Pig Sty Avenue

Lovely big poppy, apologies for misframing. Six weeks of work in London came at just the wrong time of year for the allotment. I managed to get back for just one weekend, and spent a few hours of emergency weeding, which just about kept it from going to jungle on me. Been home three days now, and spent everyone of them, a few hours, at the plot. It wasn't as bad as it first looked. The whole SE bed, formerly known as the midden and the East side of the old-greenhouse-foundations is choked with weeds. Which is an improvement, actually, it covers up the rubble and the rubbish that has been there in ever so slowly decreasing quantities since I moved in. When I get this corner sorted, particularly the old shed, a last piece of the puzzle will slip into place. And that old shed, oh my goodness me, is sliding blissfully westward, at the rate of maybe a millimeter a day.  It means the new shed is becoming a priority now, I doubt the old shed will see the other side of the approac...

That's Sparky & Cleo, the new additions to the household. Getting a rescue dog from the Scottish SPCA has been on the family agenda for years. The time has come. These two were a package, we suspect Sparky (left) is Cleo's daughter. God knows who the father was. Some kind of whippet? A Jack Russel? Anyway, they've been taking up most of the weekend, getting them settled in. So less constructive allotmenteering than I would have liked. I did get there tonight without the dogs for 90 mins or so. Put in a couple of rows of Desiree (main crop spuds), just a regular bag I'd bought from Tesco. Did a bit of weeding. Yesterday, the dogs ran around a lot on the beds, and some rows of seedlings will not have benefitted from the treatment. But I'm learning to be pretty Zen about these things. It's all a process. One sackful of spuds will be better than no sackful of spuds. This year, I'm in a desperate hurry to get it all under cultivation, and I should achie...