Still, if I couldn’t get to the allotment, at least I could take some photos of the snow in the garden – from indoors of course! Welcome to my Six Snowy Scenes on Saturday!

First up, the snow looks like it’s climbing up the leg of the chair (please excuse the bar across the centre of that photo as that’s a reflection of something indoors):

As usual, the Berberis looks great with a covering of snow. It still seems strange to see flowers on something that has a snowy ‘hat’ though:

The rabbit ornament looks surprisingly happy with his snowy blanket:

I don’t think any birds will want to use the bird bath though – or if they did, there’s a lot of snow to get through first!

With the way the snow was blowing, it stuck to the fence, making a very strange sight:

And finally, I wanted to try and get a photo (or ten) of the snow that was stuck in the spider’s web on the window. Once it stopped waving about in the wind, I finally got the photo I was after:

They’re forecasting warmer weather for Sunday night and all the coming week, so hopefully that means I’ll be able to check up on the allotment (and redo the fleece over the cabbages, as no doubt that will be in pieces after the wind & snow).

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Needless to say, the project is taking a lot longer than I’d planned! Welcome to my Six on Saturday.

This is what we started with – an old Rhino Runna barrow, which has lots of visible surface rust, plus rust bubbling under the paintwork. It was crying out for some attention, tidying up and a fresh coat of paint. I bought some rust treatment, a can of spray paint and some sandpaper and set to work.

You know I said I thought it would be easy? Well I fully admit I was wrong! There’s a clear top coat to the paint, plus what feels like 5 layers of paint to sand through before you can even reach the rust. I don’t feel confident using any kind of power tools, so this is all being sanded by hand.

The paint has blistered in multiple places on the flat panel, and each time I manage to sand away the paint on the other parts, there’s more rust appearing underneath. The rust treatment / prevention stuff has to be painted directly onto the rust, so as much of that paint has to be removed as possible, otherwise I’m just going to end up in the same rusty mess again in the near future!

Considering how long it took to get this far, I was beginning to realise just how mammoth a task I’d set myself. Maybe it wasn’t such a wise idea to try renovating this after all…

oooo do I see a space with no visible paint on it?! It took hours and even more sandpaper than I realised we had in the house, but we have semi-rusty metal visible.

Six stages later and I’d like to say this is where I realised I could actually finish the project, and show you a picture of the shiny purple finished barrow… unfortunately after that last photo, I abandoned the project for the rest of Spring as the allotment needed more attention.

Then in the summer, it really was too hot to be working on that in the garage, and of course the allotment had so much more watering necessary to keep everything alive.

And now we’re in the winter and I’ve realised just how much more there is to do on it!

I was tempted to ask Father Christmas for a new wheelbarrow, but having already got the supplies to try to renovate this one, and spent so long sanding it down by hand, it seemed silly to just give in and get a new one.

Maybe I’ll be able to do another update in the early Spring and say that this has finally been finished… I don’t relish carrying everything to the allotment by hand for another year while my wheelbarrow is out of action!

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1. The newest raised bed might not have enough soil in it (the level is a good 2 or 3 inches down from the top), but the strawberry plants are thriving! I’ve got loads (and I mean loads) of runners from these too, so I’ll have to take some pots down to the allotment to get them rooted. They can then overwinter in the garden so I have some spares just in case of bad weather.

2.  I’m not convinced the celery will come to much this year – it’s still really short, and the leaves are starting to look yellow…. but considering this is a self-blanching variety, the stems are still too green to be ready to pick yet.

3. In contrast, the cucamelon plants in the garden and this one on the allotment have been a real success…. until the strong winds meant the allotment one blew over – the soil isn’t as deep as you might think, so the bamboo canes clearly weren’t in deep enough to hold it all upright! But I think that’s a plant to grow next year, for certain.

4. Onto Raspberry Jungle next, and that’s been a bit hit and miss this year. A lot of the leaves have darkened and browned, but I’ve cut back some of the most discoloured foliage and there’s quite a bit of new green growth showing through, so it’ll be interesting to see if that leads to more raspberries before the frosts.

5. Another one I’m not convinced will be fantastic, is the Florence Fennel…. which is ironic considering how the herb fennel seeds itself quite happily all across the site. We planted 10 seeds, and these are the only two plants which grew. 

Earth up (mound soil) round the bulbs as they start to swell, from mid-summer until mid autumn, until the bulb is mature and about 7-10cm (3-4in across) to blanch the bulbs and to exclude autumn frosts.

RHS website

If the bulbs are meant to swell from mid-summer, I think ours are a good few weeks (or months!) behind, so I really don’t think we’ll get anything from these.

6. Proof that my compost bins don’t get hot enough to kill off any weeds – this tomato plant wasn’t meant to be on the allotment (it self seeded in the compost), but we decided to leave it to see if the tomatoes ripen.

And a little bonus picture just to add some brightness to a grey wet day, we had enough Nasturtium flowers to pick a little posy to go with the mint we were bringing home… plus some lavender just for fun.

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Don’t forget to check out the Propagator’s Six on Saturday  and read through the comments section for more blogs to check out!

1. …. “I won’t bother taking the ball of twine to the allotment, there’s nothing to tie back”…

…next time, I’m going to take the twine with me to tie up that blackberry before I trip over it!

2. The strawberries are approving of the more seasonal weather – even “disaster land” has revived in places! I need to untangle a lot of the runners for Just add Cream and Snow White, and sort out the escapee that seems to have sneaked out through the net…

3. We’ve finally had some success with the radishes – admittedly not as many as we should have, given how they’re meant to be “easy to grow”. If only the Florence Fennel would show signs of growth now (that’s meant to be a line next to the radishes)…

4. I will admit I’ve been neglecting my flower patch – I sprinkled a few nasturtium seeds earlier in the year and it was watered in the hot weather, but other than that it’s been left to fend for itself. It seems to be doing well though, and the penstemon survived my brutal ‘pruning’ after the snow we had in March!

5. We know there have been badgers spotted in the allotment site for a while, but I’ve always been confused why the badgers didn’t seem interested in the ants (apparently ants are a badger’s favourite food…)…
Well wonder no more, they’ve dug into the ant hills on the allotment path, and stripped it of ants completely!

I’ll be digging some of that soil off and using it elsewhere on the plot – that’s nice and fine, instead of my clay-like soil in other parts of the plot!

6. In my hope to make the raspberries easier to pick, I started thinning some of the plants – they grow semi-wild, so I’ve been letting them grow as they want… only trouble is that doesn’t leave me a path through the middle to pick any!

I’ve got bare soil in places (yay!), but that’s given me an idea for next time I work on the allotment – I’m going to try hoeing the ground under the raspberries to see if I can clear the dead leaves and also loosen the soil that the grubs are in. If the badgers are hungry for ants, they might take a liking to those pesky grubs too!

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1. First we have the allotment Cucamelon plant.

   

   

   
   My ‘gardening assistant’ (dad) had told me there weren’t any Cucamelons growing yet… I think he must have missed all of these!
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2. On to the strawberries in three different raised beds now, and first we have the top raised bed which has a few of my original Strawberry Something-or-other (there’s two or three left after the majority died), plus this year’s additions of Sweet Collossus, Florence and Beltran.

   

   
   Moving on to the third raised bed, the Snow White plants are looking really healthy (and sending out runners)…
   

   

   
   Just Add Cream shares this raised bed, and I’m going to have to sort out these runners, otherwise I’ll get in a muddle with which plant is which!
   

   

   
   Moving on to the second raised bed, and Strawberry Something-or-other really isn’t happy – using the square foot gardening idea, I had 36 plants in here last year, and now I have about 5 or 6 plants…
   

   

   
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3. Runner Beans tend to work really well on our allotment, providing we net the base to stop the Roe Deer nibbling the young plants. The bean plants don’t seem quite so leafy this year though, but maybe that’ll be a positive, as it should mean they aren’t heavy enough to bring the bamboo supports down!

   

   
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4. Moving on to Raspberry Jungle, I did some thorough weeding in here this week. The grass might not have grown with all the blazing hot sunshine we’ve had, but the bindweed is proving to be even more of a pain than usual.
   

   

   
   Wondering why I call it Raspberry Jungle? This is the “weeding view” of the raspberry patch…
   

   

   
   They’re Autumn raspberries, but they grow semi-wild across part of the allotment site, so I’ve no idea what variety they are.
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5. Something a little less wild-looking is my mini celery patch. It seems to have taken a little while to get going (I bought the plug-sized plants from Homebase earlier in the year), but hopefully now we’ve had some less-hot weather, they’ll grow quicker!
   

   

   
   And if my Mum is reading this, yes I will try and get a better (straighter) edge to this bit before the grass grows too much!
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6. And finally the blackberries have finished, but it proved that our new blackberry support was worth making – we had loads more fruit than in all the previous years combined!

I just need to check when to prune the branches back, and also get the new growth tied into the supports ready for next year!

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1. We started off buying some Cucamelon seeds from Chiltern Seeds
   

   

   
   Unknown to us, the seedlings will go through periods of growth, then stop for a while.
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2. Frustrated with the lack of growth from the seedlings, we decided to ‘cheat’ and buy a Cucamelon plant.
   

   

   
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3. The ‘cheating Cucamelon’ was split – one plant from the pot went down to the allotment, and the other was put in a pot in the garden. The 6′ canes seemed excessive given the size of the plant initially, but it’s now taller than the canes!
   

   

   
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4. A relative offered to tie the cucamelon to the canes, but with these long tendrils there’s no real need – I nudged the stem towards the cane and it just seemed to latch on easily.
   

   

   
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5. We have flowers!
   

   

   
   (followed by a “quick take a picture before they fall off” comment from a sceptical friend!)
   ….and quite a few cucamelons forming now as well!  They’re not big enough to harvest yet, but it’ll be interesting to see what they’re like.
   

   

   
   

   

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6. And of course now the ‘cheating Cucamelon’ is getting on so well, the seedling is growing strongly (although it’s got a long way to go before it reached the height of the ‘cheating Cucamelon’. This one will be put into a larger pot this week hopefully.

   

   (it had actually wrapped itself around the watering can…. that’ll teach me to not get the plant supports sorted out!)

Don’t forget to check out the Propagator’s Six on Saturday  and read through the comments section for more blogs to check out!

1. I don’t know if it’s just down to the weather, or that we’ve got the blackberry on a support this year so it’s not trailing the ground…. but whatever the reason, we have loads of fruit this year!
   

   

   
   And so far, it looks like the deer have left it alone, so there’s no need to net it
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2. This is the first year I’ve tried growing cucamelons – the seeds germinated, but seemed to stop growing so we invested in a plant from the garden centre….
   

   

   
   We split that plant into two, so one piece is on the allotment and the other is in a pot in the garden. In the end, the seed-grown plants started growing again too (apparently that’s normal for them to pause growth if they’ve not got quite the right temperature or moisture).
   One of the plants grown from seed has died, but we still have one seed-grown plant left too,so that will be heading to the allotment tomorrow to join this one!
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3. I don’t know what happened with my “original” strawberry plants this year – I started out with about 40 plants across two raised beds….
   

   

   
   ….and now have about 10 left as the others have all died off. These were runners saved from previous years, so I wouldn’t have thought they would be ‘tired’ and in need of replacing just yet.
   In contrast, my “fancy strawberry bed” is proving more successful – Just Add Cream (which is meant to produce more fruit and less runners) is sending out runners, and Snow White has runners which have already rooted!  I’m hoping this will bode well for next summer!
   

   

   
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4. The gooseberry bush is a great success this year – whatever ate the berries from it last year seems to have left it alone, as we’ve had plenty to pick.
   

   

   
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5. Onto the peas and beans, and I think the peas have definitely gone over now….
   

   

   
   ….we did get plenty of peas from them though, so compared to other years I’d class that as a definite success!
   The runner beans have taken off like rockets – I think I need to take a stool with me to the allotment next, to reach the tops of the canes in order to nip the growing tips off!
   

   

   
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6. And to finish, how about a mini game of “spot the creature in the compost bin”? This Slow Worm was pretending to be a stick, so I’ve added in an arrow to make it easier to spot!
   

   

   
   They seem to like that particular compost bin – I’ve never spotted one in either of ourother bins.

Don’t forget to check out the Propagator’s Six on Saturday  and read through the comments section for more blogs to check out!

1. First up is a semi-success – I replanted a lot of my original strawberry plants, and unfortunately most haven’t survived. However, the new strawberry plants seem to be making up for it (Sweet Collossus and Just Add Cream have several runners).
   

   

   
   If only I could stop whatever’s eating a hole in the net getting in and pinching the strawberries before I can pick them!
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2. Next we have an annual semi-disaster, which resolves itself by the time these autumn fruiting raspberries are meant to bear fruit…
   Yes, that’s raspberry beetle grubs yet again 

   

   
   But looking at the raspberry jungle, I’m hopeful that once we get past summer fruiting season, the autumn fruits will be grub-free!
   

   

   
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3. Remember that mystery plant in my wild flower patch? I’m taking an educated guess that it’s some form of thistle!
   

   

   
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4. The celery’s been planted out, and looks like it’ll grow well – maybe it’s a bit hot for that to grow too much this week
   

   

   
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5. A complete disaster next, the Broad Beans had blackfly (Black Bean Aphid), Pea and Bean Weevil, Rust and Chocolate Spot… but that did give me a chance to write a blog post on it
   

   

   
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6. And to finish on a success, this is just part of the blackberry bush.
   

   

   
   I think I can safely say it approves of the support we made for it this year, as there’s shed loads of fruit forming!

Don’t forget to check out the Propagator’s Six on Saturday  and read through the comments section for more blogs to check out!