Tuesday

 Good morning. 
It's horrible and wet again this morning.  One nice day at a time is all we seem to get right now which is a right pain.  I was rather hoping to fit in a high mowing of the grass down the allotment today but that won't happen.  Yesterday was quite pleasant with some periods of sunshine and some cloud and, on a couple of occasions, a thread of rain which came to nothing.
Oh, well, it is what it is!

I managed to get plenty done.

Not a pretty sight yet but it will be.  I cut out and dug up what will be a flower bed, just to look pretty and add colour.  That area has been covered for a couple of years and I expected it to be extremely hard work with loads of nasty weed roots in the soil but was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to dig/fork over and how few root systems I found (and removed).  The soil felt in great condition too - not as much clay as I expected.

We've changed our over-ambitious plan for raised beds for now and, as time goes by, we will cut out more beds of a similar size for vegetables, edge them and have chippings on the cover for access pathways.

But probably not this year!

Access isn't really something we had thought about all that carefully and, for a while, it wasn't a problem, but now we have dug up where the strawberries were (or tried to be), it's become a bit more of an issue so I've set out these 'stepping stones' which should help considerably.
I'd love stone really but that would be too heavy and too expensive (and maybe a bit vulnerable to theft).

Where this bed meets the cover, where the raspberry canes are just starting to send out some growth, it was very shabby and the cover was fraying and looking horrible, so I have tucked that under and staked it firmly down to make a neater boundary.

I went to Abercorns and get a couple of rolls of cheap, plastic lawn edging which, we have decided, we are going to try out.  The wooden sleepers or whatever are very nice but they rot down and ours are starting to be not fit for purpose in several places.  We're going to try lawn edging for the interior borders first and see how it works.  I strongly suspect it won't work all that well or otherwise why aren't more holders using it?

But we will see.

And finally, the obligatory full frontal photo!  I feel quite proud of it all right now.  

Beth has a week off next week so we will meet there together.  We're going to sort out the back together, clean the table and benches, tidy and sort the canes and maybe build the support cages for things like the runner beans and the sweet peas, weed round the shed, put chippings down (it's so helpful to have them provided free) and put in that lawn edging.  We reckon four hands will be a lot better than two for that job - it won't be hard, just maybe a bit awkward so one can hold in place while the other backfills with soil.

Fingers crossed for some fine weather.

As mentioned, I went across town to Abercorns and spent a happy half hour or so strolling around the plants and garden stuff.  I bought the edging, some seed pots and a nice, big plastic/stone lookalike pot for my garden.  Some of my wooden pots are looking manky and, although I dearly love those heavy stone pots in various glazings and sizes, they are totally impractical for a single lady of my age.  So plastic it is - and at least it isn't single use!

When I got home, there was a parcel on the doorstep which I'll talk about some other time.  I sorted out seeds, wrote plant labels, inserted sowing trays in larger trays and generally did everything except for the mucky part - actually planting some seeds.  That's for today, in-between showers.

Providing I am dressed in time, I need to pop into town.  My card reader thingy has stopped working so I need to get to the bank to order another one although I really ought to check online and see if I can do it that way first.  The trouble is, I can't access my account and I do like to keep an eye on my balance.

The only other scheduled event is the weekly chat with Dad this afternoon, which I am looking forward to very much.

So that's my life at the moment.  What are your plans for the day?  Whatever they are, start safe, dry and positive.  xx