Signs Of Life

Stop press, hold the phone. We have life of the fruity variety. Thanks to the warm spell we've been having recently the stuff in the greenhouse has really come on, namely the tomatoes and the strawbs.

We're starting to see the first of our tomato crop appearing. Above is the Shirley variety coming through. We're also seeing the cherry tomato plants start to fruit as well so the plans beginning to come together (the coriander in the tub's not looking too bad either).

On a less positive not, the pumpkins I planted a few weeks back have not exactly thrived. In fact they've gone downhill pretty disastrously. For some reason unknown to us, all the leaves have yellowed and curled up. From my limited garden knowledge I'm assuming this is because the leaves are getting wet and fungus is probably setting in. Therefore, my attempt at a fix was to remove the worst affected leaves from the plant and to put something underneath the plant to keep it up off the floor. It may or may not work but we won't know unless we give it a go. You can see the discolouration on the leaves in the pic below:

Just to add, the one at the top is mine and the one at the bottom is my daughter's

The slug trap Squirty put in last week(under the green cover in the middle of the bed) has now been topped up and seems to be doing its job as the brassicas don't seem to have been attacked again and we now have a slimy residue in the slug trap which I assume means we have payback. Boo-yah molluscs.

Our potatoes have also shot up in the past week. We didn't have enough soil in the beds to stack up over the spud plants so we bought some new compost and piled it on. We also went around picking the flowers off the top of the potato plants in order to stop them wasting energy on flowers and to get them to concentrate on the tubers.

We haven't bothered to turn the compost in as we might disturb the growth that's already occurred, instead we've dumped it on top of the soil in the hope that the rain will leech the good stuff into the soil.

In other news, here is the rest of the good stuff:

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Murder, Murder! Someone Call the Allotment Police

It's a sad day for the allotment. I arrived today to find that our local slug population have decided to test our brassicas out. They've done a pretty good job of decimating the plants and we are suitably unimpressed. I'm thinking we need to get some protection around these in the vain hope that they'll come back.
I've loads of empty plastic bottles at home so I reckon we'll make some cloches from those to support them a bit. Also gonna be getting some cheapo lager in to create a slug trap for the pesky buggers.

the murder scene

My main bit of work this week was clearing the open bed at the very back of the plot to make a bit of a flower garden for my daughter. I threw the rule book out when it came to looking cool in order to clear this patch. In order to avoid getting nettle stings all over my hands, I invested in a pack of marigold washing up gloves and went to work. I wish I had a before picture for this part of the allotment but I didn't think to take one first. Here's the end result though:

You can see the rhubarb to the left. There's also some cornflowers at the very back. I bought a few random packs of flower seeds and sowed them all over the shop with some deliberately placed sunflower seeds towards the front. Now it's just a waiting game.

Our pal Michael has given us another gift today (the guy is a legend!). He was showing us round his plot and we got talking about his gooseberry bushes and how easy they are to grow on from cuttings. Then he offered us one as he's got loads. Not being ones to turn down freebies, we got the plant and took it back to our plot. I'm not expecting miracles out of it this year but it's gonna be doing us proud in next year. Here he is:

Also happening this week, we did a little tidy up in the greenhouse as the shelving was starting to lean forwards (a little too far for my liking) but it's amazing what a rolled up bit of newspaper can fix! The tomato plants are still coming along a treat. A couple of them are starting to curl up a wee bit and we're not 100% sure what the deal is. We're gonna keep them watered and hope that they sort themselves out. If anyone out there knows what the problem is, just drop us a message on the blog. 

And to finish, here are the other bits and bobs and how they're looking:

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