May... oh my.

It's gone, already, hasn't it. We're halfway through the year and I don't even feel like 2010 has really started yet!

So here's an update on the month that was May...

We had purple sprouting broccoli. And Lo! it was goo-o-od.

The strawberries started flowering. Pollinate, bees, pollinate!

The rhubarb went a bit crazy. We had to give loads away, and then make more rhubarb-and-orange-flavoured vodka. Mmm... ready in a couple of months...

We got new neighbours over the other side of the crookedy fence. I'll try not to mind that their new shed shades our garlic bed in the afternoon.

At the start of the month we sowed a whole load of seeds - sweetcorn, green and yellow courgette, cucumber, butternut squash and a few different varieties of winter squash. Along with the tomato and pepper plants they’re in our tiny plastic greenhouse at home, but will be heading outside onto the plot any day. We’re a bit behind with these - most of the other allotmentholders have already got their tomatoes and squash in the ground. But a nice lady from the next plot along gave us three summer squash plants and another butternut, and Frank The Italian gave us some tomato plants (he'd already planted 300!), so hopefully we’ll have a few things which are in line with everyone else!

Our broad beans are flowering, and our peas and French beans are growing steadily. I built a complicated bird-deterrent using netting, canes, string and plastic bags (which I home will flap and rustle in a threatening manner) so hopefully that’ll keep off the pigeons.

Onions and garlic also growing away, as well as our potatoes - which got a bit frosted at the start of the month but seem to have recovered well. The 2 elephant garlic look like leeks! God only knows how big the cloves will be!

And generally, day to day, we’ve been fighting with the weeds that are continually trying to take over.

Strawberry time

How time flies. Look, it's already mid-June and I haven't put a proper posting on here since the end of May. I'd better do a bit of an update...

As the heading suggests, it's strawberry season! Yum! The patch isn't quite as chaotic as last year as we've weeded and sorted out half of it (with a bit of help from Jo) which makes it much easier to pick the little red gems of deliciousness. I'm not sure if we'll have the glut we did last year either, but I'm hoping so as I've now got a foolproof jam recipe (with extra pectin) and I want to make daiquiri cocktails, which Sian suggested last year but I never got around to doing. The picture is of the Very First Strawberry of 2008.

The carrots and parsnip are a total disaster. I made a second sowing a few weeks ago but we've double and triple checked and I think there's three, maybe four coming through. That's hardly even a mouthful. It's reassuring to hear that other people have also failed with carrots this year. We haven't yet seen any sign of the French beans which Sian and I planted either. Most of the runner beans have come through, but the French beans are sulking I think. I've popped a few more in, just in case. And we've given up on the cabbages as well. they all got so aphid-y and misshapen that although they tasted great, they were a pain in the bum to clean up. Plus the aphids had transferred to the red cabbage too which was a Bad Thing. I've cleaned up the red cabbage and moved four of them to the failed carrot bed in the vain hope that the aphids won't be able to find them again!

Another area which hasn't gone quite according to plan is the far end of the plot. Our mini-field of sweetcorn has had a really low germination rate, so it's more like a mini-mini-field... We'll have to buy some more kernels and bung 'em in, quick. Our courgettes have also been disappointing. We planted them in exactly the same way as we did last year, except this year we've got a grand total of three plants out of nine... three (count them!) Bah! I think we'll have to throw in the towel and buy some plants from the garden centre.

I also planted some squash and pumpkin seeds at home in toilet rolls and only 4 out of 20 have germinated. I think I'm losing my green fingers! But all is not lost. As we were walking back from the allotment last weekend we went for a chat with Mike and Louise, (who have a fantastic bed of asparagus, grown from seed!) and Louise offered us some squash plants! We ended up coming away with two courgette and four squashes. Hurrah! They also have a blackbird nesting on the back shelf of their greenhouse. Might try and get a picture if I can.

But anyway, onto the successes. Other than the strawberries, we've got broad beans that are nearly ready to pick (we ate some small beans fresh from the pod yesterday and they were really tasty), the peas, mange tout and sugar snap are just starting to flower, and one of the globe artichokes is budding. The salad bed is doing fine, with peppery radishes and chunky lettuce, although the spinach in the corner has bolted. Potatoes and tomatoes are also doing well so far, and we've got some outdoor cucumbers which are nearly ready to be planted out. The asparagus peas are coming up as well, plus there's the onions, garlic and shallots which are just happy doing their own thing. And I'm happy to leave them to it, especially when they're doing so well.

The onions are getting fatter, and look! Actual shallots!

In the seed bed we've got brussels sprouts and kohl rabi, and lots of little leeks, half of which are nearly pencil thickness, which means they're almost ready to be planted out. We also have a few broccoli seedlings coming up, and - over in the failed carrot bed - we have a couple of rows of swede have just germinated. I planted some more yesterday 'cos there's nothing nicer than some swede mashed with carrots, and we've got lots of... oh.

Adam continues his battle with the bindweed. He's getting there, slowly. He's also used the last of the scavenged pallets to make the cold frame taller as we realised that things like tomatoes wouldn't have enough headroom. Here's his handywork - Ta Daa!

Off to pick strawberries this morning to take to parents' barbeque. Mmm.

"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...