"Oh, to be young and in shorts"

After hearing the above said on Scrubs on TV, Adam seems to have adopted it as his motto - to be quoted when the sun is shining and he wishes his legs were on show. Today was a gorgeous day - felt more like April than January - and so the shorts were most definitely on.

It hasn't rained for a couple of days so the ground was dry enough to plant our onion and shallot sets. We've created a big bed specifically for oniony things, except leeks, which'll go somewhere else where they can stay put over the winter. We've now got a few rows of garlic, the earliest of which were planted about a month ago, and are already growing, plus about 45 shallots, which will multiply, and at least a million onions. (More like a hundred, actually, but still - I think we may have overestimated our onion consumption.) Here's me (or at least my legs) watering the onion bed.

Also made a start on The Biggest Strawberry Patch In The World, which may have developed its own currency and capital city, it has got that huge. Seriously, the little blighters have sent runners off everywhere. The patch came as part and parcel of the plot, and last summer produced tonnes and tonnes of strawberries. I'd made a feeble effort to weed the patch when we first got the plot in late April 07, but the ground was baking hard and I only got about a third of the way through before deciding that in fact it would probably be ok, seeing as how it'd survived at least one year of total neglect. But, this is the season of Getting The Allotment Organised, so the dreaded task could be put off no longer. It had to be tackled head-on. After attempting to weed between each individual strawberry plant, I decided that was a silly idea and would take the best part of a year. The thing to do was to dig the whole patch, pull out weeds and strawberry plants alike, and then re-plant the best strawberries in sensible rows - all the easier to put straw down between them and to pick the tasty fruit in the summer.

Didn't get very far. There are so many weeds - including bindweed roots - that I only dug about a quarter of the total amount in 2 hours! But we do now have one nice strawberry patch - one of an intended four - looking all neat and tidy.

We also met some new allotmenteers, Peter and Jenny, who have taken on a plot near to ours. They're friends of Phil, who's got a plot next-door-but-one from us, the other side of the giant blackberry bush. It's nice to see some more people in the area around us, not only for the purposes of having a chat, sharing tips and getting to know everyone, but also because the more plots near us that are tended, the fewer the number of weeds that'll set seed and blow onto our freshly turned earth, where they'll decide it's nice and put down endless roots.

And it's nearly February already! Time to plant broad beans methinks...