Mud, mud, glorious mud

We popped to the allotment last weekend, only for it to start raining and the ground slowly turn to mud under our boots. I guess everything was still waterlogged from the rain, sleet and snow the previous week. We picked some brussels sprouts and Adam put some manure on a few more of the beds, but really it wasn't the weather to be outside. There's nothing worse than tramping around a muddy allotment, your feet twice their usual size because of the clogging, oozing, sticky, gloopy, murky, mucky mud, and three times as heavy, and the rain somehow seeping down the back of your trousers when you bend over to dig. Yuck! So we went home.



But today we've spent a couple of hours catching up. Adam carried the compost bin from home to be added to the big heap - all that chicken poo (chickens poo a lot!) is going to do some good - and I carried the last of three big ex-olive-importing drums to use as a water butts. After getting the cricks out of our backs we sowed the first double row of broad beans, and also planted about 100 Centurion onions and sixty-something shallots too. In the picture above, the first three beds on the right are now full of onions, shallots and garlic... plus a patch of chard which went in before the winter.

The rhubarb is starting to make an appearance, breaking through the earth like some kind of weird creature. We'll have to find a big bucket and force it again as it was really tasty last year.

It's a good feeling to have got some things in the ground, especially as it's Six Nations season now, so we keep getting distracted at the weekends. Ah well, as long as we get the parsnips sown in time, I'm sure everything else can manage without us for a little bit.