Sunny Thursday!

Today I've had a very excited Little P on my hands.......you see not only is it the School easter holidays and we get to spend all day going places and doing crafts but today we went to the library to pick up a prize! You see, Little P won first prize in the Easter colouring competition at our local library with her lovely egg and chick entry as photographed above........and you should have seen her little face when the librarian gave her the huge chocolate egg as a prize, she was thrilled!! I love the cute spelling of 'Easter' on her picture, it just makes me smile........wrong spelling I know, but cute all the same.

To add to the excitement in our household, I've also been a very excited little bunny today! Below is a picture of this week's Ta Da! moment!! Last night me and a couple of good friends spent the evening making our first handmade purse. We were working much later than planned but oh boy did we have fun! by midnight I had sewn but only managed to attach one side of my purse to the frame and it seemed to be very fiddly and tricky to attach. Not to be defeated this morning I persevered and managed to complete my little purse. I think it looks really fabby and I'm very proud of it! In fact that and the sunny warm weather has put me in in brillantly positive mood all day.

And as if that wasn't enough excitement for one day, this afternoon me and my little helper trudged off to the allotment ready to plant our crop of potatoes. I was only planning to put the first earlies in (yes, they're actually a bit late!) this year I've got Charlotte and Red Duke of York varieties. However I ended up planting all my main crop too (yes, I know they're a bit early). The thinking is that as last year many of the potato crops were destroyed by blight due to our wet summer that by planting the main crops a little early they could mature that bit earlier before any possible blight strikes. That's the theory anyway, it's a bit of an experiment and if it all goes wrong I'm blaming Toby Buckland from Gardener's World as I'm following his advice!

Only one more bed left to dig at the allotment now- the one destined for pumpkins, butternut squash and sweetcorn. I cant wait, it's all too exciting!!

An afternoon at the Allotment

It was the first reasonable day for a few days today and so we took advantage of the dry weather and spent a couple of days down at the allotment this afternoon. The overall structure of the planting beds is really coming together now and we've managed to plant a few seeds (carrots and parsnips) strawberry plants and a couple of rows of onions.

The main problem we're encountering at the moment is the way that the plots are getting completely waterlogged from the rainfall and because it's a heavy clay soil it's just puddling everywhere as you can see in the photo below! This is the corner of Little P's triangular shaped bed, she was very worried today that her seeds would never grow as her bed is full of water......and to be honest I'm inclined to agree with her. I was supposed to plant my seed potatoes today but I'm going to leave it for a few days to give the water table a chance to drop (I hope), otherwise the potatoes are just going to rot in the boggy soil.

One thing that is growing really well is our Rhubarb! We were given a clump by a good friend about a month ago, at the time it just looked like a rootball and now look at it.....it's growing away like a trooper! Three cheers for Rhubarb!!! Can you see the puddle of water just to the right of it? And yet it still grows!! Looks like I'm going to have to plant up the entire allotment with rhubarb!

Fingers crossed for some prolonged dry weather- I've got broad bean seedlings and about 60 onion sets all ready and waiting to be planted.