Is this better Bob?

We don't hang about! After a rather hectic first half of Saturday including shopping for birthday presents for Mr. M. and clothes for a son who's grown out of everything as well as attending a school summer fayre (phew) I headed up to the allotment. Mrs. G. was already there putting posts along one side of the plot. She had been to the local garden centre earlier on this week and bought some mesh that would be suitable as a wind break. When I turned up she had researched where the wind was coming from and hammered down quite a few posts. We then got to work on attaching the mesh. Team work resulted in this:

The tiny plants became still pretty much immediately so let's hope this will do the trick. Our plants do look quite feeble compared to everybody else's and we have no idea why. Do other people spend more time tending to their plots? Have they planted better plants? Are they simply a lot better at this than we are? I think I know the answer to all three questions. As the wind sometimes comes from the other direction (the sea) we'll get some more mesh and put up another wind break on the other side.

Bob came by with his wife when we were having our coffee break so he didn't see what we next did. I'm sure he'll be very impressed next time he comes by. Once we had dug the canes up it was pretty obvious that they were separate ones... From the 4 clumps we'd first planted we got rid of 2 canes that were dead and were left with 17 that we planted out, put manure around and watered a lot. From having a half filled fruit section, we've now got this:

Mrs. G. clearly enjoyed a bit of wood work as she got on with improving the border while I was lugging water. It looks a lot neater now.

While being down on all four firming the soil around the canes, my eyes caught this:

Strawberries! And they're not the only ones. Lots of the plants have flowers and quite a few have now turned into berries. Looks like we 'll have a good crop this year. Though we probably need to put some netting over to avoid the birds taking them all, so I'll need to put that too on the list for the garden centre. I might even pop over there today.

Mrs. M.