Allotment: pots, watering cans and predators

What I want to know is, what happens to the flowerpots? Is it like the sock monster that eats socks out of the washing machine or is there a genuine flowerpot thief around?

This is the way it goes. I buy forty pots. I take them to the allotment and put them in the shed. The following weekend I decide to transplant something and go to my brand new pot-stock …

… and there are about a dozen left.

I challenge Himself who reminds me that I’ve watched every move he’s made at the allotment in the past week and none of those moves involved pots.

I rack my brains and remember giving a couple of pots to neighbours, and actually, now I come to think of it, potting up a few alpine strawberries and giving them away too, but not 28 of them, for Heaven’s sake! So I go and buy some more pots and the following weekend …

And it was brought home to me very forcibly yesterday that we need a hosepipe on 201. I found myself trudging up and down with watering cans, and even at half-four in the afternoon, it was a hot and wearying task. I don’t want to be doing that twice a week. The thing is, we have an attachment but it’s the wrong one: we have a push-on hose coupler and we need a threaded hose coupler. I remember this every weekend, and then forget all week, until it’s time to do the watering again. This week, even the dog gave up following me and sat at the halfway point, content to point his head in my general direction and thus fool himself he was doing his canine duty in getting under my feet whenever I’m carrying something.

And the slugs have been at our peas again. They don’t bother the first batch we put out at all, which goes to prove that perfect timing can be everything. If you can get a crop to be tall and sturdy, and well-hardened-off, and plant it when two or three days of dry weather are expected, it’s much less attractive to slugs and snails. The second lot of peas were slightly smaller and had to be planted when we knew there would be a heavy dew for several nights and sure enough, they have been slugged almost into submission, despite applications of ash, sand and wildlife friendly slug pellets.

And whenever I straighten up from my watering, this is the view I get, through the pear tree that borders our plot into our 'back' neighbour's plot. Isn't it heavenly?

Labels: allotment-flowerpots, allotment-peas, allotment-watering