I spoke to a housemarting and a robin. That's not so strange, I also speak to hamsters and dogs. But they don't usually talk back. The birds did. Honest. Had a big discussion to convince housmartin that nesting in the toilet is not a good thing, and that he'd be trapped most of the time, and not be a happy housemarting. Eventually, he agreed and flew out again.
Cheeky robin was very pleased with my digging efforts. It presented him with a lush dinner plate of maggots, worms, snails, slugs and spiders. As last year, my idea to knock down a weed tree (or should that be a tree weed? Well, it's a tree and it's a weed, it's massive, and grows incredibly fast and tirelessly) crumbled to bits when the robin sat down in it to watch me go about my gardening. He like the tree. I like him. I can't knock down that tree.
Red for tulips, yellow for daffodils, my favourite blue for hyacinths. And the yellow of the dreaded dandelions. My least favourite weed has to be the ground elder though. To dig it out, you have to dig out all vegetation, including the stuff you want to keep. And it still comes back. Next is a weed whose name I don't know. It's pretty, it flowers. Yellow. But it manages to grow from one end of the allotment to the other, and has roots that are indestructable. You simply can't get it out.
I planted 5 rockets, 5 red chards, 5 oriental lettuces. 15 kales, 15 broccolis, 15 cauliflowers. One marrow. One rosemary plant, as the old one has died. A box of sage, rosemary and thyme (no parsley, so sorry. don't like parsley). Lifted one big black bin bag of weeds. Admired apple tree, gooseberry (bigger than ever, still not a gooseberry in sight), raspberry plants. Was blown away by the difference a week made to my rhubarb: once a root with a few tentative splashes of green would be sticks, it was now a proper, big, rhubarb plant with enough of the good stuff for a first harvest. The first rhubarb crumble of the year. Bliss.
Must get rid of all the grass before it goes to bloom. It's not just a nuisance and counts as weed and may cost me my allotment (I'm on probation after all), but more importantly, I'm allergic to grass. badly. So if I don't pull it out, I suffer big time. I go into overproduction of snot which could water the plants in the dry season.
I have a new strategy to fight the unknown competitor for veg: netting. Put netting over all my newly plants, now let's see if anyone still eats them. Last year, all I planted disappeared without a trace within a few days. Not the hint of a stalk left. No fingerprints of slug, snail, rabbit, fox, magpie or squirrel. Judging by the number of chestnuts found when digging up the soil last week, the squirrels are definitely at home in my plot, and had conspired to grow a chestnut forrest. No way Jose!
My gardening neighbour gave me a cherry tomato plant. That's growing at home now, alongside peas, beans, herbs and courgette, for planting out later. In fact, my flat looks like a gardening centre at present. And my back feels like I've taken a bad beating. My arm even looks like it, but that's got nothing to do with gardening, but rather running and being clumsy, because stupidly jogged right into a fence that was supposed to protect me from falling into my favourite river (the Cart that is in case you were wondering - I don't just live beside it, garden beside it, but also run alongside it), toppled over in an impressive twirl and softly landed cross legged on a bed of leaves.