The weather was very good to us over the weekend (apart from the lack of rain!), so we got a lot done up at the allotment. The broad beans now have a supporting structure made from various odds & ends of string, and the peas have a wonderful cane-and-string contraption to support them too.
There are more signs of life in the fruit area - budding apples on the trees and flowers on the blackberry bush. The raspberries canes also have small green proto-raspberries where the flowers were, and ...
... our first strawberry! it's still very small, but we put some straw under it to make sure it doesn't rot - although in this weather, there's not much chance of that!
We got a lot of structural work done on the fruit cage - I'll call this section "Things not try at home". Number 1: standing on the end of an upturned cylinder. Actually surprisingly stable, it turns out.
Number 2 - repeatedly lifting and dropping the pole-bashing thingy to ram the posts in properly. The label on the side says "safety helmets must be worn". We only had 2 helmets, though, and a 3rd person was needed to hold the fencing away from the post while it was being bashed... I didn't stand too close, though!
Number 3: Standing with your arms raised in the full sun for several hours with no suncream - a recipe for sunburn, it turned out. This picture was when we were re-tensioning the wire. We can now walk freely underneath it without garotting ourselves!
And finally for the photos, some wildlife! I found all sorts of things on the apple tree leaves - 2 types of caterpillar and a snail (about 5' off the ground!). The apple trees don't seem to mind, though.
In non-photographic news, I planted out the spring onions and leeks in between the rows of tulips. I've left the cabbage and Brussels seedlings up there, under the lettuce netting - I didn't get the chance to plant them out in the end. Meanwhile, Jeremy sowed two rows of runner beans by the gate, and two rows of climbing French beans slightly further along the bean bed. Ellie had some spare Pak Choi as well, which is now in the salad bed, along with another row of freshly-sown lettuce. The squashes are now out in the left half of the 3rd bed and in a bit of Lin's plot, next to the potatoes.
The 3rd bed had some more digging too (thank you, Ellie!), so we're getting towards the point of being able to plant out the sweetcorn. It's now up at the allotment ready for the planting, but that'll be next weekend now. I hope we'll get some rain before then, but failing that we'll all pop up at some point during the week and do some watering to keep it all happy.
3 comments:
I think the caterpillar is a yellow tail moth - Europroctis similis. See Flickr for pictures of this species.
Wow, looks like you've been verrry busy. I'm dreading getting up to the plot at the moment as I've not been for a week or so and I just know it'll be weed covered by now... :S
We took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to get stuff done. There's a load more stuff to plant out, though, so that's this weekend's job. I'm very impressed by your greenhouse, by the way - very neat & tidy, and I never thought of having a bedding area inside the greenhouse before - I'd only ever thought about having things in grow bags and in pots. I must investigate what's possible with the greenhouse that comes with our new house, once we've got the keys!
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