Rediscovering the soil

Having finally moved into our new house, we've been catching up on the allotment over the past few weeks. Thanks mainly to Ellie, I think, it'd been kept in check over the summer, but there were areas where the weeds were close to winning the battle, such as in the brassica area, so it was time to set to and fight back.

The beans, by contrast, have fought off the weeds and become a heaving mass of greenery near the allotment gate. Another year, we'll know not to fiddle around with pieces of string, but just get a load of bamboo canes and let them grow up those.



The squashes have also been doing well. The seeds we planted were a packet of 'mixed pumpkins and squashes', so we weren't terribly sure what to expect. This one appears to be a ... curly yellow squash.





Here's another one, probably a pumpkin this time, with me next to it for scale. I wonder when these should be harvested?



Onto the aforementioned brassicas. We'd covered them in butterfly-proof netting, to stop the cabbage whites eating them to death like last year. The netting was holding up just fine, but most of the vegetation inside wasn't brassicas...

We extracted the edges of the netting from the ground-level weeds, and rolled it back as far as we could, squashes permitting. Now that we had good access to the weeds, they were easy to pull out, and there were a reasonable number of pretty healthy looking brassicas in there, which was encouraging.


Talking of the squashes, here's my mum amongst them. They'd spread all over the place, including up the fence and up and over the brassica netting, so we've had to gently reroute some of them out of the way. I think they've all survived the experience, though.