Categories: general
Date: 19 April 2010 20:48:44
I've been spending more time at the allotment recently - it helps that we live 2.5 minutes walk from it, and it's a nice break from both wedding planning and work! It's a community allotment which is run by our church, although Mr B is officially the lease holder and we do a lot of the work towards it.
At the moment I'm trying to weed the strawberries. This has been an ongoing task ever since I started helping with the allotment, but now I'm really trying to get on top of it. Trying to dig up all the weed's roots, and leave the strawberries behind. It's quite a fiddly job and generally takes an hour or two to properly weed a squared metre of strawberries. And the patch is 3 by 4 metres. Once I've got rid of all the weeds, my plan is to cover the ground around the strawberries in a thick layer of bark (which is provided at the allotment) to stop the weeds coming back. Hopefully.
Last summer we dug a pond at the allotment, and we've been trying to get some plants growing in the pond to attract wildlife, such as tadpoles, with the hope that the frogs will eat the slugs... Our allotment neighbour kindly gave us a cutting from his pond, and we got some oxygenating plants from a local aquatics centre. A month or two ago the pond was still looking pretty dead, the plants didn't look like they were thrieving at all. But recently, with the sun coming out, the donated plant has bloomed and the oxygenating plants look much healthier. I was gazing into the pond on Saturday, watching the pond skaters glide across the top of the pond and looking out for tadpoles, when I spotted a newt swimming across the pond! It was about two inches long and looked like a mini lizard! It's a great sign that something is living in our pond, just as long as newts don't eat tadpoles...