With Christmas and new year over it is time to really get down to thinking about the growing season ahead, which for us starts now. As you can see from the picture below we did as we said we would on Christmas morning, and visited a rather wet allotment to pick some veg for dinner and some greenery for a table centre piece. This had bay, rosemary, privet, holly and some variegated stuff, all off the plot. This would have cost a small fortune from a florist, but cost us the price of a candle and a piece of oasis.

   During the winter months, I find myself digging out (no pun intended) my old allotment books. I have just finished reading Terry Walton's My Life on a Hillside Allotment. A pleasant enough read but rather uncharismatically written and portrayed. It does however give an overview of what needs doing season by season and gets the brain thinking about the year ahead. My absolute favourite and a book that I turn to for comfort again and again is "Digger's Diary" by Victor Osbourne. A beautifully written description of some of the characters on his allotment site and the things he does month by month, the successes and failures and his observations about what is magical about having an allotment. If you don't have one then you probably won't appreciate the delights of this book.

   The weekend between Christmas and new year saw us making our first sowings of the new year. A tray of early peas, climbing peas and onions, a pot of belstar broccoli and greyhound cabbage and a few pots of sweet peas: all of them germinated in less than a week. Cleaned a greenhouse out this morning and done the minor repairs and bits and pieces to keep it in good condition. Bubble wrap going in tomorrow and the newly emerged seedlings will hopefully survive the cold weather. 

   We are disappointed with our over wintering broccoli plants which have been getting a bit on the big side. Four of them have started to produce heads because they had outgrown their pots. We probably grew them too early last year. We have re-potted the remaining ones in the hope they won't grow too much before we can plant them out in March. Another pot sown anyway just in case. We usually get broccoli in June from the over wintered stuff so it's worth doing.

   We will be working hard now for a few hours every dry weekend to get the ground dug, cleared, manured and composted before planting kicks off big time. On the 27th January it is the annual Potato Fair in Sydenham where you can buy spuds as single tubers. We buy rows of various different types, some turn out nice and others don't. Last year we lost our seed tubers because we put them in a shed and the prolonged frost in February affected them badly. We won't make the same mistake again. We bought five micro tubers of a blue potato last year, lost four of them and planted the one survivor to get some decent size tubers to grow this year. They did well and we have loads of purple tubers to plant this year. We'll let you know what they look like (if they ever reach a plate). Normally we would have shallot bulbs growing in the greenhouse in six cell trays. This gives them the opportunity to grow roots before planting outside and gives them a good head start on the worst of the winter weather and allows us to get them out of the ground a bit earlier at a good size so we can use the ground for something else. However we decided not to save from last year's crop as we had been saving our own for years and the crop wasn't great this time round. New stock then this year.

Our plot plans are now complete and up on the shed wall and our aspirations for 2013 clear. We wish our readers a happy new year and hope that your aspirations are fulfilled.