Garden Bears' World - Back at the Allotment

Here's another Garden Bears' World for you, looking at what happened when we went to the allotment last week.

We had an important job to do there, as Polar had given us some seedlings to plant in our flower garden, to fill in the gaps between our wild flowers.  They are Honesty, which will flower next year, and some Antirrhinums or 'snap-dragons', which will hopefully flower in the autumn.

Our first job was to make some planting holes for the them.  The ground was quite hard, so Hanley Bear dragged Polar's big trowel out of the shed and used that to make some.  It was very hard work and he could only just lift it, so Polar helped him.

Then we had to split the little plants up in their trays and put them, one at a time, in the planting holes, before raking some soil around their roots.  Polar said she would water them all in with her big watering can when we had finished.

We tried to mix them up and space them out fairly evenly, without disturbing any of the other plants growing there from our seed balls.

When we had finished, we looked around for Polar or Grizzly, but they were busy working further down the plot.  We decided to do some climbing on the compost heap pallets.

When we got to the top, we saw a lovely deep pile of grass cuttings on top of the heap.  "Yay!" we all cheered, and jumped down onto the lovely, bouncy grass.

We had lots of fun jumping and bouncing and throwing dry grass at each other, but lots of it stuck to our fur!

When Polar came up to see how we were getting on with our planting, we thought she was going to tell us off and we went very quiet, but Grizzly saw us and started laughing, which made Polar laugh too.

She gently brushed off as much grass as she could.  "If the rest doesn't brush out, you will need to have baths when the hot weather arrives in a couple of days," she said.

There was just time to check on some of the other vegetables.  Polar lifted me up to see the first runner beans big enough to pick, then I joined the other bears in the onion patch, trying to decide which one was the biggest.

Most of the onions were bigger than the smaller bears' heads and they were very heavy too.  Polar had eased them out of the ground so they could start drying off for storing. When they are dry, she hangs them up in the storeroom in an old pair of tights!

Sonning checked the pumpkins, and was pleased to see some fruit starting to form.  This is a Potimarron squash, which is one of Polar's favourites.  Polar says she will have to start trimming the shoots now, to encourage the fruit that has formed to get bigger, so we don't end up with dozens of tiny ones.  We bears wouldn't mind that, of course.

We will be going back to the allotment soon, so look out for another Garden Bears' World in the next week or so.