Today was a momentous day, and in honour of that I'm writing in purple, we harvested our very first crop from our very own allotment. Yes, we picked purple sprouting broccoli from Doug today. And bloody Delicious it was as well, especially when served with a blue cheese sauce.

We spent most of the morning watering our crops, due to the incredibly warm weather we've been experiencing recently. We also covered over the brasiccas, beans and alliums to hopefully prevent the butterflies and pigeons devastating all of our hard work.

I was looking back over some old photographs earlier today and it was amazing to see the tiny plug plants we had put in five and half months ago now either ready for harvesting as in the case of the broccoli or coming along really well like the cauliflowers and savoy cabbages.

One of the most amazing things we noticed this week was that the peas we were growing in the greenhouse had already started to set pods. We were advised to nip these out so as to encourage further growth on the plant.

It really is a fruitful time just now with the soft fruit bushes coming along very nicely and potatoes starting to shoot and showing signs of doing very well indeed. We've also got five chilli plants on Seedney the windowsill now from Seaspring seeds that were bought at River Cottage last weekend; they are two jalapenos, two habaneros and a Dorset naga. The naga tops the scales at a million scoville heat units and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it!

Anyway we will be back on Doug on Good Friday to do what we can before we head off on a well earned break down to West Bay.