mission impossible

well, the aim of the next two months or so will be to steal a little bit of summer growing from another grey summer here, we have been super busy trying to get everything tidy again and this will lead to a bunch of before and after photos ...

so, aside from doing loads of weeding and trying to get seedlings in the ground we have been slowly tidying up the backyard of our house where we found two baby bufo bufos, which is just a fancy way of saying two baby toads!  it was amazing to see the two of them together, and of course the good news was that our cats hadn't gotten to them yet, fingers crossed ...

on the allotment front here is a picture of our new kale bed:

the seedlings were provided by a friend's father, there are a lot of predators out there in that big bad rain filled world so we are using plastic cloches to protect them from slugs and then the nifty netting frame that i made last year is designed to keep cats, badgers and pigeons away (a dangerous troika), i hope to make another one of these frames next weekend, we have enough netting i think to make at least two more. 

introducing ratty!

i would say that for the last 8 months-ish our allotment, or more specifically our new "dalek" composter, has been home to a little friend, one ratty m. ratkin ... before you jump to conclusions, we and ratty have worked out a deal, he or she gets an undisturbed house and an undisclosed share of everything that goes into our compost bin in exchange for the daily turning of our compost, which is done regularly without fail.

so far ratty really has been one of the most important of the many unsung heroes in our allotment, but no longer, in perhaps our most whimsical page so far i give you:

the life and times of ratty m. ratkin

slow planters

i would like to introduce the latest addition to the planter craze, a big 10 1/2 foot long and 10 inches deep monster of a planter, this one was purchased from the bristol wood recycling project for only "a tenner," you can only guess what they stored in it before it was recycled: missiles or pythons or something like that ... basically all of the soil from the beginning of these planters to the white cold frame at the top of the photo was covered in trash when we first got the plot, although we were able to get most of it out, the plastic that was left in the ground disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces, moral of this story: PLASTIC IS EVIL, so we can't really plant things in this area, and our answer has been planters.

 

here is its profile, m and i are debating on whether to keep the cantilevered  effect at the front, a straight forward question of design over function (design will win!).





and here are some more of our neighbors:

 

three slow worms, which are actually lizards without legs (for those of you who make up our burgeoning US readership, ha!), and they like warm covered spaces, mostly under black plastic ...

 

i had to disturb them before i put down the planters, sorry guys!

(and just a technical note, although slow worms are very slow, they seem to be fast enough to prevent the camera on my cell phone from focusing properly)

the horror ...

after being three years of being greeted by the worst of britain's terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs i no longer mind and even tolerate the less ravenous of our neighbors, but even after so many encounters, i was still shocked when i found these two green slugs:

it was their greenness, somehow sickly, and nearly phosphorescent, that made me recoil.