A good 5 or 6 hours on the allotment today. It felt...right. The more time I spend outside, around plants, feeling the air, listening, the more right it feels. This could be where I am supposed to be.





I pruned the blackcurrant bush, and marked its territory with a circle of bricks. Mulched it a bit.

I started a wall to mark of the edge of the path and what I call the 'inedible bed', which I have been gradually filling with shrubs and the like.

Build that wall!

I think I'll grow thyme in the cracks between the bricks, next year.





Earlier this week I moved my acer tree from the indoors to out, as it was looking very sad. I hope she fares better out here.





An anti-ladybird from another dimension has been to visit the compost bin. I've never seen one like this before before. I've started to collect the pictures I take of creatures I see on the allotment into an album, which you can view here. To such tiny things we owe our lives.

I've been thinking about colour a lot recently but have nothing to say about it yet. Some labour: I've removed the wood chips and the nasty black plastic sheet beneath them from the space between the beds and the shed. It was tiring, so I did it in short bursts, punctuated by Carlsberg. But look at all this new potential growing space:

Black plastic sheeting would seem to be an allotmenter's staple, but I don't like it. It suppresses weeds. I've even heard it referred to as "weed suppressant membrane". That just sounds so...unnatural. Clinical? I understand why you might wish to use it, but I want my allotment to be a garden as well as a farm. A work of art. Weeds are welcome here. What is a weed, really? Who cares? Here's another, more conventional ladybird, probably from this world:

In my own little, and still artificial, space, I am trying to listen to nature. I don't even know what that means yet. You have to be very, very quiet, and still. Something humans are not innately good at.

I thought it would be interesting to 'greenhouse' some of the shoots inside re-purposed plastic bottles, and leave some of them to the elements, to see what difference it makes. The unnatural world has its uses.

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The onions I sowed two weeks back have sprouted! The broccoli too! This is happiness.