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Allotment Diary :

March

Muscari by the greenhouse

Our allotment gardens are an essential place to experiment. I am expanding last years potato tyre project as it was so successful, in order to see how else I can use tyres in the vegetable and flower garden. My plan is to fill tyre stacks of various heights with soil and use them as raised beds.

The benefits of this will include earlier sowing due to raised soil temperature, growing in awkward spots that usually defy cultivation and protection for particularily vulnerable crops against slug and snail attack.

In the vegetable garden the potato tyres are already set up in orderly groups; I like the look of them all plump and welcoming, but it will be a challenge to fit them into the flower garden so easily.

In the green houses we are growing early lettuce and rocket crops in the beds that will later contain tomatoes, and are already picking salad leaves. As it has been so cold we have erected a small secondary poly tunnel inside one of the houses to keep night time temperatures up and have been able to germinate the tomato seeds without additional heat.

The frogs became very active in February and have now spawned in two of our three small ponds, but I fear that the cold has prevented most of this early batch from developing, whilst the newts are sensibly waiting for better weather.

I have seen a few shiny, healthy looking brown rats searching for seed and scraps. I don't mind sharing the space with them at all, but I will definitely protect the soft fruit crops from the wood pigeons this year, as last summer they took more than their share. I am using flicker tape around the broad beans and this is really effective in scaring them off, but I think that I will invest in proper fruit cages so we can enjoy a decent blackcurrant harvest.

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