Mid-May

The allotment as it stands today.  We picked up a bag of Sante maincrop potatoes at the weekend at the Chatsworth Garden Centre for the princely sum of £2 for 45 or so seed potatoes.  This was something of a bargain!  We also picked up some lettuce seeds and some cucumber seeds.  Not quite such a bargain - but the cucumber seeds were a much better deal than the £4 for 5 seed packet that I first chanced upon!

I have had my first strawberry from the new strawberry plants.  There are more coming along.

We still have had no significant rain, although mercifully no more severe frosts either.  But the vegetables and fruit trees are all rather thirsty.  But it has also been very much cloudier, cooler and windier over the past couple of days with odd spots of rain.

The Builder has been doing a great job working on the veg beds and has now turned his attention to the shed at the bottom of the garden.  He has been slowly but surely emptying it out, and moving all the junk up to the top of the driveway.  This has attracted the attention of a couple of "rag and bone" men, or scrap merchants as they call themselves, who (with permission, of course) have been gleefully clearing away all the metal rubbish. Saves us hiring a skip!

The flower garden is still looking beautiful.  The plants in the pond seem to have recovered from their ruthless uprooting, chopping and replanting and are beginning to grow again.  The seedlings in the greenhouse are flourishing.  The new asparagus plants and putting up more spears. We are eating the spears from the old plants. The allotment is almost entirely under cultivation now.  All is good :-)