Here we go! The 35th Leeds International Film Festival launches its programme this week, ahead of the first screening in November. I think its fair to say I’m a bit excited.

Last year’s last-minute scrapping of the whole festival was such a cruel blow. Mid-October we had a 3 tier system of lockdown (remember that?) and, as the film festival proudly announced, every one of the tiers allowed in-person cinema screenings, the festival was safe! Of course, at the very end of October the government announced Leeds would move into the (previously non-existent) tier 4. And all the screenings had to be scrapped. (And then actually they put the whole country on lockdown just as few days later).

They made the best of it, and we watched a lot of stuff on the online player but it wasn’t really the same. So this year it’s so exciting to be heading back into the cinema for it. Opening film is Spencer, which I’d struggle to care less about, but much like a music festival is never really about the headline acts, the film festival is all about the hidden gems. Fingers crossed for a good year.

Beans and peas sown last week, but the ground has been so cold and frosty! We’re hoping they’re helped out with a little bit of fleece. Hopefully it’ll keep the pigeons off too.

Even more digging! Got one really long thin plot ready for carrots and beetroot in a short while.

And the big addition is the new compost bin! It’s… massive. I think we might have overestimated how much compost we would generate. We’ll see.

More digging and clearing this weekend. We’ve got another bed dug, cleared around nearly all of the mystery twigs and cleared a lot of weeds.

Nothing planted today, but we’re gearing up to get some beans planted tomorrow.

Finally our 6 raspberry canes have arrived! We’ve planted all 6 of them alongside the blackcurrant in our fruit bed.

They’re just twigs for now, so any photo of them is a bit dull. But here’s a nice sunny shot of the allotments in the lovely afternoon light.

And the digging continues! This time we dug just a half bed and have put two rhubarb crowns in there. They’ll not do anything much this year but they’ll be good for next year.

We’ve dug yet more of the allotment. We’ve raked some soil food through it all. We’ve picked out some of the weeds we missed. And now we have planted blackcurrants! Bed #9 is designated the fruit patch: we’re hoping to get raspberries, gooseberries and maybe redcurrants too!

The allotment is all looking very pretty and springy. The daffodils are all starting to open up and there’s a single magnificient red and yellow tulip. In the next allotment over, the blossom is looking lovely.

We’ve put the very first things in the ground. It’s still a little early by all accounts (Leeds’ last frost is the first week of May!) but I’m a bit impatient. So I’ve sown some radishes. Just a few, in two neat little rows. We’ll see if they actually come to anything in the next couple of weeks.

This weekend we’ve done lots more digging!

We got another bed dug (bed #9), took a trip to some garden centres and did more digging! Bed #7 is also looking good now. The piles of drying weeds is growing bigger and bigger.

We’ve done some digging! We’ve drawn some diagrams and portioned our allotment up into a number of beds. We’ve marked some of them out with pegs and string. And now we’ve dug the first one over.

What a lot of dandelion roots! This is bed 8. Not sure yet what its going to have in it.