I was intrigued yesterday to see a recipe for a shed beer fridge in Allotment Growing Diary Plus, and as it’s my birthday today I thought it was a fine excuse for enjoying cold beer on the plot.

The idea is that the terracotta pot cools following evaporation of the absorbed water.

It certainly seemed to work, within an hour the pot was very cool but I made the mistake of starting with warm beer. I was too impatient to wait for the full process had to make do with coolish, luke warm beer.

I’ve left a couple of beers in there and topped the tray up before I left so we’ll see how long it works for. Maybe there will be an icy beer waiting for me after work tomorrow.

And here’s a gratuitous flower picture. I’m so happy with these dahlias, I grew them from seed and never imagined they’d be so successful.

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.

After last weeks struggle with the compost I decided it was time to invest in a high tech conveyor - a wheeled contraption is required for lugging the heavy stuff.

This particular model is the Revolution Cargo trailer by Edinburgh Cycles. It normally goes for £125 but I managed to source one on ebay and save myself a fair sum. It is pretty impressive, very manoeuvrable and can carry 50 kg, which is a lot of compost. Now I have to go in search of things to carry, perhaps I should cancel the veg box and set up my own scheme delivering fresh produce from the back of the bike.

Yesterday the trailer showed its worth by carrying two whole seed packets to the plot. My freebie pea and bean seeds had been delivered so I thought I’d better get them in before the weather got much colder. So thats another double row of Aquadulce and a row of Feltham First. It also means the whole of one side of the plot is now completed, where am I going to put all my plants next year? I think I may need another plot already, I can imagine the remaining side will be filled by squash plants as I have in the region of 7 varieties of seeds and I haven’t even started on the spuds and carrots and……

Shakti (pictured sowing peas in her posh gardening clobber) has offered me her garden shed for use on the plot. How exciting is that? The next few weeks are going to be taken up with dismantling crises, as we try and take it apart, balance it on the bike trailer and deliver it the allotment ready for reconstruction. The whole family have been called in to help with the construction part so it will make for some Heath Robinson style photos as I don’t think any of us are that talented in the DIY department.