Blank Canvas and Mouse Attack

As one of my fellow (experienced!) allotment bloggers kindly commented:  in 2013, the first full year at the allotment, we will have a blank canvas at the plot to fill as we wish.  We can decide what we want to plant and where, we can dream and plan! This is very exciting, but, I hope sensibly, tempered with the knowledge that a full size plot is a large area to initially fill, keep weed and pest free, productive and enjoyable.

Here we are assessing some of the space! Actually it's where we put the fruit bushes, so it won't look like blank space once the leaves are out in the Spring.

We had some fantastic allotment themed presents at Christmas (I'll write more about these later) and one was a bundle of seeds, some of which are not bog standard varieties, so they are food for thought and will definitely form part of blank canvas in-filling! 

Mouse food

And talking of food you may remember that the mice had a good old go at the peas in the greenhouse, and a pot of bulbs I'd left in there. (They also demolished the broad bean seedlings some time ago- see the picture above).  It's an instructive early warning of pests to come I reckon. I have taken the advice of another (experienced!) fellow allotment blogger (and thanks for the comments I have received so far they are really helpful and encouraging) and sprayed a little WD-40 around the pea plants-  it seemed to work and stopped the mice- hurray! Spurred on by this I got a bit carried away the next time I was at the plot and sprayed it liberally in the greenhouse in my excitement, over some of the plants themselves, so next time I go down I'll have to see if the mice have killed the plants or my foolishly over-zealous attack methods have! Oops!  I will be keeping that can handy for the time being though.....