Planning Out The Digging

Firstly, a 'Hello' if you have come here after I was brave enough to post about my blog on Beansprouts.

I have been up to the allotment since my last post, but I forgot to take the camera. The picture wouldn't have been very interesting though. Imagine lots of grass and weeds, with a bare patch of earth in the middle. And I was oh so proud of my digging too.

The amount of digging that I need to do is huge, and time is running out to get it done! I can only really get up to the allotment every other weekend, assuming that nothing else is happening. Unfortunately, there is a lot happening over the next few every other weekends. This means that I may have to be choosy over what I can plant as I am simply not going to have dug over enough ground to get it all in.

And so I need to plan out what seeds I have and when they need to go out so that I can dig accordingly. Boring, but I got to get it straight in my head.

• Potatoes will be going out quite soon, so I need somewhere for them.

• The carrots and leeks also need to go out fairly soon, so they are next in the list. The patch that I have been digging over had tomatoes in it this year, so I can't put the potatoes there. Leeks and carrotts have just had their new home identified me thinks.....
  

• The seeds that need propogating are (in order of sowing): Chilli peppers, tomatos, sweetcorn and pumpkin. They can all go in the allotment from May/June time, so that gives me some breathing space for getting some digging done. Will the first early potatoes be done by that time? I think so. Woo hoo! Less digging!

Okay, planning done. Now will everything run to plan? Course not.......

The Allotment Generally

I love the idea of growing my own stuff - low food miles, organic, watching it grow etc So I decided that I would get an allotment. I put my name down, and in late april 2007 I was told I had got one - woo hoo! It was worked for the first part of last year, but had become overgrown since then.

So what now? I had some tomato plants growing, so they were the first things in to the ground. Unfortunately, not long after that, I was told that children aren't allowed on the allotment. As I have young children, including one who was with me all the time, this severely limited my opportunities to go to the allotment. Thus my excuse for why the allotment continued to be overgrown and covered in weeds.

My youngest has now started playgroup though, so I have 2 opportunities a week to go to the allotment. I must now tackle the jungle that it has become, and bring about order from the chaos. Hah!