Little House Not On The Prairie

Today I've felt very much like Ma from the Little House series, or (for Georgette Heyer fans) like Jenny from A Civil Contract - all housewifely! So a quick run-down of my day:
- got up and fed my son for half an hour to help clear blocked up ears from a minor cold he has.
- put the washing in the washing machine, sorted out breakfast.
- got me and children washed and dressed.
- Mum and Dad came round and we all went to the allotment where we weeded, dug and harvested.
- got lunch for everyone.
- put washing out.
- washed up.
- boiled, peeled, chopped and pickled 2.5 lbs of beetroot from the allotment.
- peeled, chopped, blanched and froze 2.5 lbs of carrots from the allotment.
- made a lemon drizzle cake with the lemon my mum brought me.
- made pizza dough.
- washed up.
- comforted my son when he punched himself in the mouth with the end of the sink plunger which he was sticking to the floor and then pulling up with a popping sound. Came up unexpectedly hard that time.
- finished pizza and got tea on the table.
- got washing in.

And now I have to start getting the kids to bed, reading to them and getting them to sleep. Well, at least I've got a lot done today!
- made afternoon snack.

Tomatoes

So, what's with the tomatoes this year? Ours are all still green. We've got loads but they're not ripening. No blight or blossom-end rot so far (touch wood), but no ripe ones either. Other people at our allotment seem to be having the same experience, but this is very late for tomatoes to still be green. How are other people in other parts of the country doing tomato-wise?

Compost

Am I the only person to get really excited when the compost you've spent months making is actually ready and you can lift up the compost bin and dig out rich, dark, crumbly compost onto your veg beds? (OK, call me sad but this post is a hymn to compost, so please feel free to skip it if this seems unbearably dull.)
This is what we've been doing this afternoon and I was unfeasibly excited about it as it's the first time we've been able to do this. The bin is quite large and it's been rotting away in there for over a year since we first filled it after moving here (we've got 2 bins - one to add to and one to leave alone). And at our old house we didn't have any beds to spread it on, so we just had to keep adding to the one bin and never actually use the fruits of our labours.
The children were also qute excited and we spent some happy time digging it all out and spreading it. My son particularly enjoyed bashing up any intact pieces of egg shell very enthusiastically. And I just thought 'wow, all this would have gone into land-fill if we hadn't collected it and composted it, and now it's actually useful to add nutrients to the soil, to deter slugs due to all the sharp bits of egg shell (thanks, son!), and to mulch and help prevent weeds!' It seems particularly fitting since it is almost Beltaine, in fact it seemed like a sacred task. You can't get much more earthy and fertile than compost.
Hurrah for compost!

Green fingers

Lots of work done at the allotment and in the garden today. The allotment now has loads of over-wintering onions, 6 Jersualem artichokes, plus 3kg of early potatoes, several rows of carrots and 3kg of maincrop potatoes. We'll need to remove the tarpaulin that's been covering part of the plot since the autumn, see what's underneath and then prepare it so we can plant the late maincrop potatoes, more carrots, leeks, parsnips and anything else I think of at the time!
In the back garden, we've extended the strawberry patch so the runners can spread further and make lots more plants, planted lots of peas, and weeded the herbs, raspberries and blueberry bush. The children have also planted lots of different old flower seeds into pots to see what comes up, and I'm tending to 2 courgette plants in pots and awaiting some cucumber, French bean and tomato plants to start in pots.
So, all in all, a very green-fingered day - well, hopefully! I have to say I'm not really a natural or a very technical gardener. If I had to describe my approach it would be: just bung it in and hope for the best. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. What the hell! At least the children enjoyed the planting today and it was lovely to be out in the sunshine. And hopefully some lovely, organic, home-grown food in a few months.

Swimming and tomatoes

Why are places which provide activities for children so obsessed with putting on classes rather than just letting people enjoy themselves freely? Our local swimming pool has a small pool for youngsters which we have started visiting regularly but it is actually fairly difficult to do so due to the amount of time it is used for classes. I can understand that schools often have swimming lessons and had accepted that it wasn't open till 11 every weekday morning, plus being closed again at 3.30 for after school lessons, as well as closing at 1.30 2 days a week, but I was a bit fed-up to find when we went there today that half (the deepest half) of the pool was shut off as, guess what? Yes, another lesson! This time for tiny babies, 2 lessons in a row actually, so we didn't even have the whole pool. Whatever happened to parents just taking kids to have fun at the pool? I can't believe that such a high proportion of the opening time of the pool is taken up with set lessons and classes.

And tomatoes. I thought we'd escaped the blight which destroyed pretty much all out tomatoes last year, but I've just today seen some of the signs that it might be starting again - bottom leaves withering, the tomatoes on those parts of the plant turning black rather than red. Gah, we don;t seem to have much luck with tomatoes. Still, out potato harvest has been fantastic and we're also still gathering beans, peas and carrots which isn't bad at this time of the year, given the weather we've had.