New Season

There's been a lot of progress on the allotment over the winter, with various people lending a hand with digging over the beds that we hadn't got to at all last year. We also now have 2 new people on board, each with their own areas to look after, so we can now focus on our 3 large beds and the fruit at the far end.



The onions, garlic, daffodils and tulips that we planted at the end of the last year are starting to come up now, so we have some early signs of life to encourage us. Here's a photo of the daffs.




I also tried out the hoe for the first time this weekend just gone. Last year, we were so busy digging over new areas that we didn't have the chance to tend the areas we'd planted in, and lost a fair few crops to weeds. I managed to hoe all of this area in about half an hour, if that, which bodes well for the rest of the year.



Finally, we've started off the potatoes chitting in the shed at home. We bought 4 bags of potatoes at the end of last year, and when we opened them on Saturday we discovered that they'd all got a bit damp - probably from the frost a few weeks back. Still, most of them dried off just fine by rubbing them in newspaper - this picture is about 2/3 of them; the rest are chitting by balancing on the barbecue! The ones that still looked a bit odd we planted at home, in a spare corner, just in case they do manage to produce anything.