Spent some time on the allotment weeding and tidying yesterday and met this chap on the way - Google tells me he's a Common Darter Sadly, I think this one's darting days were nearly over - he flew up if I accidentally moved suddenly, but otherwise spent a lot of time resting on the piece of wood in the picture. And to demonstrate the superior zoom on the new camera, here's a photo of the...
... I just have to get round to actually doing the job... Rob has next week off so we're visiting his parents for a couple of days starting tomorrow and popping down to see my Mum for a couple of days on Thursday, so if I'm not commenting much, that's why. Rob's Mum and Dad have kindly offered us a large pile of horse manure for the allotment, so the trip back on Tuesday may be a touch fragrant :-)
I meant to go to the allotment for an hour before teaching last Thursday. But halfway there I drove over something big and noisy, and lo and behold the front left wheel got a puncture. The downsides were (a) a puncture, and (b) all the allotment-visiting time was squandered in reading the car’s manual on how to change the wheel, finding the toolbox and spare wheel, and changing the wheel (actually...
We got the new roofing felt onto the shed roof this morning. Well, Rob did most of it, going up the ladder and hammering and cutting things - I just passed him stuff and tried not to get in the way...:-) [1] Not, I should add, because he is male and I am female, but because he has a head for heights and I don't. He's also far less likely to hammer his own fingers out of sheer clumsiness than I am
Today's plan was to paint the roof of the allotment shed with some bitumen paint to make it a bit more waterproof for the winter. Unfortunately, when Rob went up the ladder to assess the job, it became clear that there wasn't enough roofing felt actually attached to the roof to make this a viable proposition. He also merrily swung the centre panel of it up to see how well it was attached and flung...
Picked the first of the sweetcorn today. The pollination had been a bit patchy, and they wouldn't have won any prizes at a show, but they tasted fine and were crisper and sweeter than the ones we had...this than I might have been because the insects love them. I thought at first they were honey bees, but when I got a closer look, they were hoverflies, cunningly impersonating bees :-
Today I buckled down to get some work done on the allotment. Sadly, the outdoor tomatoes have been ruined by the rain - the main difference fom last year being that this time it was after the fruit formed rather than before it had a chance to... I cleared away the plants next to the sweetcorn patch and harvested a couple of small pumpkins that had grown among them. I picked about a gazillion runner...
A brief window of sunniness yesterday, so we dashed off to the allotment to gather in the potatoes. I think this has been our best potato year ever, even though they got blight. Hardly any of them -- maybe a dozen altogether -- got infested with wireworm, and none of them were bothered by slugs. Because we were so quick to remove the blighted haulms, none of the tubers have been affected by it, thank...
...I have mostly been making a ladybird house. This involves a small plastic tub, and attempting to drill a hole in the bottom of same, which was rather more successful than necessary, resulting in the... on the way back home, I slipped in the mud and fell over. Fortunately, I fell a) on a portion of my anatomy that is exceedingly well padded and b) not on the saw I was carrying at the time...
We popped up to the allotment yesterday afternoon, and found the potatoes blighted. Blight appears first as a brown blotch on the leaf, which is confusingly similar to the sun-scald on the greenhouse plants -- but if you turn the leaf over you can see a ring of white mould around the edges of the brown blotch and, lo, it is blight. I dug up one particularly blighted plant to see if there were...
