Ugh

It rained all day, in that persistent way that make you wish you had scales and flippers, so I didn't go to the allotment. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for the disaster reportage I promised.

But you'll be pleased to hear that instead of getting muddy, Amy and I took a trip to Penge, where we bought a sharp and attractive saw. I'm going to use it to chop bits off the trees we're not allowed to cut down.

To keep you occupied until tomorrow, here's a picture of carrots.

Is it safe to leave the house?

I have decided to revive our allotment blog. Some recent events have made this essential:

1. My friend Jo told me to.

2. My friend Jo and I are writing an album of comic songs about vegetable cultivation, which means I suddenly have something to blog about when it's raining.

3. Our plot is slowly being taken over by trees. Trees we're not allowed to cut down. I am devising a scheme to persuade the One Tree Hill Allotment Society to give us a plot that is sunnier.

4. The Daily Mail has just launched an allotment blog, and I want to compete, because my readers are nicer.

Tomorrow I shall visit our allotment, and report back on the devastation.

We put up a shed

We’ve just built a shed. A shed is useful for a number of reasons:

1. You can make tea and store biscuits in the shed, which means that in theory you could spend all day at the allotment.

2. You can store tools in the shed, as an alternative to your living room.

3. You can throw potatoes at a enemy plotholder, and then hide in the shed.

4. You can sleep in the shed if your house unexpectedly falls down.

Many thanks to David and Marion for supplying the shed, and to Ben for helping us put it up.

It rains for forty days and forty nights

Our courgette plants have been flattened by slugs. Twice. Our beans have been munched. Three times.

But we did get a wonderful crop of strawberries, and one of the advantages of gardening on the side of the hill is that it we haven’t yet been flooded.

We harvest carrots

Conventional gardening wisdom says that one should sow carrots in the spring, in freely-drained, sandy soil. One can then harvest them from late summer onwards.

We don’t think conventional gardening wisdom is very clever.

We sowed some carrots at the beginning of September in poorly drained heavy clay, and we’re harvesting these lovely straight carrots in April.

We pretend to be organised

According to our highly scientific plan, we were supposed to start sowing this weekend. However, the soil here in London is still far too wet to work into the mythical ‘fine tilth’ that we have seen on BBC television programmes. All that we can do is stay indoors and file our seeds in a mildy compulsive manner.

Warming the soil

It’s nearly spring, so we thought we’d try to get ahead of nature by warming the soil.

Dan and Amy’s top tips for soil warming:

(1) If you garden on clay, like us, the soil stays cold for ages.
(2) Clear plastic warms the soil faster than black plastic.
(3) It’s warm enough to start sowing once weeds start to grow.
(4) You can look up the temperature a particular seed needs to germinate, but the unpredictability of the British climate makes this meaningless. Decide if the soil needs to be cool, warm, or hot.
(5) There’s a useful weather forecast which tells you the soil temperature for your area.

I cannot be expected to work under these conditions

We cause climate change

After we’d cut the trees down, we ended up with a huge number of twigs and small branches littering the allotment. What is the responsible thing to do in our uncertain age?

(1) Leave them to decay naturally. This will keep the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere for longer, potentially protecting people who live on very flat land next to the sea. The wood will eventually turn in carbon dioxide, but not quite so soon.

(2) Burn them, creating an artificial spike in global temperatures, thus making world leaders panic and start building wind farms.

We become Archaeologists

We’re digging over the new allotment at the moment, and we have unearthed an ancient landfill site.

The soil is filled with chunks of metal, margarine tubs from the 1980s, and a large sheet of plastic which has disintegrated into very small fragments.

This is a nuisance, and we probably won’t be able to get rid of every single piece. The soil is very sticky and full of couch grass, bramble and bindweed roots, so it’s fairly tough going. But we’re grateful we’re not in East London, where they’re digging up radioactive waste.