Prize Winners....

I am lucky in that I have very good friends - friends who would, for no monetary reward or bonuses of any kind, sacrifice a day of their lives in order to help me out on the allotment. Indeed, John came up to visit me, only to be whisked away to the allotment to get down and dirty for a few days. We arrived and spent the obligatory half-an-hour wandering up and down the plot, looking at things and generally not doing any work. However, we were getting cold so we knuckled down to digging over and weeding the remainder of the Broad Bean bed as well as sieving the rest of the early Carrots bed of stones. The main job of the day, and the one that took the greatest chunk of time was, preparing and sowing the Parsnips, which I am 95% sure will turn out to be the best darn parsnips the world has ever seen AND tasted! First, we removed the old carpet that was keeping the ground nice and weed-free. Then, turned her over with a fork - twas lovely work - no roots, no weeds, just lovely fine sandy soil. Then the cone maker (basically a bit of old 3/4" plastic piping) was knocked into the ground by about 1'6" then turned rapidly in circles until a cone about 4-5" wide was created. Lovely! We then filled each cone up with sieved soil up to about an inch from the top, placed 3 Tender-and-True parsnips on top, then topped up the holes to ground level and watered in! Phew - finally! Hard work, but no doubt worth the effort come winter again. Also, as a little side note, sowed another 2 half-rows of early nantes, leaving just the last 2 half-rows empty. The last job of the day, before we headed home for some ale and dinner, was to erect the cheap, £3.95 Lidl poly-tunnel over the carrots to help get them started. Was a pretty easy job and looks fairly professional,don't you think?!