Between The Rain

In a brief interlude between deluges I managed to get a small amount of hoeing and photography in. Whether it's the rain or the slug, the carrots She Who Does Not Dig planted a few weeks show no sign of life. All there was in their rows was a small dock plant and various types of new grass. Hmmm. Whilst the rain seems to being carrots no favours, the weeds seem to be coping, they're as happy as ever. This isn't helped by both my neighbors largely abandoning their plots in the face of the 'summer' weather.



My plot is the strip of ever-so-slightly-fewer-weeds in the middle. Huge numbers of the plots are looking somewhat sorry for themselves, understandably the weather is proving rather dispiriting for many people. I need to sort out my paths, they're just growing faster than I trample them down by walking around, so I need to either cover them with something (more of the thousands of stones in my soil?) or else start to regularly cut it. Ugh.

There is positive life though, whilst many things are looking dubious the potatoes are just about to flower and now they've finally got going the sweetcorn is really going for it.

The best of the bunch though are the beans, they're covered in stunning red flowers. I hope you'll forgive me for including a couple of larger photos, they really are beautiful at the moment.

Squirrel

In the absence of much gardening to blog about I thought I'd post a picture of the young squirrel whose stealing from our bird feeder.


She Who Does Not Dig has named him Samson, and so Samson it is. We could try to drive him away to leave the seeds for the birds, but they seem utterly uninterested in them. Maybe the thousands of slugs that are out and about in this wet weather mean they're turning their noses up at our sunflower seeds. We did see a pair of bluetits feeding at it one day, but they were much more excited by the slugs on the fence than the seeds, so it looks like it's just Samson we're feeding until winter comes around.

Wet

As just about every other allotment blogger has said, it's been a rubbish few weeks with little gardening, little growing and lots of grumbling at the weather. Stop raining!

The plot appears to be surviving my neglect for the last couple of weeks - foot is now back to a normal size thankfully - and some things have even grown. The beans have shot up after I retied them a couple of weeks ago, should be laden with beans by the end of the summer.


A quick apology is needed for the quality of the photos, last nights trip was meant to a 5 minute visit to drop off kitchen waste for the compost heap. Of course this didn't happen, the potatoes that hadn't been earthed up for a while looked so much less happy than those that had, so I was forced to stop and do some digging. The lack of planning meant I didn't bring my camera, and so all the photos are from She Who Does Not Dig's mobile. Worse than poor photos I managed to destroy my shoes. Instead of nice solid gardening shoes I was in a pair of flimsy things, which didn't enjoy the work one bit. The sole is now in 2 distinct pieces. Ooops.


Due to the many interruptions to my beautiful and ambitious plans for the plot I haven't been able to dig the last of the 4 patches destined for vegetable production, so I bit the bullet, bought some matting and covered it up before it turned into a weed seed factory.

I had been resisting doing so but now I have I'm pleased with the result, it's not as ugly as expected and the whole plot looks much more under control now. More veg patch, less wildness area. I'll return later in the week with a photo of the whole patch.

And once more, STOP RAINING!