Our Allotment

This weekend Julie was at college during the day, so there wasn’t a lot of free time to visit the allotment. Nevertheless, the girls and I did manage to grab an hour or so to pop in and tidy up a little.

The girls were nervous about weeding, but once they figured out which was what they were pulling out tiny nettle seedlings quite happily. The Roo bimbled around as usual, helping himself to blackberries and walking on the beds to enjoy my reaction.

Our one unpleasant surprise was finding that someone (or, more likely, something) had uprooted two of the lovely asparagus plants so kindly donated by Bob. Judging by the shape of the holes and the copious prints left on the membrane nearby, our prime suspect is a local fox. I had no idea that foxes liked asparagus to go with their chicken. Urban foxes clearly have sophisticated tastes…

The uprooted plants weren’t far from their holes, and the roots didn’t look too badly damaged or dried out, so we re-planted them and gave them a generous splash of water. With luck they may pull through…

I remembered to take some photos this time, and in uploading them I came across a picture we took when we were laying the membrane last weekend. it was a rather bizarre-looking spider which Julie spotted. We’d never seen anything like it, but it turns out (thanks to Google) that this is something called Argiope bruennichi or the Wasp spider. The photo I took was blurred and black-and-white, but here’s a dedicated page…

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Julie discovered a couple of marrows in the back garden which had hidden undetected for long enough to grow to a remarkable size. Clearly too good for eating, the plan is to follow some instructions from the interweb to make these into marrow rum.

If you look very carefully at the bed next to the kids above, you’ll see little hints of green apprearing. Those are our “early” peas! Growing! If only the forecast for the next week weren’t as bleak as it is (ugh) I’d be reasonably confident that something might come of them…