitement, Neil managed to cut himself with his fancy (and sharp) new saw. No photos of the resulting injury but there was plenty of blood which dripped all over the place. Not sure if that is a good fertiliser?
This signalled a good time to stop for the day. The next big job will be the cleaning of the inside of the greenhouse, a daunting task that we can put off no longer. Especially as our seed order may arrive in the next week or two. Time is ticking on!
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