Yesterday I went to Utrecht to help my friend Renske on her amazing vegetable allotment (SO.JEALOUS!). Two weeks ago she had carefully planted out her seedlings, watered and fertilized them, and left it to the warm weather to do the rest.

Here’s a picture she sent me a few days ago:

An explosion of green! She hadn’t been there for a week because she’d been on holiday. Believe me, there are a lot of lovely beets, leeks, sugar snap peas and carrots growing here but you can hardly see them because of all the weeds.

Luckily, there is little that I find more rewarding than weeding. The results are almost instant and it’s very meditative. We started with freeing the sugar snap peas and carrots from their unwanted neighbors:

More hands make light work:

 

After clearing this part of the garden Renske wanted to build a trellis for the sugar snap peas. She had actually pinned quite a few of them for inspiration. In the end we decided on a design of our own, inspired on what we had seen.

With bamboo poles we made a frame with vertically placed poles for extra frame support:

Then, we used kitchen twine (what else?) to make the horizontal lines that the pea vines can climb up against:

Renske went back and forth, winding the twine around each pole. and moving down the position of the twine once she reached the other end:

We placed extra poles on each side of the frame. This way we hope it will not be blown down by the wind.

It was such a blustery day, when it clouded over it was quite cold with the hard wind. But only a few seconds after this photo was taken, our finished bean trellis was looking beautiful in full and very bright shining sunlight.

After the trellis was done we did some more weeding and replanted a few seedlings.

Result after a hard day’s work!

So pretty.

I want an allotment too.