Tabula Rasa

I took a quick stroll up to the allotment today, mostly just to check it was still there, what with it having been a good few weeks since I last made the 10 minute hike up, and there having been some meaningful gusts of wind of late. Apart from a couple of upturned compost bins and a bit of damage to a fence that will need replacing at some point anyhow, things were basically in order, which is great.

I couldn't be bothered to do any actual graft - too many Warhammer miniatures to paint and too much whisky to drink to be getting involved with any actual work - but I did empty a whole bunch of kitchen waste into the compost bins and rip up a couple of newspapers to follow them, which sort of counts, right?

We're expecting our first sprog to arrive within the next 4-5 weeks - by Christ, that's a scary sentence to type out - so who knows how much time we'll have to tend the plot this year. We've got potatoes chitting and I need to get some tomatoes sown, so we're sort of blithely soldiering on as if nothing's about to happen. We'll see. I mean, what did farmers and other such country folks do in the olden days before child benefit, antenatal classes good quality nursery provision? There must be a way. I've got this mental image of taking said baby up to the plot and plonking it in some kind of contraption in which it silently and obediently sleeps while I tend to my onions, but I have a feeling that this may not be exactly how things work out.

Broad beans

But back to today. The broad beans, garlic and onions that were planted at the end of October have all done really well through the winter, with just a couple of the broad beans succumbing to slugs or something. It has been an almost ridiculously mild winter, so fair enough. Global warming, innit. You watch, in a couple of short years there'll be vineyards all over Hadrian's Wall.

Rhubarb

About the only other thing putting on any new growth is the rhubarb, whose alien-like pink tumescent orbs are one by one unfurling themselves into what will, before all that long, become pudding.

Other than that, the patches are all blank slates of soil and manure, awaiting us to figure out what we want to plant in them. I like this time of year in that respect. It's full of potential and entirely lacking in dissapointment. You can't get too stressed about things you haven't even sown yet. Given the aforementioned arrival, I think we'll be keeping things fairly straightforward and low maintenance. It's going to be a challenge keeping the plot, never mind this blog which loosely purports to be about it, going, but we'll give it a bash.