Transplanted from my parents’ garden a couple of years ago, these clumps of snowdrops are a lovely welcome to the allotment site, planted underneath my damson tree.

A productive day, and a delightfully warm one, sufficiently so to have lunch in the garden of the roundabout pub – a lazy trundle up the path away. And I managed also to:

• plant a standard rose ‘Boscobel’ in the flower bed – I have high hopes for her!
• plant a little pear tree grafted with five different varieties – in the absence of any available space on my plot I daringly planted it in a wild area of the site and hope nobody will mind. I had to dig out lots of nettles and brambles to make space.
• finish weeding out all the tiny strawberry plants from one fruit bed
• prune the gooseberry, redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes
• mulch the fruit beds
• consolidated two raised beds and a path into one large bed – and moved one of the inner planks to replace a rotting one in the fruit cage
• then I lifted and turned the turf (heavy work, that) and laid out a pathway with all the cardboard I had been storing for the purpose and topped the lot with three bags of compost and finally a bag of beautiful leaf mould to top the pathway down the middle of the new bed.
• cleared the debris from the strawberries in grow-bags on their shelf in the fruit cage
• … and picked a bag of wonderful flower sprouts for supper!
  

  new bed with path

  

  new leaf mould path

  

  leaf mould

  

  grafted pear tree

  

  fruit cage

  

  newly planted Boscobel