Can you dig it?

Serious digging today. Joined up beds 2 and 3, 4 and 5 and redug bed 7. Did large portions of bed 8 and removed about 50% of the carpet. Evil, evil stuff. It's biodegradable, they say, meaning you have semi permanent lumps of the stuff to make your spade go 'doooing.' and jar your back. Ugh.

The allotment looks like a tip while I move things around. Big fire tomorrow night, a bit of tidying up, and some photos to follow.

I need to weed! A lot!

Here's a picture of a lovely autumn visitor to our homes, that I found in ours, last night. The fastest running true spider lives in England and he is Tegenaria gigantea (aka Tegenaria duellica) - the giant house spider. Totally harmless. What you most often see is the male of species running around in Autumn, looking for a female to give him a hard time.



"Roll on tomorrow, onward verily again to our realms!"
The unknown gardener.

Some shots from today

Decided to get serious with my intervention between bramble and Russian vine, two plants I've come to realise have a massive sense of self entitlement. Nothing grows underneath them though, which means we have an almost clear bed of leaf mould, so it's not all bad.


Some pics from today, hopefully not too random :)




Also, I saw my first Harlequin today. Last year the media did their best to replace their usual "OMG we're all gonna die!" with "OMG all the lady birds are going to die!" due to the arrival of these little beasties. Well I've seen loads of two and seven spots this year and this is the first Harlequin I've come across. And it didn't even bite me.

Got a bit done today

Rachael did a bit of weeding and I looked after the kids till she went home. Once I was on my own I had a bit of a go at the Russian vine that's costing us the bottom ten feet of our allotment and swamping our shed almost totally on most of one side and completely on the other. I found a fruiting Elder tree under it, which was quite a nice surprise. I think a few days of concerted effort might actually get it under control. Will endeavor to do it this week. As usual topped off the water butts and watered the greenhouse growbags.



Rachael came across a recipe in the River Cottage cookbook for pickled Nasturtium seed pods, which odd as it sounds, taste reminiscent of capers, and possibly better. We've got lots of nasturtiums so we found some pods and tried a few raw, and they are very nice indeed. Will pickle the few dozen we have and report back.

We dug up our first potatoes today, the yield is pretty low, probably because we didn't manure properly, but the spuds themselves are very good. We had them with a melange of courgettes and beans and a salad of lettuce and my own radish pickle - all from the allotment. Very nice indeed.

The allotment fed me today.

Been picking at stuff all day, but actually put a summer salad on the table that was 100% allotment grown. I haven't started actually murdering my own pigs yet, so the ham was bought in. Very satisfying (not to mention enormously tasty!)



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