Forgot to mention...

.... the onions are not looking too bad but haven't grown as much as the garlic and shallots.  

We're going to leave it for the winter and plant some more in the spring.  If nothing else, it's best not to have everything growing all at once.  There are some other holes where some of the beans etc. haven't grown yet but again, we'll plant these in the spring with new seeds.  Hopefully this way we'll extend our crops further.

Well it sounds good in theory!!! :)

Not what we were expecting...

We had a brief visit to Doug last week and just pottered around.  As expected, the fleece had pretty much been trampled by a fox - they never have been good at disguising their footprints!!! So we lowered the fleece to ground level and pinned it back down.  Also did a bit of general weeding but otherwise not much needed doing.

This week was different....

We went down yesterday to check it out quickly as Phil was working today so it wouldn't be as easy to go.  What we found was not good.



Some not-so-nice people (probably kids but no proof either way except for the trainers being worn) had managed to destroy the cloche at the front of Doug and trample across much of the rest of him.  Most of the ground sheeting we had put down had also been ripped up.  Not sure where many of the pegs had gone, we found a few but certainly not all of them.  Our storage box had also been damaged, although not seriously.  We therefore made a quick trip to Homebase to buy more pegs and another cloche.

I went down on my bike this morning to sort it all out.  
In the end, I managed to repair much of the damaged cloche - one end is completely ruined but I was able to re-feed some of the wire supports back through the plastic and as a result was then able to re-position it over the purple sprouting broccoli.  The new cloche we bought has instead gone over the broad beans.  I re-laid the ground sheeting and put in a large selection of new pegs.  One of the neighbouring plot holders also loaned me some iron bars to help weight it down until he needs them back in the spring.  I did some extra weeding in and around all the rows so it's starting to look good again. All is not lost, it was just very annoying!

We're not sure if we'll have much time next weekend, so hopefully this week will be less eventful :)