Sunday work slot

Yesterday we spent a bit of time up on the allotment doing odds and sods.

I put a cabin hook on the shed door and the side of the shed so it can be held open without banging in the breeze. Previous attempts to do this with hooks and pieces of string had been spectacularly ineffective. This was my first trial with my new cordless drill, and it proved its worth.

Meanwhile Amanda did some weeding and harvesting. We're producing more beans than we can eat from six plants, so I've no idea what the gurus are doing with their solid walls of beans.

We've got a lot more radishes ready for picking, but left them for now as we're not entirely sure what to do with them. They're fast and easy to grow, but not so easy to use.

All of the work we did turning over the topsoil over the last couple of weeks seems to have gone to waste, as the grass is merrily growing back up through it. One guru suggests we started too early - we should do this at the end of October, when everything starts slowing down on the growing front, and when the frost gets a chance to get at the exposed roots. This doesn't really suit Amanda, who's gung ho to get on and do stuff, but I'm well up for taking it easy for a bit.

I think we need to pause and consider - plan what we want to grow next year, where it's going to go, when it should be planted, etc. Sometimes more haste means less speed.

Pumpkin?!

This one was a bit of a puzzle. We planted some "pumpkin" seeds that a friend and Allotment Guru kindly gave us, small plants grew and we planted them into the allotment. We were a bit surprised then to find what looks like a giant zuccini, or small marrow, it doesn't look like a pumpkin at all.....It does look very nice though.....it's just that we don't know when to pick it!

Beans means.....success!

We've been able to pick and eat green and french beans over the past couple of weeks! We've got loads of radishes too!

Other approaches to building compost bins

Such is the egalitarian nature of the web, and the downright obsessiveness of some of its users, that I'm sure there are whole sites devoted to the art of the compost bin. If I could be bothered to do any research at all before throwing my thoughts up here, I could find out in an instant. However, on Friday one of my RSS feeds lit up with the following article on how to build a compost bin, and I found the synchronicity compelling enough to post it here:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Pallet_Compost_Bin

Netley Bin Raising #3

Step 3: You're done. Irritatingly, Amanda seems to have been completely correct - the bin is so large and heavy that it's pretty solid.

Perhaps I'll sneak up some evening and bang in some spikes while she's not looking.

Netley Bin Raising #2

Step 2: one of us holds some of the pallets upright, the other bangs in some nails.

Netley Bin Raising #1

Having built the shed last Saturday, on the Sunday we carried on the construction theme and built a compost bin. A really big one. We'd managed to scrounge a couple of pallets from some people down the road who were having some work done, and I got some more from my mate Dave the builder. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Dave, have you got any spare pallets?
Dave: Sure, how many dozen would you like?

We got four (actually four, not four dozen) in the end. I reckoned we should be driving big metal stakes into the ground to hold the pallets upright, as most of the onsite gurus seem to do. Amanda reckoned we should just bang some nails in and it would be alright. I decided to humour her on this one, and so we took a hammer and a healthy supply of nails up to the allotment.

Step 1: taking the ends off some of the braces so that the pallets will fit flat against each other.