Allotment almanac, part one. Put in several good sessions on the allotment over the weekend. I wrote an entry last week concerning the bare root wildflowers I ordered: various meadow plants that could do well among the coarse grasses on a spare corner of the allotment. 
 Initially I bedded them in a slit open bag of compost as I wasn't able to plant them there and then and this ensured they didn't expire in the meanwhile. On Sunday I cut a strip of the rough grass right down to the ground, partly to make planting easier and partly to give the plants a chance to establish without getting swamped. The natural habit of these plants is to grow through grass so hopefully as the grass grows back the plants will hold their own.
 It's an experiment. Wildflowers are extremely robust but then again quite particular about the conditions that suit them. What prompted the idea was the beautiful flowers that appeared during the year on some of the neglected grassed over allotments. I noticed that various plants had colonised these spaces even as the grass reclaimed them. What they have in common is that they are species whose native habitat is meadows and pastures...