This year's sweet peas.

I have ordered my sweet peas from Roger Parsons Sweet Peas.

2015's  varieties are:

• White Frills

White Frills

• Doreen
• Gwendoline

Gwendolin

• Yvette Ann - may have to be replaced by another pink variety.
• Daily Mail
• Mark Harrod
• Windsor
• Joyce Stanton
• Just Julia
• Andrew Cavendish
• Ethyl Grace
• Jacqueline Ann
• Bristol
• Charlie's Angels
• Oban Bay.  

I will be sowing them in January this year and keeping them in the greenhouse until March when I will plant them out in their permanent positions.  Roger Parsons sells the seeds in packets of ten, so if all the seeds germinate and all the seedlings survive, I will have 150 plants.  I have grown White frills; Gwendoline; Daily Mail; Windsor; Ethyl Grace; Bristol; Charlie's angels and Oban Bay before but the others will be new.  I am concentrating on the blues in 2015 - just for interest.

As I was working today, I have not done too much down the allotment.  The nights are drawing in far too quickly now and, just when you have started to do something, suddenly it is dark.

Dug a little more topsoil out of the trench and sieved it.  Took the subsoil down to the hole by the shed and tipped it.  Dug the topsoil out of the main path, sieved it and put it into the trench to replace the subsoil.  Filled the hole in the path with the subsoil and stones taken out when I made the hot bed.  This subsoil is in the way of the main trench going across the allotment so I will continue to make a new path with it just to get it out of the way.  I reckon that this might take some time because the path is so infested with perennial weeds.

There is an awful amount of mare's tail and bindweed in the path which had to be sieved out.  I did about 2 foot square, one spit deep and it virtually took all the time I had at the allotment to clean out the topsoil.

This is what the allotment looked like
on November 19th 2013

I had dug further down the allotment in 2013 than I have on the new half this year.  The new half allotment is not quite as untidy as the one in the photograph so will be dug quicker with any luck.

I want to plant the currants and rhubarb in their permanent places as soon as possible so I will have to get a move on trenching the new half allotment.  The rhubarb is still growing in the Mount Road allotment so will have to be transported to this allotment during the winter.

So the idea is to improve the soil with the addition of organic matter.  You can either do this by trenching or by mulching, however there is nothing to stop you doing both.