Spudtastic

• By Alison
• 3 February, 2008
• Comments Off on Spudtastic

I took delivery of my potato order today. I ordered Desiree, but got King Edwards. But it’s not really a big issue, since I only ordered Desiree because
they sounded nice. Whether they were better spuds or not is not the issue. So my King Edwards are now sitting in the hurricane shelter with a cherry tree, 2
blueberry stalks, a redcurrant stalk and a black currant stalk. All waiting to be planted.

We spent this morning moving the compost heap from our backyard to the allotment, into my newly fashioned palletastic compost square thingy. It was pretty nice
compost, considering that the bottom of it was quite possibly 3 or 4 years old. There is now a small family of mice who are probably wondering what on earth
happened to their dining room. They live in a small hold beneath the now empty space. I was digging the compost out after removing the plastic outer with a
real fear of chopping one of them in half as I dug. Luckily they live lower than ground level.

I got the rest of my seeds a few weeks ago. I have laid them out in order of the month they need to be planted out. The first set are March, so i have another
month to prepare the plot. That is going quite nicely – I’ve turned over the first two rods. (Rods being a measurement used in allotmenteering, but I
don’t actually know how big a single rod is… I do know that my plot is 7 rods in size.) I didn’t get around to planting any garlic, but fortunately
I’ve now discovered that there is some growing in a neat row in the first rod. I need to move it, or rearrange my planting order since it’s not exactly
in the right place. I
think
it’s garlic… it smells like it.

I have no idea what is growing in the back rod. It looks like pac choi, it’s glossy and leef beet like. It doesn’t smell like anything I recognise
though.

I wanted to plant my seeds into biodegradable containers, instead of the plastic potting things I used last year (they are all falling to bits anyway). But
biodegradable ones are quite costly, and I don’t want to spend large amounts of money. So I did a search for “egg carton seed planting” and
discovered a blog advocating using toilet rolls, or a neat way of folding newspapers. I have so many toilet rolls kept for craft reasons, that I am now looking
forward to this idea! I will take photos to prove it!

And speaking of spending money, for my birthday I going to get a small greenhouse/growbox. How exciting!