Kelsae Seeds

I ordered some onion seeds from a well know online auction site the other night, these have now appeared. The seeds are Kelsae seeds which are basically giant exhibition onions. Only cost me a couple of quid so got nothing to lose. Tomorrow we are making our way over to a major garden centre to pick up some gardening tools/accessories.

Evie waiting patiently to go home!!!

Evie is cold!

Evie looking cold as she waits for Mummy & Daddy to take her home

Burn, Burn, Burn!!!

After reading books, asking questions on internet forums and also asking people down the allotment of what i should do with this dreaded stuff i have chose to burn it. I wanted to try to compost this but i was told this stuff never dies off. Even when i broke the pile up it was still new green shoots in the centre. Anyway, fire was the only option. If you look carefully, behind all that knee high couch grass you may see Martin a guy thats currently helping me with work.

The metal stillage you see was obtained from a local job we had been doing

More couch grass

For all other fellow new allotmenteers, please do not underestimate couch grass. These were pictures when half of one plot had been dug up. Erm, now what do we do with it???

Second time round

No matter how many times you fork through the peat, more and more couch grass comes up from no where. We decide that we will do this only twice as it seems almost impossible to take it all up. Notice in the background out plot 2 with the tarpaulin sheet over. An attempt to cover this with the peat and pick out grass roots separately didn not work so decided to leave it there to kill off weeds.

With a little help from my friends!

Buy this time i knew i couldnt do this job on my own so i called in the next best thing to a rotovator - Paula and Evie

Making a start!

I realised after the first 4 hours that this wasnt going to be as easy as we first thought. Being cold wasnt helping but neither was the dreaded couch grass.

With various phone calls, emails and trips down to the allotment i finally picked up our virtual keys to what we can now call our 2 plots. Doesnt look much now but a quick trim with the lawn mower and hoe down with a couple of weeds we`ll soon be sowing. Well, maybe!!! As you can see there is plenty of couch grass which as a newbie to this we was totally ignorant to what happens to couch grass under the ground.