Spring has sprung (for now)

Well it's been a while since I took responsibility for writing the blog so after a productive morning on the allotment I thought I would put fingers to keyboard and drone on for a while.

It was our first visit to Doug for a while where we could actually do any sort of sustained work. The past few weeks the ground has either been too frozen or in the case of last week too wet. I think if we had tried last week we would have ended up with an allotment that looked like a film set for one of the more gory scenes of War Horse.

However, this morning was a real shorts and t-shirts job and we got stuck into it. Between Mary and I we managed to plant out three more rows of potatoes (more Purple Majesty and some Pink Fir Apple), a new purple gooseberry that we picked up the other week that's sprouting well, some oregano for the herb patch along with some purple basil (though to be honest neither of us is holding out much hope for the basil) and a few more broad bean plants to replace those that got battered by the frosts earlier in the year. We've also been advised to get our pea plants into the ground so that's on the list for next week.

After the planting it was a case of some long overdue weeding and tidying up - that seems to be one of those jobs that never goes away. Why do weeds grow quicker and better than the plants you want to grow? Over to you boffins!

The established crops are all looking really good at the moment. All of our fruit canes and bushes are coming well into bud or are already in leaf. if everything was to fruit heavily there will be an awful lot of jam doing the rounds; you have been warned. All of the brassicas are starting to get nice and leafy; I've been really surprised how few we lost to insects and cold. Here's hoping our luck holds. The best surprise though was the shoots starting to come through on the purple sprouting broccoli. Suddenly I find myself looking forward to eating veg as we will have grown it!

All of the onions and garlic seem to be coming along nicely although Mary and I did stump ourselves this morning. We asked ourselves the question of "when do you harvest garlic?" and neither of us really had any idea, so some research required there or answers on the back of a postcard please!