On an egg and a banana

What a lovely weekend eh? Saturday saw me and mum pop out for wool and ski gear and come back with a boot full of shopping, including several plants. We had scone and tea at the garden centre too. Lovely day! On Saturday I re-planted the hanging basket for mum, and put a honeyberry bush in a pot, and potted up a second blueberry – the centre was selling bushes (very small ones!) for £1.99 so I figured might as well get them.

I finished the new allotment plan! I think I must have been there for about four or five hours, ended up with a sun headache, but it’s finished! Sort of!

For reference, this is where we were:

This was half time, when I popped home for a banana (egg for breakfast) :

And this is the end result! I’ll add the updated plan to show what it’s all about in a bit – LeechBlock will lock me out soon 😉 Basically the middle path is now a North path with permenant stuff above it, and then five paths stretch South to separate the six beds.

For the bits of impacted earth that make up the old paths I used the no-dig method of wet cardboard (or dry cardboard when I ran out of water) covered in soil. The worms then sort out digging the hard stuff, the grass is killed by the cardboard and I work on the top stuff.

The onions are still in the North corner mucking up the new paths but as soon as they are out in May I’ll be able to unfold the paths and complete the layout. Yay!

EDIT Here you go:

You can hopefully see where the onions muck up the paths in the bottom right corner, but they’ll be out in May. I left the strawbs where they are for now but will be bringing them back to the house as otherwise we’ll never remember to eat them.

Bed plan is from left to right:
1 – potatoes with perhaps mustard to mulch
2 – curcurbits (squash, cucumbers) and sweetcorn
3 – legumes (beans and peas) with chard and spinach to mulch
4 – brassicas
5 – aliums (onion family) with beetroots to mulch
6 – umbellifers (carrot and parsnip family) with spring onions and maybe celeriac and fennel as I got a bit carried away with seed buying.

I also mulched the beans (still doing badly) the onions again, and the bushes, and filled the second (middle) compost dalek with manure and oak leaves.