International Fame

My friend Ian mentioned our blog on his blog! An Australian blog, no less. So now we have two, yes two, real actual readers (Ian and my Mum!) Not only that, but we inspired Ian to write his own gardening post on his hitherto gardening-free blog. I like to feel we're starting a gardening-blogging revolution. This time next year, we'll have.... um... three readers. With any luck.

Fruits

We now have a gooseberry bush and some raspberry canes. Here's the gooseberry.

We bought it from a garden centre in Enfield, which was on a long road lined with garden centres. Pretty much every shop was a garden centre. Or a pond shop, or some other garden-related retailer. Strange. We were trying to find one that Andrew remembers from his childhood. We ended up going to the one that was easiest for me to park in. I wonder how other visitors decide which garden centre to go to...

We went to this garden centre on our way to a party in Cambridge. We gave our friends Andrew and Ben a lift home. I forgot the car was full of stuff and they had to sit squashed up with cardboard boxes, wellies, seed trays and gooseberry bushes. I don't think they minded. The gooseberry, however, got a bit squashed.

Broad Beans

Here are our broad bean plants. We've put in two rows of plants that we started growing indoors, and then two rows of seeds. Next weekend we'll put in some more rows, and then we'll have a nice long-lasting crop of beans, rather than them all being ready at once. That way, we won't get bored of broad beans. That's the idea anyway.
We have canes and string to build supports for the beans to grow up. We would have put them up on Saturday but I left the string at home by mistake. Hopefully the beans will still be ok without the supports for now.

Trees

My very generous Pops bought us four fruit trees, a plum, a pear, an apple and a cherry. We don't have room for four trees on our plot. Not if we want our vegetables and our soon-to-be-installed greenhouse to get any sun. So we decided to keep two and give two to Charlotte's friends Bruce and Lucy. We chose to keep the apple and the pear, because we thought the fruit would be less likely to be eaten by the birds. It's not like we can spray the birds with water from our kitchen window like Charlotte and Jon do! Do you think we made the right decision?

The trees were supposed to be kept immersed in water from the minute they arrived in the post until you put them into the ground. Unfortunately (I'm not sure this is the right word as fortune had nothing to do with it; we just didn't get round to it) this didn't happen to ours. Instead they spent two weeks sitting very dryly in Charlotte and Jon's hallway. I'm not sure how important this bad beginning is going to be for our poor fruit trees. Hopefully we can make up for it.

Yesterday I went and picked up the two trees. I took them to the allotment and left them sitting in water overnight. This morning I went back up and dug two holes, leaving plenty of room below and around the roots so they've got lots of room to grow. I chose the place where I thought they'd block out the least amount of sun for us and our neighbours: the northern edge of our plot, infront of a non-window part of next door's shed.

I sprinkled loads of fish blood and bone into the hole and onto the soil I was about to put back into the hole, filled in the hole, and watered each tree with about 8 litres of water. I tied a bamboo cane to each one to offer some support against the wind, but I'm not sure it'll be enough, we'll have to see. Apparently the trees need to be watered every other day. So far we've only been going to the allotment at the weekends. I really hope it rains this week or I might have to make a few trips after work. Don't want those trees going thirsty again.

Straight lines and right angles...

...or perfectionism vs sloppiness

When we first got our allotment, I drew a plan, carefully scaled down, of where each of our 10'x10' beds would go. When we started digging, we carefully measured 10 feet in both directions. Or at least we thought we did. And we thought that was good enough. When we started to dig our second and now third beds, they didn't seem to match up with the first, no matter how many times we compared them using our bright blue string. After much confusion we eventually realised that our first bed was not a square, as we'd thought, but a rhombus. To make matters worse, our second bed was even worse than a rhombus: it had wonky sides . And not a right angle in sight. It was very confusing. After literally minutes of thinking, we realised that we'd gone wrong right at the very beginning of our allotment adventure. The boundary we'd (not very carefully) staked out with bamboo canes at the top of the plot to divide us from our neighbour was not perpendicular to the long sides of the plot.

Once we realised this, Andrew decided that it didn't really matter if all of our plots were rhombuses. He said the vegetables wouldn't mind the absence of right angles. I tried to go along with him but after a few minutes I gave in to my inner perfectionist and insisted that we re-do all the measuring, do a bit more digging, and make sure that our plots had right angles. They aren't squares, they are rectangles. That's fine. At least all the paths will be straight. Andrew forgave me eventually. It was only an extra hour's work.


Here's Andrew making sure the sides are perpendicular.