The Brown Stuff

My 8 year old daughter loves painting. Not painting pictures in an artistic way but just painting, painting anything, slapping it on in the style of a decorator. If there is nothing for her to paint she is happy to take a paint-brush and a bucket of water and spread a thin coat of water across the garden wall, the garage or the patio slabs and once it has dried she will start all over again.

It was no surprise last weekend when she volunteered to paint my compost boxes. I provided her with a tub of paint, a nice wide brush and a flask of orange juice and left her to it.

Unhappy with the colour of the paint she complained, "It looks like poo!". I did not really have much choice. Site rules stipulate that structures on the allotments must be painted only in natural colours by which they mean various shades of brown and maybe a delicate shade of green for the daringly flamboyant types.

My daughter argued that as flowers can be such colours as pink, red, purple and orange and as the sky is blue these must all be natural colours. I have to agree with her. I think the site would look great if all the sheds and boxes were painted like multi-coloured beach huts but I could not allow her to paint my compost boxes in pink and sky-blue stripes.

For a while she could not bring herself to touch the brown paint. She lounged around in the sun for a  few minutes and sat with an allotment book over her face absorbing gardening knowledge by osmosis. She watered her strawberries and did a bit of hoeing around the vines. Eventually she was overcome by the compulsion to paint and despite constant complaints about the colour she did a really good job.

Whilst my daughter painted I was able to prepare a bean bed and frame for the French Beans and Runner Beans and plant another row of potatoes.

                              

Gone with the wind

This is the greenhouse frame which I erected on Sunday afternoon:-

This is what I found when I came home from work tonight:-

It looks like we have had a bit of a storm blow through today. The allotment is like a swamp and, as you can see my, pride and joy, greenhouse frame is now a tangled mess of aluminium sections. I did notice as I put it up on Sunday that there was one cross member missing from the back of the frame and a couple of the nuts could not be tightened up as they just spun around on the bolts when I tried to tighten them up. I had planned to fit a cross member this weekend and replace the faulty nuts and bolts and then fix it to a base frame. The greenhouse seemed quite secure when I left it but I can only assume that the structural integrity was compromised by the missing strut and the loose nuts and the wind today took advantage of that. 

I was a bit pressed for time before it went dark tonight so I haven't been able to examine the full extent of the damage but hopefully it will be salvageable.

My 10 Grapevines arrived last night and I need to get them planted this weekend so I went up to the plot after work today to dig holes ready for planting. I put a dollop of manure and a scoop of slow release plant food into each hole and then covered it lightly with soil. I will stand the vines in a bucket of water for 24 hours and then plant them in the holes this weekend. However I am a little bit concerned that the site does not seem to be very well draining. It is like quicksand in some parts. In the picture below it is not easy to distinguish my planting holes from my deep sunken welly prints. I will just have to wait and see if the vines take to it.

Hopefully the swampy conditions and greenhouse damage will prove to be only minor set-backs. Everything seemed to be going so well last weekend. The composting boxes arrived;  I collected a nice pile of well rotted pony poo with assistance from Lucy; I also planted three rows of first early Duke of York potatoes.