Well the “greenhouse” is still in one piece but is arousing amused glances on the plot. Quite a number of people have let me know that they won’t be at all surprised to see it floating above their patch like a tomato laden hot air balloon.

I got a few really helpful comments to my last post, it seems both Easygardener and Kethry have learnt hard lessons with similar contraptions. Just to confirm, the frame is slightly submerged under the soil as is the excess polythene and I have now weighted this down further with a grow bag on each side. There are also 4 guy ropes attempting to hold the whole thing together and a number of clips holding the polythene to the frame.

Although it sounds super secure, I spent a bit of time in there today rearranging all the young plants from the front room nursery and gave myself one hell of a fright everytime one of the high speed trains whizzed past. The whole contraption feels as though it rises a couple of inches from the ground and then slams back down again. All the clips seem to pop off the frame as this happens and I’ve already retrieved 6 from the pond. If I had a bit more space I’d be tempted to go around the outside and bank the sides with growbags as well.

I’ve made the mental note to dismantle it before winter and if its still usable come next year I’ll locate it away from the railway line.

It is going to be much more of a hassle to deal with the opening and closing of the door. I’ve left it closed for now as I want to ease the plants gently into life outside, I’m thinking to nip to the plot tomorrow though and open it. From then on in I’m hoping it will be ok to leave the door permanently open. I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about undercover gardening.

I reckon this is going to end up being a picture post, I’m far too shattered to string words together. The day was glorious but after about 6 hours on the plot my skin is tightly shriveling with the sunburn and I need to spend the next month in a vat of E45 cream.

My seedlings have been going crazy in Shakti’s front room nursery, the beans are threatening to smother everything in sight and the tomatoes need staking. None of these things go well with toddler sized birthday parties so they need to go. Not wanting to shock them into submission with an immediate relocation to the outside world, I’ve been hunting down one of those mini greenhouse affairs to act as a coldframe. I spotted something even better from Wilkinsons though, a full on walk-in greenhouse complete with staging for £40.

Considerable rearranging was required to squeeze it onto the plot. The compost bins were pushed to the corner shaded by the hideous ivy which seems like the best spot for them considering nothing else will grow there except for slugs. More problematic was the wigwam I planted up last weekend with some 7 year old experimental peas. It’s quite a palaver trying to retrieve ungerminated green orbs from a patch of soggy soil.

Given my unchallenged bodging tendencies, I’m quite surprised but pleased to say, the greenhouse went up relatively well. It only has one little tear in the polythene and I’m sure that existed before I took it out of the box. I’ve piled the edges up with soil, staked, pegged, clipped and tied down anything threatening to flap and if it’s still there tomorrow morning I may well do a little jig.

I’m going to plant the tomatoes in grow bags around the base - anything to try and keep the structure anchored, and I think the chilli peppers and aubergines will be overjoyed.

Before the construction started we (I had Shakti’s help today) transplanted the greyhound cabbages from the seed bed and sowed a row of yellow french beans. We also managed to acquire a load of broken paving slabs from the site skip and have a veritable highway laid out between beds. Unfortunately the new compost bin and greenhouse layout, blocks all access to the bottom of the plot. I haven’t a cat in hells chance of accessing the peas if they decide to crop.

We left with a sack of multi-coloured delights for tea - Ruby Chard, Broad Bean tips and some of the overwintered onions.

There was a bit of a water crisis on the site last weekend, a huge leak had been discovered in one of the pipes and a rumour spread suggesting we were going to be without running water forever. Even though it seemed to have been sorted out on my half of the site by the next morning, it acted as a trigger for me to start a water conservation project. I acquired a water butt from freecycle and the weekend was scheduled to create a shed, butt and guttering ensemble.

How long could it take to install a single span of guttering? To give the game away right from the start, it took me 3 hours and as I left the guttering was propped up on the inside of the shed, thereby serving absolutely no use whatsoever. Perhaps a few more hours tomorrow will see the task complete.

I started by siting the butt at the back of the shed, leveling the ground and preparing a raised support, then I had to repeat the whole process at the other side of the shed as someone had seen fit to install a flippin birdbox slap in the middle of my guttering route. I intended to put the gutter with a slight downward slope so that the water just trickles into the butt without the need for fancy attachments and downpipes but my first attempt failed at the first hurdle - the roof overhang went beyond my guttering and the rain just slipped over the edge.

Batons were sourced and cut to force the guttering out beyond the overhang but then I had a problem with my screws - too short - too long - the usual. I got a bit knarked and started hammering the screws and a few nails until walloped my finger with a direct blow. I wanted to hop, scream and swear like a lunatic but an audience had assembled on the overlooking platform. I had to smile and take cover in the shed until I could cope with the throbbing finger. It also gave me the opportunity to retrieve all the items scattered on the floor after my banging frenzy.

I regained my composure and finished the job off, slid the guttering into the brackets and went in search of some water to test the trajectory. Still with an audience I poured a bottle of water into the middle of the guttering only to be welcomed with a splattering sound at the wrong end - someone installed the shed on a flipping slope. You just can’t get the workmen these days!

Off to Homebase again to buy an end piece for the guttering so that the water gets directed back in the right direction. Guttering apparently works with some impossible connection that took 3 beefy guys from the customer service section to be able to break into. I was sent off with the suggestion that I loosen up the rubber with some hot water and washing up liquid. I needed a cuppa tea anyway so just chucked the end piece into some boiling water on the trangia. When I remembered to fish it out again it looked a little on the overcooked side and rather twisted out of shape. No hope that it would fit on the end in the designed fashion. Not to be outdone I opened up my tub of bitumen and smeared great dollops around both ends of the pipe. So now its propped inside the shed, hopefully drying into super sturdy water proof seal. We’ll see tomorrow.

Although I am clearly the worlds worst DIY’er I can console myself with being probably the worlds best cabbage grower. I dug up one of my monsters today and had to utilise the bike trailer to get it home.

I’m sure Norris McWhirter would be interested in this photo.

With the recent spate of inclement weather the green fingered addict has to look elsewhere for a horticultural fix. Here are a few of the ideas I came up with:

While I was forced out of the garden this Easter, thoughts naturally turned to DIY and the flat ended up with a spring clean, a new lick of paint and an assortment of new shelves. With paint brushes and offcuts of wood littering the worktops it was an easy step to start rustling up a few homemade plant labels.

These are made from edging strips coated in white paint, the writing is done with a permanent marker and then coated with a layer of clear varnish. I reckon these will last a good few years and hopefully I won’t lose the next row of parsnips I sow - I can’t find the one I planted a few weeks ago.

Even with plant tags it can be quite easy to lose track of the layout of your plot. I’ve heard recently of a few websites that are offering plot design and garden layout tools so I tried out Plangarden which has two week free trial before asking your for a $20 per year subscription.

This enables you to draw up a visual image of your plot. I’m using it here to remember which variety of spud belongs to which row and to determine how much space I have left for everything I have left to sow.

It is its pretty useful but I’ve done it now and can’t quite see why I would carry on and pay for the subscription. There are a few other features such as a planting guide which aims to tell you according to location when it is appropriate to start planting. For my location it tells me that the last predicted spring frost will be the 25th April, so just one more month of anxiety to go.

There are two other gardening websites that I am much more convinced by and would like to recommend to you, these are myfolia and blotanical and both are free.

Myfolia is a beautifully designed website, it enables you to keep track of multiple different gardens eg veg patch, herb garden, flower bed and then monitor individual plantings in each. From there you can write blog posts and progress reports related to your plantings. It is linked to the online photo albums, flickr and picassa, so is very easy to create visually impactful posts.

I think this site is going to be invaluable when it comes to looking back and deciding when was the most successful time for planting broad beans for example. I have two rows planted a month apart and I will keep the progress reports going until they both crop.

The only thing about the site that I don’t like, is the enclosed nature of the website, I think you have to sign up in order to view the content so any blog post you write will only be seen by other members. This isn’t really a problem for me as I have an external blog anyway but I’d like to see an rss feed (or somesuch) that sucks in my existing posts rather requiring me to recreate them inside myfolia.

I’m sure things will change though, the developers are really keen to receive feedback and have made some great enhancements recently. For example the site also provides a few widgets to transfer myfolia content to your blog, on the lefthand toolbar I have a widget from myfolia detailing my latest plantings.

Apologies for the length of this post, we are now approaching the “and finally” bit.

And finally, there is blotanical. This is a great site, essentially a community of garden bloggers. Blogging communities are fairly common but this site has been designed so well you end up wanting to go back daily and as a result you are introduced to so many great blog posts and bloggers. I’ve never actually come across a site that manages to be quite so “sticky”.

All member blog posts are displayed on the site via an rss feed and can be viewed in all their visual glory, from within the blotanical site. You are encouraged through a membership point system to comment on and vote for outstanding blog posts. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this, I believe the voting system is sometimes used as a means to gain points rather than to highlight worthy reads but you aren’t obliged to join in.

If you have a garden blog, I would really recommend signing up for blotanical, my readership numbers have trebled since I joined last month and a lot of new and welcome commenters have come my way. I’ve also been introduced to a number of local and more exotic fellow bloggers, so I am never short of something interesting to read.

Phew! All done, have a flower for lasting this far.

Another glorious weekend and I managed to sneak two full days on the plot. I was supposed to be out on my long run on Sunday afternoon but I’m finding it increasingly hard to drag myself away from the shed. With weather like this I can stretch out on my bench with my feet on a sack of manure, my back leaning gently against my peach and my face basking in the sun.

No sun bathing for these coy little beauties, they spend their entire lives looking at the ground, I wonder what made them so shy.

It wasn’t a completely lazy weekend, I spent most of the time digging and now there’s only a small strip left to go before the entire plot will have been given the once over.

I also prepared a seed bed. I really don’t know why I keep being attracted towards construction jobs, I must be the worlds worst DIY’er. I gathered my scrap planks, chopped to them to size and then nailed them together into a frame of sorts before knocking it and the stakes into the freshly dug ground. As soon as I took the hammer to the stakes the whole frame decided to blow apart. 30 bent nails later I managed to get it to stay together for long enough to step away from the disaster area.

I intend to use it as a stale seed bed for starting off my cabbage and leek plants. I’m not sure how well it well it will do as the shed casts quite a shadow and it only really catches the sun from about 1pm onwards but we’ll see.

My neighbour gave me a good bag of jerusalem artichokes to take home with me. I don’t think I will bother growing any, what a flipping faff they are to peel! I made a carrot and JA soup which was ok but not special enough to repeat, I’ll try roasting the few I have left and see if this leads to any sort of culinary epiphany.

Great weekend, the sort that requires another weekend to recover from though.

The widely forecast snow didn’t rear its head in London, in fact Saturday was a gloriously sunny day. I was free in the afternoon so headed off to the plot with my newly delivered peach tree. I bought this from Blackmoor Nurseries and the variety, Avalon Pride, is apparently resistant to leaf curl. If I can plant it against a SW-erly wall I should be rewarded with juicy fruit some years hence.

My shed is approximately SW facing, if you are a glass half full person, so I’ve decided to train it as a fan underneath the bird box. This required some brave and ruthless pruning. The stump you see in the photo is the result of two days of nervous nibbling with the secateurs. It seems such a tragic waste to hack off hard grown branches, especially when the tree cost £25, I’ve already relegated about £10 quids worth to the incinerator.

Today wasn’t such a great day, cold and flippin windy but I managed to get quite a lot done. You’ve got to love sheds, regardless of how bitter the day is, you’ve always got a little retreat. A perfect home from home. Everyone should have a strategically placed shed with a supply of tea bags and digestive biscuits, it’s practically a human rights issue.

So I started with a bit of digging - I still haven’t cleared that peculiar ridge of bindweed and couch grass roots that I mentioned a few weeks back, and then I chose to start building a path.

At the moment I seem to be wandering haphazardly across the plot, compacting the area I’ve already dug, so I need to add some order. I nicked the bricks from another pre-existing but almost buried path and will need to go on a hunt for suitable hardcore material before I can organise the whole plot properly.

After a couple of hours hard labour, it was back into the shed to start the sweet pea seeds off in the toilet rolls I’ve been collecting for months.

I don’t get a huge amount of light through the glazed windows, so I hope they don’t get too straggly before it is safe enough to send them outside to face the big bad world.

I’m using one of my old coke bottles as toilet roll specific watering device. It was a heck of a lot harder to construct than you’d imagine - I knocked a nail through the lid after a couple of severe bashes with the hammer but I had one hell of a job removing it again. The plastic on those lids must be about an inch thick!

I woke this morning with plans of allotment pottering on a slightly more sophisticated level than I managed yesterday. I still wasn’t feeling on top form so my plans centred mostly around my new chair and dreams of a hot steaming mug of tea.

My mug of choice was A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf, so apt for the shed I think, and my stirrer is a little family heirloom from my Gran.

However, these were just dreams. I actually woke to an email from a freecyclist offering me a gift of a 9ft extendable ladder. Now as I’m in need of a ladder to apply some roofing felt to the shed I was very happy to take him up on his offer, but herein started a 2.5 hour challenge to claim the goodies.

The ladders lay 6 miles to the west of me, an easy enough cycle but it was quite an ordeal to lug them back. My trusty revolution cargo trailer proved its worth again though and really took the weight off me. Most of the route was along the thankfully straight dual carriageway - it is understandably tricky to steer a rigid 9ft bike around tight bends.

I was knackered by the time I arrived on the plot, so stopped for the first in a long line of cuppas. After this essential revival, I started on the roofing task.

Applying roofing felt is quite tricky, I made a fair old mess of it all and am choosing not to illustrate the point as its too embarrassing. I even had a barracking from someone waiting on the train platform opposite, who informed me I had put it on upside down. He’s probably right. I daubed the edges with bitumen paint so it should do the trick anyway.

Talking of bitumen, I met my closest plot neighbour today, seems we keep missing each other. Anyway she was just passing by with her kids to pick up something from her shed and popped over to introduce herself. We shook hands and I’m afraid she left covered in the black tar that had somehow spread itself across my palm. I know how to win friends and influence people!

Just before the day ended I started on another task. I have a stack of wood offcuts lying around that either littered the plot when I took it on, or came with the freebie shed. I’ve had my eye on one of the planks for a bird box.

Rather like the roofing task, I rather botched this one as well, cutting the base too short. Still, I was able to wing it by substituting the roof. I then fashioned a new roof with some extra thin ply, covered it in an offcut of roofing felt and bashed nails in liberally.

I was at the bashing stage, feeling rather hopeless about the future of the box when a little Robin came and settled on the doorstep of my shed and watched my progress for a while.

I hope he comes and lives there.

*UPDATE*

I’ve just found what appears to be the definitive guide to designing bird boxes for specific species and it informs me that Robins like open fronted boxes, not tiny squeeze threw hole boxes. Maybe I’ll make another one just for my digging pal. It also looks like I might need to enlarge the hole a touch, at the moment it is 22mm but it seems that even tits like a minimum of 25mm.

There’s been stacks of progress over the New Year break and I’m sitting here at the end of the day with a labor intensive back ache. Good job I’m going back to work tomorrow, I need a rest!

I popped into a garden centre on my way back to London yesterday and I was tempted by yet another variety of potato - Kerrs Pink. This cultivar is now 100 years old and much favoured by the Scots and the Irish who ought to know a thing or two about spuds.

The potting bench in the shed is now laden with chitting potatoes, I’m digging like crazy to clear enough space to house them and I’m left wondering where the heck I am going to put the rest of my planned crops. Which brings me to the rather impressive structure in the photo. It’s my space saving, climbing bean/sweet pea support structure.

It seems that most plot holders here grow their beans as a fencing crop and it strikes me as a great way to squeeze in a whole family without having to set aside a specific bed. I don’t think they will cast much shade (at least not on my plot) and may even benefit the remaining crops by providing some wind protection and by discouraging the fox from running through.

Digging has proved to be painfully slow. I’m dealing with the patch in front of the shed, which the previous occupant had formed into a long ridge. There have been a couple of similar ridges across the plot, one of these comprised numerous mango pips buried in the ridge and covered with layers of newspaper. This one appears to contain nothing but couch grass roots, it’s so dense in there that not even soil has managed to find its way in. It is so tough to dig, I can get my fork in but can’t get it back out. I’m having to loosen the whole ridge and then go back over and peel it back like a decaying, detritus covered roll of axminster. No wonder my back hurts.

I had cleared quite a bit of the weed pile yesterday by bagging it up and tipping it but its mountainous again today. I had to shift it to a new location so that I can dig under it, maybe with all this turning it will rot down in to a perfect pile of compost. Not that I’d ever dare use it.