After the Deluge

Apparently the weather is discussed 282 times per second in the UK, which isn't very surprising when it's as mad as it has been in Newcastle over the last few days.  See here, here and here for three of the more dramatic vids of the downpour.  We were down the allotment earlier in the day when it was raining a bit, though there was no suggestion of the drama to follow.

The View from the gate on a damp morning

The Season So Far...

Leeks! Garlic! Me!

So here we are in late June, roughly halfway through our first proper growing season.  After getting all excited about it, especially in March when the weather was (briefly) amazing, we've seen a fair chunk of our efforts completely scuppered by one of the wettest and coldest summers on record.  Seeds haven't germinated, courgettes have perished in record time and things have just generally been as sodden and grim as.... well, let me know if you've got a really good "cold and wet" metaphor, I can't think of one.

In The Beginning...

Day 1; The view from the gate

So, it's been more or less a year since we got the call, got shown round a bunch of weed-stricken plots and made the choice of our own half-plot of smallholding heaven.  We'd been on the waiting list for about 9 months on a couple of different allotments.  The one we ended up on has a pleasantly unfussy, slightly ramshackle feel to it; a lot of the other plots didn't exactly look like Monty Don was at the helm which was reassuring, considering that, at least in the near future, neither would ours.