June 16th, 2010 by Rich
Last night we collected some free stuff from a colleague of mine, she had decided that she no longer required some garden bits. We loaded up the car with three lots of greenhouse staging, a cold frame, a wheelbarrow and a load of pots, quite the haul! This has now made us a five wheelbarrow allotment – the neighbours will be jealous! Mel even gave us a hand by driving her car with the cold frame in it to save us making two trips, by way of thanks we showed her around our plot and introduced to the chickens. Things to know about chickens part one: if you wear sandals they will peck your toes 
September 10th, 2009 by Rich
Today was my first time on morning chicken duties and it was all pretty good. Alarm went of at 6.25, got up had a wee stuck some clothes on and down the allotment in the car I went. I arrived about 6.30 and could hear the girls stirring inside so I quickly weighed out their food and filled up the waterers ready for them to be let loose on. The waterer did cause some fun as I deposited its contents over the floor and my foot! Apparently I hadn’t screwed the base on properly so when I flipped it right way up it fell off ~ clearly the thing to do is give it a good check before you flip it over.
Upon opening up the door they started to come out and headed straight for food and water. Sadly no eggs but fortunately no signs of eggs being eaten either so not entirely bad. I watched them for a little bit (there is something oddly satisfying about just standing and watching them) I then left to get back home to do the usual morning bath, dress and coffee routine before heading out to work.
I did pop by at lunchtime to check in on them (and take some more bedding down as I forgot it in the morning) and they were all happy and had popped out 3 eggs during the morning.
So I have now done a morning feed and release and the evening round up and lock away. The evening is definitely harder work but I suspect it wont be long before they learn to get in the coop when the sun is setting. At the moment you have to round them up and pick them up one by one with Benny Hill music going around in your head!
When I get a chance I shall do a post to show you the chicken club ~ we worked hard to get it up and running so some showing off is deserved!
September 1st, 2009 by Rich
Well festival weekend is over but I did happen across this photo on the beeb that goes to show the scale and possibly explains why we had guard dogs stationed on the site over the weekend!
August 28th, 2009 by Rich
It’s festivale time! What does this mean? Well, being questioned everytime I go to the allotment by security guards and dodging guasrd dogs on the bike! Other than that plenty of young ladies wandering around and a few beers. If the weather is ok then bbq time it is. I may even find the time to give you a real update on the lottie and chicken club!
July 28th, 2009 by Rich
Since I last posted we have been harvesting courgettes like there is no tomorrow, it is proving quite tricky to eat them all! Hmm I wonder six plants – two adults, too many? nah We have been doing the usual things with them, plenty of fried up with garlic and served with pasta, courgette frittatas, courgette on pizza (yes it does work!). We have also been looking for some new ways to use them, one recipe we have found is creamy courgette lasagne which is brilliant. When I have it to hand I will try to post it on here.
In other news, my shoulder continues to give me grief so I went to the doctors to get it checked out, this ended up being a complete waste of time. After waiting 25 minutes past my appointment time (in addition to the 10 minutes that I waited for due to arriving in plenty of time) I finally went in to see the doctor and it was a rubbish experience. I personally expect a doctor to be able to listen to what I say, to be able to read information off of a computer screen and understand I am talking about an accident 5 weeks ago NOT last year!!!! I was then asked what I wanted her to do, WTF you’re the doctor with the years of training! Needless to say I ended up leaving with no real idea how it was healing and with no treatment. If I need to go back I shall make sure I don’t get that doctor again.
In other news, I will be taking a test ride on a new bike this week, a Ridgeback Flight 05, this ticks all the boxes for me so I hope it rides well. Sadly my employers don’t participate in the cycle to work scheme so I will have to pay full price. I really don’t understand why they don’t do it, the amount of effort required is minimal, in fact as a government scheme I think it should be mandatory for companies to take part if employees want to get a bike on the scheme.
When I rule the world it will be different!
July 15th, 2009 by Rich
Hmmm it’s been a while hasn’t it! What has been going on since I last posted …. from the lottie side of things we have been happily harvesting cucumbers, courgettes, runner beans, potatoes, peas, garlic, broad beans even a few raspberries and strawberries. The feeding is good but we are starting to hit the usual “argh not courgettes for dinner again” point, this means I will have to dig out he courgette recipe book to find new and interesting things to do with them!
Our harvests to date have been good and we are mainly happy but we have come to the realisation that some crops just aren’t for us and top of that list are peas. Every year we spend time and money trying to grow peas, fresh peas off the plant are a simple pleasure in life that we enjoy. Sadly every year we end up pea moth problems, as a conservative estimate I would say we end up composting something like 75% of the peas we grow as they are riddled with the little maggoty buggers. So that is it, we give up on peas and will use the space normally allocated for something else, after all we seem to struggle for space every year!
On a non allotment note, I had a great night out drinking high quality smokey beer from zero degrees wishing a work colleague a farewell, I then cycled home and right outside the door fell off. The next day I went to casualty as I decided shoulders shouldn’t look like mine did. Ended up that I had a severe sprained shoulder, the x-ray made me laugh, this was not the reaction the doctor was expecting! That was several weeks ago, it is healing and getting stronger but still gives me some grief. I really don’t understand what happened … after all as a teenager we were all protected but the god of drunk cyclists and never came to harm, shockingly our god has deserted us!!!
Erm what else ….. we spent some enjoyable time down in Cornwall visiting the oldies who treated us to a lovely meal at The Three Mackerel in Falmouth. The food was brilliant, the service friendly and the young waitresses in tight leggings with pert behinds and no vpl ~ does it get any better? 
In breaking news I can also reveal that Chicken Club has been given the go ahead from the council, now we need to do a bunch of stuff to make it happen but more on that another time.
June 5th, 2009 by Rich
This week has been an important week, we harvested and ate our first two cucumbers of the year! They are a variety called Cucino and are described as lunchbox cucumbers due to them being only two to three inches long. The good thing is that they are not full of seeds and water so you get a real shot of flavour from them. I would recomend this variety as hopefully it will also mean we don’t end up with a cucumber glut like normal (that will happen with the other variety – marketmore we have growing!)My only gripe about the cucino is that the seeds were normal price (£1.50 -£2) but the packet stated average contents 5 seeds, we got 3 thats a 40% discrepency! Fortunately what we did get all germinated so not as bad as it could be.
May 20th, 2009 by Rich
Is that you don’t talk about chicken club!
No I haven’t gone mad, well may be a little …..Our allotment neighbour Jon had an idea and has convinced me and a few others that it is a winning idea, to collectively keep some chickens. The basis premise being that seven plots join forces to rent a plot and keep chickens for eggs, sharing the costs and sharing the work. Currently we are five, we’ve worked out ball park figures to start up. We need to find some more willing members but I’m sure that won’t be a problem, the main sticking point at the moment is that we need to convince the council that this is a good idea. Hopefully we can get things worked out within the next month or two so we can get some ex-battery hens in and back to good condition before the poor weather kicks in.
May 19th, 2009 by Rich
If you remember way back I said we had planted four left over first earlies in a big pot, well last weekend we harvested the pot giving us our first new potatoes of the year. After emptying out and rooting about we came away with 2.4kg of spuds, not bad for the left overs that didn’t make it into the ground! I did consider taking a photo but then I figured you all know what a potato looks like
I feel I should also point out that I haven’t posted in a while, ok more than a while! Sorry about that, been busy with many things on and off the allotment. I will aim to bring you up to speed with our progress over the next few days
