Allotment 9/8/10

I love this time of year. All the hard work that you have put in is literally bearing fruit (and veg). Just yesterday, for instance (and I use it as an example because it was a really good day) we bought home onions, peas, mange tout, 3 types of bean, radishes, lettuces, cucumber, courgette (anyone want a courgette by the way?) beetroot, carrots and my special prize, more on that later. Basically at this time of the year we can feed ourselves with vegetables. It is a joy to behold. Yes, you have to keep weeding and looking after things but it is so much more rewarding when come home with a bag full of things.

 And now back to my special prize. When I was looking on a seed selling website at the beginning of the year for tomatoes that don’t get blight (I bought a bush variety called Koralik and so far so good, fingers crossed though) I noticed some melon seeds that the website claimed would grow outside in the UK, I think I have mentioned this before. Anyway the seed were 99p so I thought I would loose less then £1 if they didn’t grow. I can confirm that my investment of 99p was well worth it,

To be honest I was a little inpatient. Some websites said that I would know when the fruit was ripe because it would smell of melon; well I think I may have detected the slight whiff of melon ness but that was probably wishful thinking. It has been looking the same for several weeks and I just wanted to pick it and see. Yes it is childish but I do have another 7 fruit to be more patient with if this one really isn’t ripe. We are giving a couple of days in the fruit bowl to see if we can make it smell melony. I tell you how it goes.

Allotment 25/1/10

I have finally made it back to the allotment. There has finally been a break in the not-letting-me-get-to-the-allotment weather. After weeks of frozen soil and snow followed by a lot of rain, today is just grey. It is cold but not cold enough for the soil to be impenetrable to my fork.
It has been about a month since I had last been there so I expected the worst. I expected all my crops to be dead, yet I also thought that the weeds would have managed to have survived the winter and grown spectacularly. I assumed that my plot would be completely over grown with grass and bindweed. Yet again my logic and knowledge of plants let me down.
Because of the fact that it is winter nothing had really grown. Neither the vegetables nor the weeds. Bare earth was still bare earth. Big, very pretty ice crystals all over it, but it was still bare. Oh the joy. I had thought that I was going to have so much work to do.

This was not the only surprise. I had left the cloches over the salad leaves but thought nothing of it. They are summer plants after all so they’ll be dead now. Oh how wrong I was. A quick peak under the plastic presented me with a very pleasing sight. Some had survived. Oh yes, I picked fresh salad leaves in January. The rocket doesn’t look to good but had survived but the other one that I don’t know the name of is doing very well. Hurray for nature I say.

So there wasn’t that much for me to do today except a little light digging and I put some broad beans in, they do pretty well at sorting themselves out. Some parsnips were found as well.
To be honest I wasn’t looking forward to today but in the end it was really rather lovely being the only one there on a Monday morning.