Internment camp

Improvised bird proofing

Mange touts in a tent

Our allotment plot never looks perfect. When it has just been dug over from end to end it probably looks at it's tidiest, but there are always scruffy bits, piles of canes or poles, untidy edges near the fence and hedge and so on. At the moment it looks like some kind of miniature internment camp, with wire, fences, dangling CDs and mesh everywhere. Some of the structures are more carefully planned and constructed than others, but all are a bit ugly. They are also always in the way, you can't walk around the plot without climbing over or squeezing past something. To get at any of the plants means uncovering them from the mesh, which then gets tangled up with something else like the fence.

Healthy beetroot

Covered cabbage and eaten cabbage

I feel we have little choice with everything getting so badly eaten, but I wish it wasn't needed. The fact is it is needed. We deliberately planted out excess cabbages alongside the covered ones and they have been eaten, with some plants completely gone. The idea was to be sacrificial, but they were probably just wasted.

Broad beans

The broad beans are doing very well. They are tall and straight and covered in flowers with some small beans beginning to grow. The cane and string supports are simple and encourage the plants to support each other which stops them breaking in the wind but also stops them breaking against a hard support too. There were a few black fly in the tops of some plants, so I nipped the tops off of all of them to get rid of the fly and force them to put their vigour into beans.

We put more slug pellets out - there were some huge slug trails around the plot. We took some spinach for later.