Hello again, is there anyone still out there?

Ok, so it's been a while, almost an entire year to be precise. I'd love to say the reason for such a lack of updates is that we became allotmenting heroes and simply didn't have time to post amidst the whirl of plot based activity. However, the reality is that choosing, buying, building and using the new greenhouse left us horribly behind on allotment jobs at just the wrong time of the year meaning we didn't end up sowing half of the thing we'd planned to. To make matters worse then I tore my knee ligament in July while playing football which pretty much kept me off the plot for the rest of the summer. Once I was finally able to get back up there most things had succumbed to the now overwhelming amount of weeds and the whole thing looked in a sorry state. This coupled with the dreadful summer weather pretty much the last bits of our enthusiasm and so, I'm sad to say, we all but wrote off the rest of the growing year.

There were a few small victories however, we harvested a good crop of broad beans and early potatoes before things went wrong while our onion and beetroot crop, although suffering from having to compete with the weeds, still provided a good few jars of pickles. We also managed to harvest an impressive ten squashes from the solitary plant that had survived and prospered despite my neglect.

Best of all however were the parsnips. All the care and attention I'd given them in the early part of the year had clearly stood them in good stead and they came through the summer largely unaffected by the lack of attention to produce some amazing roots come winter. This picture is of the final few roots we picked early this year which, despite looking a little got at round the edges, were used to make a whole batch of Parsnip wine before ending up in the freezer ready for use in roast dinners and soup for the rest of the year.

The greenhouse too was pretty much a success, Admittedly a mixture of inexperience and over enthusiasm meant we crammed a bit too much in there causing it to get a tad overgrown in late summer but we managed to harvest plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers and chillies all the same.

Which brings us to this year and our plans to make our third allotmenting year our best. The seemingly continual snow and rain stopped us from getting the early start we wanted and once we'd finally got back into the swing of things and cleared all the weeds left from last year we were already well behind. Our early spuds and onions in particular went in the ground about a month late at the end of April. However, the fact that we now have the greenhouse at home meant that we were actually pretty up to date with seedling etc despite what the allotment itself actually looked like. So, now it's all systems go and everything, fingers crossed, is feeling unusually in control going into the second half of May.

Anyway, I'll do a current allotment update post tomorrow along with some pics followed by a greenhouse one with more pics and we'll go from there with updates hopefully back to every couple of days like they used to be...