The herb garden on the plot is going crazy!

Sage is enormous, thyme flowing everywhere, chives have seeded all over the place and the applemint that we thought had been dug up is also popping up where it shouldn’t!

This is great, but we need to find a way to use or preserve them asap…

The most popular, and possibly easiest, way to preserve herbs seems to be to dry them, so that’ll do for us to start with!  First one we’re trying out is sage… we’ll let you know how it all goes

We’ve also had some tips on oven-drying and freezing which we will certainly try out in the coming weeks.

Please let us know how you like to preserve your herbs… we have never done this before so need all the help we get!

Today we almost cleared the area where Marjory used to live, levelling out and digging out the blasted dandelions…

New canes for the raspberries has tidied up that section very well and they’re looking very healthy, so here’s hoping for a good crop

The herbs are coming back strong, they always look a bit pathetic after the winter months, but the sage, thyme and chives are looking fabulous. The lavender isn’t looking quite so good and we have lost one of them – we shall replace it as we found it great for attracting bees.
 

When we planted it last year we were planning to plant it in a pot, but we forgot the pot and in our eagerness to plant everything we decided not to worry about it – “surely it won’t get that big” – ooops!

Thank goodness it’s Pimms season! Oh, good in gin too

We cut the sage, thyme and chives for a lovely bread and the mint for a tasty salsa and a delicious pudding – all of which we shared with The Gang on Saturday evening.

Lisa is wearing the allotmentgirls t-shirt in pink from our merchandise shop

The Bay is doing extremely well, it has more than doubled in size since we bought it… we could do with some recipes that use it though!! This chilli plant has also surprised us, we thought we’d lost all of out chilli plants to the rain and weeds, but we found this one still alive n the undergrowth! It’s flowering well so we hope we may get some fruit from it.

We were delighted to find that beneath all the jungle of weeds our tomatoes were actually growing!! They’re little and green, but hopefully they’ll ripen nicely. Lisa’s mum has also given us some smaller tomato plants so we need to get them in the ground once we’ve cleared a few more weeds (she also gave us a green tomato chutney recipe should they not ripen!).

Also growing well are the sweetcorn, beans and broccoli, so we’re very hopeful of some good crops there too.

The herb garden was very overgrown, but apart from the parsley and the chilli plants everything is doing well, including three frogs, who leapt out of the jungle and looked quite annoyed at being disturbed! We think we’ll have to find them a little Toad Hall to live in!

First part of our ‘allotment girl’ uniform also arrived – some rather fetching overalls that I am sure we will be modelling on the site soon.

There was much hilarity gained from the discovery of the term ‘growing position’ on the instructions of some of the seeds. I think we are developing ‘allotment humour’ – should we be worried?

Planted today:

Applemint
Marigolds
Beans (two types)
Radishes (two types)