Raised Beds

With most of the bought plants and the potatoes now planted, I thought I'd have a go at some raised beds.

Six 8 foot scaffold boards, with two of them cut in half, nailed together through the ends they were fairly easy to build at look quite good.

Digging over the soil and adding more to fill them a bit was quite hard work but worth it.

Sunset

Some more brassicas planted out at the front of the plot, and a nice sunset too, unfortunately it looks like the camera setting on the phone was set to low quality !

The weather has been fairly good since getting the second plough done so I feel like I've started to get a good bit done.

Planting Out

These are the sprouts, cabbages and cauliflower I bought recently at Watsons nursery in St. Johns.

They were reduced to half price over the bank holiday weekend so they were only about 75p per tray. They looked really healthy, and the staff there were really helpful too, so I'm sure I'll be back.

With 6 modules to a tray but mostly double planted so split the plants as carefully as I could and planted, hope I've not damaged them doing this, but time will tell I guess.

At last !

At last the weather has been dry enough to get the second pass with the tractor done, which means I can start to plant.

First thing to go in was these potatoes, 2 rows of lates on the right and one of earlies on the left, right at the back of the plot by the hedge - unfortunately I lost the bags they came in so dont know the varieties, they just came from B&Q, maybe I can find something on their website to give me a clue ?

Great feeling to have something planted at last, cant wait to see if they all grow !

I tried a bit of an experiment on the last few at the far ends of the rows, I'd read that potatoes will grow from just a small section of seed potatoe, so cut a few up and we'll see how they compare to the 'whole' ones planted.

Stones

I'd been told the site was very stoney, so whilst I can't actually start any planing yet, I've started to pick out some of the larger stones, and yes there are plenty of them !

Some of the other plots around the site have used them for paths which looks quite nice, not sure if I'll do that, but I'm sure they'll get used somehow, I dont really want to have to sift them all.

1st Plough

The 1st plough has finally been done, the weather has been too wet for the tractor to do it over the past couple of weeks. Very frustrating as now I'm keen to get on.

We need to wait for this to dry out a bit and then it will be done again to break up the sods more. So just hoping for dry weather over the next few days !

A little bit of a field

Well, I finally got the details of my allotment, and here it is, 180 sq ft of field at Braaid in the Isle of Man.

Its the first year for this allotment site, so from a field last year to allotments this year.

There's someone on site with a tractor who for a small fee has cut the grass and once the ground has dried out a bit, will plough/rotivate the ground (its been a very wet May).