Allotment Betrayal

We are sharing our allotment plot with a local school. We have been given half, they have been given half. We have been working darn hard on our half... well we had, up until about the middle of Oct, when it turned yucky and muddy and very cold. So I haven't been down there since. But up until then we had worked very hard to clear the surface and dig it over etc. The half claimed by the school was untouched.

BUT NOW... my partner in allotmenting went down there yesterday because a friend of hers was delivering a bunch of rubble for us to use to help our pathetic drainage. And the school side is completely cleared, completely dug over and even has drainage pipes running through it and out the other side to where, allegedly, the allotment chiefs are going to be running some drainage pipes.

I am really peeved because now we look like complete slackers and like we are totally unworthy of our half-plot. How have they done this? I mean, it is totally flooded, and theirs is worse than ours (even with the drainage pipes, because they don't drain anywhere yet). They have ice on top of their flooded mud. So HOW have they got it cleared and dug and drainage piped so quickly in such foul weather?

I bet they paid some gardening company to do it for them. That must be it, rather than just being two over-worked mums who have to bring children with them who are liable to fall in muddy puddles and need a complete change of clothes. And so by cheating and paying to get it done they have made us look unworthy...

I don't like it one bit. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. I was rather hoping they would be as... what word am I looking for? Overworked? Slow? Useless? Not keen on the cold and wet? Perhaps 'normal' is what I want. Please let our neighbours (who we haven't met, I hasten to add) be normal and not show us up every step of the way. Please, God?

Veg-Plot Review

I was doing a bit of clearing out of the garden veg-plot the other day, getting rid of the cosmos skeletons etc, and I found a treasure! One last onion which had been hiding under the thickets of dead scrub. It started out as an onion-and-carrot bed. Then I planted some cosmos seedlings in among, just to add interest later on... and then the cosmos got huge. They loved all the rain, I guess! They grew and grew and fell over and grew some more and sprouted roots from the stem and kept growing. I managed to get (what I thought was) all the onions and carrots out from underneath them, but yesterday I discovered I was wrong. Hooray! It's like finding a fiver in the pocket of a coat you don't wear often... well, maybe not quite the same financially, but I was chuffed to bits to find an extra bonus onion. And it was oh-so-oniony too... Not damaged from neglect and full of flavour. It was eaten that night. Yum.


So now the veg-plot has come to the end of the cycle and is bare again... well almost. I have planted 4 rows of red onions and 3 rows of garlic, which are all starting to sprout. So even in the depths of dark November (which according to a friend's gardening calendar is NOT a gardening month!) we have the hints of what is yet to come, if we can hold on through the horrid cold and wet and dark.

And I thought I would have a look back through my photos and see if I could pull together some pictures taken in roughly the same spot of the veg-plot through the months of this year. So here you go:

April. Newly planted potatoes, onions & carrots


May: Potatoes coming through nicely


June: Baby carrots and onions... and weeds


June: Potatoes geting taller


June



July

Sept


And finally here we are in November.

We wait patiently through the darkness for the turning of the seasons back to lengthening days and months which ARE gardening months. Not November though. And I am not too hopeful for December either...

Cold: virus and weather

We have had the lurgey again. This time it was Spike and Dude who came down with it. They are mostly over it, and just full of snot and coughing (as opposed to full of snot, coughing, fever and lethargy). Here's one of poor little Dude, who fell asleep on the landing half way up the stairs... Couldn't even make it to his bed. Must sleep now...

We have also had snow... ok, so only half an inch, and nothing like the exciting thickness that the Canadian cousins had been enjoying, but still very exciting. Exciting enough to stir Dude from his lethargy and send him hurtling outside to play... only to come back in 5 minutes later and spend the rest of the day on the sofa with a fleecy blanket absolutely exhausted!

Pip made a very impressive (?) mini snowman. Well, very impressive considering what he had to work with!

He also got the Chief Scout's Bronze Award at Beavers the other night... highest award a Beaver Scout can get! It means that he had got all of the Challenge Badges. Very proud mummy... Considering that I was a Brownie in my time, and a sixer, and only managed to get 2 badges. We were a very lax group and mostly just played games! So to have a son whose arms are covered in badges rather makes up for my underachievement.

Romanesco Broccoli

We found the coolest vegetable ever in a greengrocers in a nearby town... It was fractal broccoli! I searched for it on the internet and found out that it is actually called Romanesco Broccoli, and it definitely wins the prize for worlds coolest vegetable.

It is now our favourite vegetable, but it is not sold in our local supermarket, so we have to go to the other town to get it. So we haven't had it since and I hope that next time I go to the green grocers they have it again. They didn't have it in another grocers in another town, so here's hoping.

In other news...

We had a wonderful trip away over half term with our church... We went to a Youth Hostel and took over the whole place for three days.

Edinburgh Zoo

Bamburgh beach with friends

We had a halloween party for Pip which was a great.

Eating doughnuts off a stick

And Spike moved into a big-boy bed. Which means he can now get out of bed at 6:30 with the big ones... so they have been put under a new regime and are not allowed to get up until 7. Which I think is reasonable, but they think is tortuous. Hopefully they will get used to it soon!

No gardening news, I am afraid, because, as a friend's gardening calendar says 'November is NOT a gardening month'. Too much rain, wind and general nastiness for me. We have lost all the leaves off our bird-feeding tree though, which means we can see the bird feeders now, so we have started filling them again, and are enjoying watching the birds. We get greenfinches, sparrows, blue tits, great tits, goldfinches, and have even had a woodpecker (but not at the birdfeeders). And robins, blackbirds and collared doves pick up whatever falls out onto the grass below.

And that's the news from Lake Wobegon...