That's what friends are for...

Sian and James visited last weekend for some allotment pottering and tea drinking. It's great to have friends who are also interested in the art (!) of growing stuff to eat, especially now the weeds have started growing - we need all the help we can get!

The weather wasn't great - there was some shed-sheltering involved - but we managed to get outside for long enough to get lots done. The men went on a pallet scavenging expedition and came back with 3 pallets (bravo!) so built a new compost heap. The other one is quite full so now we can leave it alone for a while to make us some nice, crumbly compost, ready for next year.

While Adam and James did some digging and bindweed removing (grr, we hate bindweed) Sian and I built a couple of rows of cane supports, and sowed runner beans and french beans below the posts. We also weeded the seed bed (Sian was very useful, mainly for identifying the brussels sprouts seedlings among the weeds, not so much with the removal of slugs...) and sowed more rows of leeks, brussels sprouts and kohl rabi, plus a row of swede as well.

I'm really hoping that we can have all our Christmas vegetables from the allotment this year. That's assuming that more brussels sprouts plants germinate, as we've only got a pathetic 4 at the moment, one of which has been nibbled... Oh, and the new rows of carrots we sowed haven't germinated yet either. Maybe it's a bad year for carrots. They were fine last year, except that they grew in some interesting directions because our ground is quite stony, but that doesn't affect the taste.

Oh, here's a random picture of a clump of shallots, just because it looks interesting.

And here's a sort of an overview picture so you can all see how much things are growing and how nice and green it all looks. Check out the giant bean supports we built! They're at least 7 feet tall, so we're expecting good things from our runner beans!