Lazy Sunday & Allotment Watering

What a Sunday! It was actually too hot for me, so I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon (queue the Small Faces) sitting under a parasol listening to the radio before heading to the plot late afternoon.

Loaded the car with the surviving brassicas and a lot of beans that are about ready to plant out.

I was amazed how quiet the site was, expected it to be crowded but there were only a couple of people on and one of those had only come down to pick up his slug pellets for his home garden.

Gianni turned up, looking a bit washed out. He’s doing a Spanish degree and has been cramming. Apparently he managed 100% in one assessment! We’ve some brainy people on our site. He said he’d been down in the morning and it was pretty quiet then. Perhaps it was just too warm.

Anyway, I transferred all the seedlings into the tall coldframe on the decking on plot 5, giving them a good watering and then commence to water plot 29. Although I moan about people watering every day, even when it was raining earlier, the strawberries and over-wintered onions are pretty dry.

It really doesn’t do a lot of good to sprinkle a bit of water when it’s dry. In fact it can do more harm than good as it encourages shallow surface roots. A good wetting where the water soaks down does a lot more good.

So an hour zipped by with the hosepipe on the beds and in the greenhouses. Next it was off to Therese’s greenhouse and that got a good soaking as well. I need everything to be OK tomorrow as it’s going to be a sunny day and we’re off to the lake district for the day.

Now I said yesterday I would try to remember to take the camera along and I did. So I took a few snaps of various bits around the plot including a patch of marestail. The one weed that I get the most mail about is marestail and some people describe it but don’t know what it is so I thought it might be useful.

You can see all May’s photos here – Allotment Photos