My Rescued Bike

My allotments just keep getting better. The Chairman of my allotments fixes up bikes as a hobby. He collects the bikes from the tip and does them up and sells them for £10 as £10 covers the £5 cost to buy them from the tip and he donates £5 to the Siberian Tigers. He also helps collect the bikes for Rotary as they send them to coutries less fortunate than ours.

My bike was finally completed, I am now a proud owner of an original 1970's Raleigh Shopper. This bike is going to be ideal to go to the allotments especially with the removable basket. It also reminds me of the wicked witches bike in the 'Wizard of Oz' so I will have to give the bike a new image and be known as the white witch of the allotments!



The bike's dynamo light is also still working it looks like it was bought and hardly used and has being sitting very bored in someone's shed for a long time.

The First Raised Bed Take 2

After the OH trusting my theory on how to make the first raised bed and it all going wrong we went back up the allotments on the 7th Of March to try and fix it using the man theory, extra posts!

The OH had to dig around all of the bed and take the middle bits apart and put a post in between all of the corners. I think it looks much better now and if the OH is looking THANK YOU xx

We even had time to think about the construction of the next bed, I was sent to sit on the naughty stool while the OH came up with a theory of banging the posts in first. Hopefully we can get the second bed completed by Good Friday as this bed will be for my potatoes.

Making the First Bed

My OH kindly offered to help make me some raised beds from wood. Our landlord kindly brought home a pile of pallets from work for us. I don't think my OH realised how difficult the pallets would be to dismantle and when he offered he didn't realise how many I wanted but hey hoo he carried on and we had enough wood to make the one bed. Although he made the vital mistake of trusting my womans intuition on how to make it so the first attempt looked like I made had made it!!
Women's intuition is good but don't trust it when it comes to DIY! I also had a another good theory of digging around it and banging it hard with a mallet to straighten it out and as I had this theory when I was at the allotment on my own I tried it out which resulted in me cutting myself on a few rogue screw ends. I think I should stick to the planting! and that is what I did.



On the 6th of March I planted a Loch Ness thornless blackberry bush as it has promised to listen and not hurt me. I also planted five Galanate raspberry canes again because they promised not to hurt me and if I look after them they will crop twice a year!!


I also planted three different varieties of strawberries to give me an extended crop, I planted one Florence, Alice and Honeoye, I hope these ladies behave although I am a bit worried about them with the weather today, fingers crossed!






And last but not least I planted a bay leaf tree as I go through loads of these when I am making a vegan lasagne yum!

It's a good start to a prosperous year.

The First Sowing

So I now had all of the seeds so on the 2nd of March I started making small pots out of toilet roll and newspaper as I didn't feel the need to buy anything new when I had a couple of pots left over from last years pots and I obviously had plenty of toilet roll and newspaper in the recycling bins. I also made tags to make sure I know what is where although I really wanted to give them individual names as they are my babies...




So my windowsills are now taken over with baby onions, radishes, cabbages, garlic, peas, beans and chitting potatoes.








After 6 days I noticed my radish babies coming to the surface, I felt like shouting push, push you can do it!!

The Arrival of the Seeds

On the 15th of February I had double excitement my big order arrived from the Organic Gardening Catalougue and I also had a parcel from CompostWoman who kindly sent me some of her saved seed along with a couple of herb
cuttings from her garden.




I now have most of my seeds for the year and two varieties of mint and a thyme to get me started. A big thank you to CompostWoman!