It's cold again

Wow, looks like February has finally remembered that it’s winter. Frosty mornings, ice in the water butt, frozen earth. Brr.

But we have seen the first onion set poke above the soil. Which is good. After we got carried away and planted the whole lot of onions and shallots a couple of weeks ago I was worried that they’d got frozen or rotted in the damp below the ground. But now I have hope. Fingers crossed that most of them will come up ok! Roll on spring…

No sign of the broad beans yet either. On Sunday I made a makeshift cloche out of bamboo canes and corrugated plastic which’ll hopefully keep most of the chill off the row, and then I also sowed another double row of beans alongside.

Adam did more digging (good man!), and I thought about tackling more of the strawberry patch before the weeds take over, but then I had a closer look, and chickened out and started a fire to burn all the twiggy weeds and dry grasses. (Mearing! Hurrah!)

We also took one of our compost bins from home to the plot. We’ve used cheap plastic dustbins, with some holes drilled in, for all our kitchen waste. We didn’t think it was very well composted – there were lots of big lumps on top – so we were going to add it to our heap on the allotment to give it a kick-start (it’s currently lacking greenery), but when we took the top layer off, underneath was nice and brown and crumbly - yeay! So we’ll keep the precious stuff separate, ready to add to the soil where it’s needed in a month or so.

We’re also planning on creating a compost trench when we’ve decided where the runner beans are going to go. It’s dead simple - you just dig a trench in the ground, add a whole load of kitchen waste in the bottom of it, and fill the soil in over the top. If we do this a couple of months before we plant beans on top, by the time the seedlings are sending down roots the kitchen waste will have rotted down, giving lots of lovely nutrients. And more beans for us. Fab.