Well, that was around 3 hours and 45 mins down the #allotment and a few things achieved. Notably all the potatoes harvested, and our first garlic planted. After many years of the fuss of growing potatoes in bit tubs out of necessity, the necessity being a lack of garden space, for the first time this year we did all our potatoes in beds. I am a convert. We put potatoes in. Barely had to care about them. We have dug a few out ad-hoc, and today we cleared out over 30kg of potatoes, possibly as much as 35kg. Now we need to decide how and where is best to keep them. The beds the potatoes came out of now contain 162 planted out garlic cloves from the Garlic Farm. With 24x each of decent cloves of Kingsland Wight, Carcassonne Wight, and Extra Early Wight - I also put in a row of 6x quite small cloves of Carcassonne Wight as an experiment (not the first time I've monitored how small cloves grow, the result is generally: less well). The remaining 60 are "Wonky Wight" cooking garlic.

Seedy day! Actually, these have been accumulating through the week. Just need to find the energy go do something with them. I has been one of those long tiring weeks where Monday feels like it was a month ago. I was on a major "release" thing at work, but one where the actual code was tiny, but the possibly consequences were significant ... so there was a lot of fiddly testing. Possibly all a bit over-dramatic, and in the end it seems to have done OK, though I need to do some post-deploy testing, documentation, and implementation (job for Monday, of course). Meanwhile I also was in charge of the company fireworks-night BBQ... which meant setting up for, and smoking, about 8 kilos of meat... plus sourcing condiments and excellent bread (which involved a bit of a trek itself.) Last night I was in bed at 9pm, didn't get out of bed until closer to 10AM today, still feel exhausted and de-motivated. Gonna be a day of recovery I think. But hopefully not entirely unproductive. #allotment

OK, right, this isn't comfortable at all... but here's an incredibly rare full photo of this grim lump of a meatpuppet. The occasion being that Kat has made me an @Electromagnetic Field #emf2024 solar-punk theme fabric* kitchen apron (sort of for the occasion that I am doing a massive beef rib & lamb shoulder smokefest at work on Thursday.) If you look very carefully you may see it actually has two sets of sewn-on pockets in the front too, but she has stealthily matched the pocket fabric pretty much perfectly to the main fabric. You may also notice the neck strap is also matched. 🤯 I bought quite a bit of this fabric with the intention of making sound panels for a pub with it... but, well, that whole thing never happened of course so we've been wondering what to do with the fabric and this is Kat's own inspired idea. Next up... utilikilt? 🤪 * *With thanks & credit to @npub1csuh...fqqy for the awesome design and the fabric!*

Managed to catch a short bit of #allotment time today as needed to get those slabs out of the back of the car. I have 12 of them, we put 8 around one of the pear trees to get a feel for the area they can cover and actually rather like the look of them around the tree.