As I may have mentioned before, there is a well on our allotment. It just about reaches the water table (about 4' down), and had a fairly consistent 8" or so of water until the recent dry spell, when the level dropped right off to just being generally muddy at the bottom. Mark (who shares our allotment) managed to borrow the well-digging thingy last weekend, so he and Jeremy set to trying to deepen the well.
The first idea was to climb into the well and try to dig it down from there. That didn't go so well, as there wasn't enough room to bend over inside the hole. The second idea was to put the ladder in the well and climb down it head-first by hand, to try to dig it out that way.In the end, I'm not sure what the most successful method was, but they managed to get the well about 18" deeper after a couple of hours or so, so we're back down to water again, which is brilliant. Of course, there is still the main allotment pump for water, but this will save us the walk, and we may even fit our own pump to it at some point in the future.
The potatoes are coming along very nicely, and we've been hilling all the rows that we hadn't previously got round to. I read somewhere that it was a good idea to remove the potato flowers, so that they concentrate on bulking up the tubers, rather than going to seed. So I've been round and taken off all the ones I could find. I'll probably need to go round again next weekend, as the flowers are only just appearing now.
I've now finished planting out the brassicas (no, Mr. Spellcheck, not 'brassily', and we've used a few more of the bike wheels, as you can see here. Some of the ones I planted out last week have wilted, but I'm not surprised, as some of the seedlings were very small. Anyway, it meant I could re-use those spaces in the row for the final few plants, which in turn meant that the netting was nicely wide enough to cover them all.
Here's the general overview now (as seen from the convenient vantagepoint mentioned once before!). Comparing this with the same view a month ago, you can see how much has changed & grown.
