First swifts

Planted out sweet peas, brussels and cabbages . Dianthus and dahlias moved to coldframe. Potted on antirrhinums and rudbekias. Lovely growing weather, apple tree blossom is coming out, saw the first swifts over the site. Harvested the last leeks and broccoli spears - eating the leaves now!

In the greenhouse

This is how the greenhouse was looking today:

Full Moon

More sowing in the greenhouse - runner and french beans, sunflowers. Got a few brassicas and lettuce out into the coldframe. Started pinching out antirrhinums, cosmos and dianthus. Mulched broad beans with garden compost. Spread fish,blood and bone over areas yet to be sown/planted.

Mulching broad beans

Cracking on

Did some pricking out and potting up, planted out main crop spuds and sowed another row of peas. Dug and mucked trenches for runner beans and sweet peas. Sowed some annuals outside. Busy potting on for a little while most evenings - brassicas, lettuce, flowers. Spring days: everything leafing up, little birds dashing about, the light!

Broccoli

Started harvesting the purple sprouting today:

In the potting shed

Pricking out antirrhinums:

The last winter parsnips

Can't complain about the size of these:

Planting early potatoes

First sowings outside - peas

Peas sown in a wide flat-bottomed drill:

Planting onion sets

The muck man cometh

Helping my mate Arthur with unloading a trailer load of muck - in return for a few barrows to put under me spuds:

First signs of life!

Antirrhinums starting to germinate:

Hello, wecome to my life!

Here goes...a website for my allotment diary. I hope it will be interesting for fellow growers and gardeners everywhere. My name's Simon and this will be my sixth year of cultivating my plot here at Firs Estate Allotments in Derby. In the beginning it was overgrown with brambles, bindweed, etc. Over the years I have been clearing more and more ground so now I have two beds, each about 20x30 feet. I also look after the next door plot for Brenda, which is down to fruit trees. I garden organically and grow the usual vegetables, fruit and also cut flowers. Around two sides of the plots I've left a two metre strip of blackberries. Here there are also trees such as holly, elderberry, horse chestnut and ash, so there's lots of wildlife here too.

Over the winter the garden has been feeding me with leeks, carrots, parsnips and brussels sprouts. Growing at the moment are purple sprouting broccoli and autumn-sown broad beans. The plot has been dug over, with compost dug in at the same time. Apple trees have been pruned, brambles at the top of the plot cut back, hawthorn whips planted to fill in gaps on the boundary and a bit more ground brought under cultivation. Spring is just round the corner and the best is yet to come! This is how my plot looks today:

Here's this year's plan:

I've got my seeds and sorted them into some sort of order by sowing dates. I start my early seeds off in a heated propagator on my bedroom windowsill then they go into the greenhouse on my plot, which is unheated except for a small paraffin heater which I put on at night if frost is forecast. As the plants grow they get pricked out and potted on, before going into a coldframe to be hardened off and then planted out. Of course quite a few types of seed are sown direct in the ground.

As far as this web site goes, I'm pretty much making it up as I go along. On this page I'll do the diary in the form of a timeline, hopefully with plenty of photos, and then put my records by plant name underneath that, which I'll keep updated as the season progresses. That's the intention anyway...