You can’t say fairer than seeing your first little shoots of stuff coming up 🙂 While the garden is fairly bursting with veggie life, the allotment is (understandably) behind it but these onions were only put in over the Royal Wedding Weekend and shoots were really exciting to see.
There was also a garlic shoot but I *ahem* weeded it before I realised. :blush:
She’s looking very much the teenager this year. As you can see, I have slotted neatly into ‘management’ on the allotment; it is the only way to keep the troops busy and happy. Everyone did a good job today, pulled all the thistles, watered it all and planted more stuff.
Fran finished the shallot patch off and Max made a broccoli patch; I did the same with cauliflowers and we’ve been warned by another plotholder to net them against pigeons.
There was consternation when we discovered two rows of onions in the pathway; the girls are blaming Grampty for this 😆 but a hasty rescue mission was launched and they were replanted in what we hope is a spare patch of earth.
We are so much novices this year that I know we’ll have some non-successes; a long chat with a neighbour today suggests we can also expect to lose a bit to opportunistic bounty hunters but otherwise it is a nice place to garden.
I’ve used GrowVeg to plan it all out though and now most of the crops are in, I’m going to start really trying to read up about each thing we’ve planted so I am ready to deal with natures pitfalls. The planning programme has masses of tips and so on but hopefully I’ll manage to Google more and add them to my Gardening with Kids page, which is undergoing a much needed revamp. Annoyingly, my old Muddlepuddle page with our first ever gardening efforts hasn’t moved right on to the new version so I’ll have to link to the very old version… but look how cute Fran was back then 🙂
Fran in 2002
Anyway, the allotment has ended up roughly like this…
Allotment Plan
Now we have to weed, water and cross our fingers. We’re 4/5 of the way through this plan, with beetroot and cabbage and celery seedlings left to go our and something in the space left for the girls beds if we conclude it isn’t going to get trashed.
Am slightly in awe of The Frantic Gardeners though; VERY impressive! When I searched on the word “garden” on this blog, I got 248 posts, rather surprisingly, but 5 years of dedicated garden blogging is a bit good.
The flower beds are changing too; the tulips will be gone soon (so will the borders if Max doesn’t get us a new lawn-mower and I don’t get out there with the shears!) but the pinks and purples are gearing up. Here come the foxgloves.
The flower beds are full of seeds from the lovely bundle of fairy goodness I got, but I think it needs some yellow and white, so just in case things don’t come up, I might indulge in some daisies or something this week, just to brighten it up. And re-tie the daffs into bundles too, it’s all looking slightly wild.
The girls have learned lots already at the allotment, which is great, and really enjoyed chatting to our neighbour today. And it is so nice to be working on it all together. Fingers crossed it ends up okay.
well … as for the errant onion seeds … i seem to remember a gust of wind blowing them out of a certain person’s little hands! But never mind … I’ll take the cop! xx
Grampty, I think that was the leeks. The onions were too big for that and were still in rows! Clearly you didn’t police the furrowing enough!
Oh no … and this after the tin-opener incident. I plead insanity or senility … either will do!!
poor grampty 😉 glad he is defending himself!! looking good tho 🙂
Helen ‘Haricot’ LOL … I expect a comment from Mr Bean any minute now
People tend to have ‘internet names’ dad, rather than their real names on the net. There is a Mr Bean and two little Beans too, known as Stringbean and Butterbean!