Thanks for all the graffiti advice in the comments to the last post.

I took the train to the plot at the weekend and discovered that every single flat surface (mostly sheds) facing the platform had been scrawled over with the silver spray paint. It looked a bit grim and so I decided that the shed should be re-painted. It will probably take a few coats as the spray paint is heavy duty stuff, but as I had to go out and buy a new tub of paint, I have plenty to go around.

They can come back as often as they like now, I’ll be ready for em.

They didn’t cause any more damage by the way - all my crops were left intact which is a blessing.

I picked up my new Brompton from the fantastic Wizz Bike this evening and went straight to the plot to photograph the new machine in amongst the potatoes.
The foliage just sets the colours off!

I was surprised to find that the beans are ready to start cropping, I had a trangia full of Borlotta and runner beans for my tea, shamefully mixed with a packet of curry flavoured supernoodles.

I’ve given up on my first earlies for now, the slugs had their wicked way with the foliage and as a result hindered the tuber growth to pea sized proportions.

All the other spuds appear to be getting back handers of performance enhancing drugs though so today I decided to start whipping them out.

I dug two plants, one Maris Peer and another Kerr’s Pink. Both were pretty productive although the Kerr’s pink had loads of tiny little spuds with loads more room to expand. I’m going to be over run with these things in a few weeks so its a good plan to start on them early.

I took them straight from the ground to the trangia so I could carry out an immediate taste comparison. I don’t have any salt in the plot but I do have mint and the result was perfect.

Kerr’s Pink are supposed to be very floury but as an early spud, boiled young, they held together very well and were delicious. Boiled up like this they will encourage me to head to the plot for my dinner more often. Not very varied perhaps but I finished them off with strawberries and raspberries, delicious.

Thought I’d test the progress with the spuds today. There has been so much rain that I imagined whopping great sacks of juicy tubers sitting under the mounds of earth.

My Mum had advised gently exploring the soil around the plant rather than digging the whole thing up but I didn’t find anything with my first tentative reccy, and thought what the heck, they must be buried deep.

In went the fork and out came 5 creamy coloured peas. Perhaps I should wait another 6 months before I try again.

One of the plots adjacent to mine is run on a community basis and I find it fascinating to see how well it flourishes. I would expect utter chaos but it’s a very well ordered plot. I haven’t spotted a Gantt chart pinned up on the shed wall with tasks and timelines allocated to individuals and I’ve never seen them huddled round a cuppa holding secretive planning meetings.

Last weekend though, G wandered over to my plot with a half eaten tuber in her hand. She was digging over an empty bed and unearthed what she thought was a Jerusalem artichoke, after rubbing it on her trousers she popped it in her mouth and gnawed off half it. It’s at that point she discovered it wasn’t actually edible so wandered over to seek my help in its identification. Turns out she was trying to enjoy M’s Dahlia collection.

She quickly went back and reburied the tuber and patted down the evidence of the freshly turned over soil but I have an inkling that she’ll be caught out when M gets back from his holidays.

As you know my parents visited a fortnight ago, after tea on Sunday, Dad and I cycled over to the lotty to see what we could achieve in the last remaining hour of daylight. Working in the same tiny section of the plot (a 4m row), we set off almost shoulder to shoulder, planting our respective crops. Dad stuck in a load of sweetcorn seeds and I popped in 3 tomato plants and just in front of these went the 3 heritage potatoes that we’d saved from lunch (prior to cooking of course).

I marked the spuds with 3 quite impressive hillocks but yesterday while I was down there, I could find no sign of my potato mounds. Instead though, I found a scattering of swede seedlings. Under interrogation my Dad admitted to seeing the potato hillocks but assumed they were just evidence of poor cultivation. He had flattened them out and sown his seed on top!

I will forgive him this once as he also put in a row of carrots and these have actually germinated, which is great news as my most expensive carrot in the world appears to have disappeared.

While on the subject of my Dad, I have to sneak in a photo of his rather substantial cauliflower. He dug this up before he came down and it fed 4 of us for 3 days.

That is my kind of vegetable, so I’ve been quick to gets some seeds in.

London woke to a pretty dreary and overcast day this morning. Not the most inspiring of days and it seemed to push me into the dumps as I arrived at the plot. I haven’t been keeping my eye on the allotment stores recently, the shed was clean out of digestives and my cup of tea just wasn’t as revitalising as usual.

I wandered round the garden sipping tea and imagining the future, a day of the triffids style future where the weeds grow to 6 foot and throttle you as you reach hopelessly for the hoe.

If I’m sweating with dread in February just imagine when the growth really starts to kick off. You have to pull yourself together when the weeds on your plot start to give you daytime terrors. I put the cup down, stopped stressing about the future and just knuckled down to the here and now.

I like gardening, it never fails to ground you.

First strike today went to the old rocket and spicy salad leaves bed. The rocket has been a super provider but has now past its best and the spicy leaves are so overrun with nettle plants that my salads have a tendency to give far more bite than is healthy. Both were whipped out at the roots and plonked in the compost bin. First tidy patch sorted and I have space for something new now.

My early planting of broad beans have been very successful, maybe even too successful? They have been pushing at the top of my fleece cloche for a few weeks now and bending at the tips. Today I decided it was time to expose them to the elements and whipped of their toasty covering.

Most of them are flowering so hopefully they wont be traumatized by any more frosts. I spent about an hour tying myself in knots with about 100m worth of twine, fashioning a cats cradle support. There is very little wind protection in that particular spot and the beans are effectively trying to stand tall in a wind tunnel.

Carried away with the weeding, I whipped off more of the cloches and cleaned around the chard and cabbages.

Everything started to look beautiful again, I began to smile and contemplate my next cuppa and a future decidly more rosy and bountiful than it seemed when I started.

I finished by planting my first row of spuds! How ridiculously early is that? The traditional date for planting potatoes is Good Friday which this year is particularly early anyway so I’m not sure what possessed to me to anticipate the great day by about a month.

I’ll do my best to keep them cosy and earthed up til summer arrives.

Oh and did I mention that my sweet peas have germinated? What a glorious and uplifting day its been.

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.

We may have just hit the point of mid winter but it wasn’t all that bleak down the allotment today, jolly misty, a bit chilly, but not bleak at all. In fact it was quite a joy to be down on the site, the old apple trees are looking particularly sculptural and most plot holders have been involved in a flurry of tidying, the plots look great. Even mine seems to have adopted a sense of the seasonal spirit, I should have taken some mulled wine and chestnuts to roast over a little blaze of bindweed roots.

When I first took on the plot, one of my more experienced neighbours told me that most of the site remains free of frost year round but that they occasionaly get a freak frost that passes through a handful of plots in a diagonal band. My plot is definitely within Jack Frost’s dropzone, he scatters the ice through my plot like rivulets. In some areas I had to jump on the fork to crack through the frozen tilth but then a foot to the side I found myself squelching in a soggy patch. Probably not ideal digging weather but Good Friday falls early this year and I need to crack on if I want enough clear space for my spuds to be in for March.

I laid out my seed potatoes for chitting in the shed. I was a bit concerned that it may be a bit cold for them in there as I always used to do them on my window ledges but I think they should be ok in these polystyrene seed trays.

They look pretty toasty to me but they aren’t the only cosy veg on the plot. Check out the new pea seedlings, doesn’t it look appealing in there?

Shakti planted those peas for me on the 14th November alongside a double row of aquadulce. The broad beans are only just showing signs of awakening and have been pretty tardy in comparison to the peas. It would be cruel to compare them to their older brothers which were planted two weeks earlier and are now almost pushing through the top of the fleece enclosure. It will be interesting to see if the head start makes much difference to the bean cropping.