It’s that time of year again. The time of year that sees an envelope flop through the letter box from the council pointing out that it is time to pay the rent on the plot. It’s a gone up this year as well, a rather extortionate £15.25. God lord, that’s for a full year mind you.

There is a line in the letter that amuses me. It says, in bold, “Reminders will not be sent out this year so therefore if we do not rec...

Does anyone one have any recipes to use up a lot of cherry tomatoes? It seems my experiment with a blight free tom has gone quite well. Seriously, I have fuck loads (I believe that is the expression I heard them use on Gardener's World.) and I made BBQ sauce and some tomato sauce for storing on Saturday but the BBQ one demanded skinning of the tomatoes which became very boring very quickly. It is very tasty though, do you want to rec...

I love this time of year. All the hard work that you have put in is literally bearing fruit (and veg). Just yesterday, for instance (and I use it as an example because it was a really good day) we bought home onions, peas, mange tout, 3 types of bean, radishes, lettuces, cucumber, courgette (anyone want a courgette by the way?) beetroot, carrots and my special prize, more on that later. Basically at this time of the year we can f...

I come before you to report a rare success today. I have been a little failure heavy recently but some things are going alright.

 I have finally managed to get some carrots seeds to germinate. I know that this is usually very easy for most people but I seem to have a problem with them and I don’t know why. Anyway this is my 3^rd lot of seeds and some of them have germinated, this makes me very happy. Look at their tiny little gr...

The sun has remained visible so I have continued to get things into the ground. I’ve been removing stones from the soil and adding my own compost. It all looks lovely. The problem is you have nothing to show for all of your work except for some lovely bare soil.

  Here for instance are my carrots,

And here are my parsnips,

And today I put my onions.

Yes that is just 3 pictures of soil but it is lovely soil.

Just because it is cold and wet (really wet) doesn’t mean that nothing is happening at the allotment.

 Well, when I say the allotment I really mean my kitchen and back garden. I was supposed to go and plant some seeds today but the rain was so hard that I decided against it. The plan involved early carrots and salad things (spring onions, radishes, salad leaves) under my ugly but useful plastic cloches but the weather put pay to t...

Up and out bright and early this morning and I had a plan. Not only...