Sunday, October 18, 2009

Shameful really, but so what.

Two days shy of a full month and here I am typing my latest timely blog update.

Until the rain two weeks ago my allotments had set like the proverbial cement, little old 20st me jumping up and down on the blade of my spade and more likly to bend it or force my boot in half than to actually get it into the soil.
So what have I done in those weeks, apart form non-gardening stuff.
Well, I harvested a good crop of Chilli Peppers from the Greenhouse and the majority are now festoned around the hot water cylinder in the airing cupboard and going wrinkly.
The Tomato plants in the Greenhouse have resumed growing, with fresh green shoots and teeny-tiny red fruits where the last flowers to set had not really grown away, thought at least one had fresh flowers today and the Greenhouse is wholly unheated.
Today I relocated the Sweet Winter Jasmine from the Greenhouse to inside the French Windows, here's hoping for some sweet autumn fragrance.
Plot 18 yielded up a decent number and mixture of Winter Squashes together with some Sunflower heads. In order to store them I had to spend a bit more on my shed, adding a set of shelves across most of the rear of the shed, so it now looks more like Hagrid's garden minus the HippoGryff than a workshed. Today I gathered in all the Blue Hubbard, which have me puzzled as they are defiantly and wartily Dark Green, some tending to Orange with a Grapelike bloom, any road they were vandal-visible as the 1 degree celcius Tuesday night had worked its dark and mysterious magic on the foliage.
Now that the soil is more amenable to digging today I dug a half-width strip across plot 17 about six feet wide after I'd wrestled all the dying octopii from Plot 18's Squash patch into the compost bins and bonfire pile.
The Workshed now just needs one end and some detail round the door coating in Sadolin Black to look acceptable from the outside and a great deal more sorting and ordering and placing and organising to look like a workspace inside.
Still I finished one long drawn out project this weekend, we got notice boards for all the Allotment Sites in 2007, I installed four over the last week, the last one yesterday, that entire job took an average of two months per board. In mitigations, it was impossible to get to any tools or "stuff" while we had the builders in and dealing with my late mothers estate after her death took a tad more than five minutes work, but it still seems to have taken an age.
Finished a newer project that was sprung on me a few months ago by Yahoo. They went and decided to get rid of GeoCities, their free web-hosting site and guess where I'd put our association website.
So after pottering round for many weeks trying to find a FREE web-hosting service that the association could use I finally found one that BT is providing as a community service and tonight in one straight off sitting I've resurrected our website.