Garden Organic experiments

I had not been at the allotment for a couple of days and I should know how it works by now: rain and warmish weather are good! Still I was surprised but how fast vegetation is growing. Especially weeds. But I found another sage seedling, and a bronze fennel one. I wish I could express the joy that stirred in me, despite the miserable greyness of the sky and the drizzle.

Not going so well for my Garden Organic experiments. As I have mentioned already, I enrolled in 3 of them.

1. Monitoring butterflies at the allotment - I was lucky if I saw five in the last couple of months. And a couple of moths. Pretty much depressing.
2. Trying tree spinach as a crop. Germination was very staggered, to the point that the earliest plants are now out and some 20cm tall while the latest are still tiny seedlings. And not growing very fast, but steady. Not so depressing.
3. Growing lettuce under protection of a supposedly anti-slug cardboard collar. The lettuce is growing healthily and slugs and snails have not been very active this season. However, while the collars seemed to have a marginal effect at the seedling stage (only 1 non protected lettuce was slightly damaged), now that the leaves have outgrown the cardbord I found a slug on a protected lettuce - damage would have come to very much the same extent as a non protected lettuce if I had not picked the slimy creature and squashed in the usual manner.

I have taken more pictures of the allotment as it comes into its own, and will shortly post them to the Flickr set "Allotment in spring".

P.S. GO experiments photos now available on Flickr