Ruth's Pea Patch

Ruth has warm, cosy memories from childhood of her Grandad's garden, and in particular shelling freshly picked peas and admiring the fabulous sweet peas growing on the fence. It's said that if you want to find happiness as an adult you should go back to the things that made you happy as a child....

Therefore we decided to clear a fence panel's worth of the garden and try to recreate a version of Grandad's place here in South Lincolnshire. It was a difficult job as the border has been left to its own devices for a few years, and buried under a weed-limiting top dressing of stones. After a few evenings graft and the addition of compost we managed to have it looking like this. Ground ready for planting and netting attached to the fence to encourage sweet pea mountaineering. Chuffed!

Our first pea shoots had appeared in mid-April (above) and they had matured quite nicely in the meantime. I'm still surprised how Mother Nature works so beautifully....

At the weekend we decided it was time to start populating "Ruth's Pea Patch" (a name we settled on after many rather more vulgar options were discussed) and Ruth built a pea-stick wigwam and popped in the first five plants.

Fingers crossed that they thrive, as I really want Ruth to re-live her treasured memory, and share it with our boys as well.

Now we've popped in some sweet peas, flanked by a few sunflowers, and we're waiting for a few more peas to mature enough to plant out. We're also going to plant a sugar snap wigwam as soon as we can.

Ruth's Pea Patch is up and running!

New Balls Please!

We all know that poking out your own eyeball on a stray cane is one of the perils of allotmenteering, thankfully a rare occurrence. But what do you use to prevent it happening? Old plastic bottles? Plasticine? Dolls' heads? (Is that too sinister?)

As previously described we have named our growing beds Tom, Dick and Harry. We wanted to have some eye protection but to make it a little individual and special to Plot 13D. After much discussion among the whole family I (the head gardener, obvs) decided that we would use cheap ping pong balls, and paint them to colour code the three beds. Everybody agreed, after I told them to do so....

The table tennis balls were obtained for a ridiculously low price on the Interweb, and we used our modelling paints to create our masterpieces - yellow for Tom, green for Dick and red for Harry. They certainly have brightened up our space, and I like them. We've had no opinion form our allotment neighbours yet....