More Allotment Stuff

The weather has been so beautiful and I am on Easter Holidays.  We are planning to try out our new tent next week, so I thought I had better spend some time at the allotment whilst I had the time.  So I planted up a new strawberry bed.  There are early, mid and late fruiting varieties, so hopefully we will have strawberries late into the autumn.  The broad beans and peas are also in.  There are another lot of broad beans in the allocated squash bed, I LOVE broad beans. That is garlic you can see in the background.  I found those little wellies in a skip and it seemed such a shame that they had just been discarded, so now I grow flowers in them, they seem happy.

I do a sort of planting plan each year, which always go to pot for various reasons, like a bed being ready for planting  before the one that was planned for that veg type.  But this year I am trying really hard to stick to it.  I am also going to try some more experimenting with polyculture to try to confuse those damn cabbage white butterflies and other bugs that get to eat my veg before me!  Polyculture is where you grow lots of different things in one bed, it is supposed to cut down on the weeding and keep the bugs away.  Well, that's the theory, I'll let you know if it works.  I have spent quite a lot of time over the winter reading about permaculture and polyculture, so now is the time to start putting some of it into practice.

I have planted a patio apple tree and a patio plum tree in large pots on the path to the barge.  I figured if they were close to hand, I could keep them watered.  Apparently they produce a lot of fruit for such little trees, we'll see.....