Sunday 23rd March 2014

I woke up at 5:50 - breakfast dressed and everything ready for a quick start then OMG ice on the windscreen. Scraped off the windscreen and drove to the allotment getting there about 7:00 and seeing a very wet greenhouse but happily not a frozen one.

The sun does not come around too the greenhouse until about 8:30, but I uncovered the rest of bed 10 hoping for the sun to dry things out a little

The soil under the carpet and DMP was shiny and hard and I took a pick axe to it to break it up before digging over with a fork and weeding. In between rested by creating a set of staging from the grow house blow-a-ways for the right hand side of the greenhouse as  you face the door.

Un-covered the strawberry bed number 5 and started to mix the farmyard manure into the soil a little more as the worms don't seem to have done a very good job on this bed for some reason.

I had just completed digging bed 10 and was just installing the white plastic edging when hailstones stopped play - I sheltered in the greenhouse and pottered around in there. I covered up the potatoes on beds 7 - 9 with what I have at hand, as Andy had informed me it's likely to be minus 2 - 3 tonight.

The additional staging in the greenhouse means that I now have 8 square flower buckets of early potatoes in the greenhouse. I've put bubble wrap and weed membrane in plastic bags that is intended for the other beds around them as some additional frost protection.

Outside it was 12degrees C inside the grow house in the greenhouse it was twice that - I didn't check the difference between the basic inside vs outside. Propagator lids sitting on top of the grow house for additional insulation.

Also on the allotment today were Keith & Pauline, Andy and Barry for a short time as rain showers and hailstones stopped play for Barry and he went home. Only us nutters carried on.
More beetroots now showing, that's 5 little heads now and the onions are coming on leaps and bounds - I gave them a little soak in comfrey. The additional tomatoes made the trip with me today. I didn't get to sow my carrots, parsnip and radish but there again once I heard about the temperature drop, perhaps it's just as well to let the sun tents keep warming up bed 1 and the pop bottle cloche bed 2

Had a tidy up down the bottom of the plot and moved the dalek next to the green one on the path.

In the last two week I've gone from "looks like the comfrey is coming back" to "blimey look at the size of those" - I'm sure if I sat all day and watched it would be like one of those time lapse videos.