Our Allotment

Thursday evening, the boys and I went lookin’ for scrap wood to recycle. I’d spoken to a manager at a local DIY store, who told me I’d be welcome to help myself to pallets from their loading yard. We’d just need a way to transport them home for breaking. Sadly, our car isn’t really designed for the transport of pallets, so I hit upon a plan B: We’d take the pallets, and break them in situ, then load the scrap wood (which would be far more compact) into the car.

Plan B fell foul of the store’s general manager, who saw us helping ourselves to pallets and sent a minion to tell us that we weren’t welcome to help ourselves at all. Apparently their pallets are shipped back to bla bla bla. Yadda yadda. Bottom line: No help here.

So we mooched around, found a couple of scraps here and there, and after a couple of hours of fun, frolics and hitting things with hammers we had a carload of scrap wood, mostly about 1m long, which we took home. As I drove, I calculated that it would take two weeks, collecting scrap wood at the same rate (assuming we could do so every evening) to gather enough wood to form our bed edges, and that even then it would be a bugger to work with. Clearly another plan was needed.

Plan F*, then, is as follows: Let’s not bother with the bed edging. They’re really only cosmetic unless the bed is seriously raised, and as long as the paths are clearly defined the beds will be defined as the spaces between the paths. Sounds reasonable, right?

Right.

So today we hopped into the car, with a handful of garden pegs and a whole cone of cotton, to mark out the plot into beds. Yet another fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and the end results can be seen here:

That’s right, ten beds, 1.5 * 6m, with 0.5m-wide paths between each one. I had originally planned to scoop some soil from the paths into the beds, but plan F dictates instead that the paths will be covered with weed-suppressing membrane and bark chippings. They’ll sink as we walk on them, and the beds will stand proud.

Next: Defining the paths, I guess…

*Plans C, D and E were: To ‘borrow’ timber from local fences, to use some offcut galvanised steel sheeting we spotted in a skip, and to bike around the area looking for people disposing of useful planking. each of these were dismissed pretty much as soon as they came up, either as illegal, impractical, or involving endlessly cycling around in a downpour…

I went to bed worrying about the weather last night. John had agreed to work our plot for us this morning, as long as it wasn’t raining. The weather forecast wasn’t great; there was talk of showers and torrential downpours later, but in the event today dawned bright and sunny. There were clouds, sure, but they weren’t threatening yet. It looked like good rotavating weather to my inexperienced eye…

Julie kept me from hassling John; we spent the morning doing a little grocery shopping, and buying some of the kids’ uniforms for next year. Then, after a hurried cuppa, I could be restrained no longer! Julie, Storm, the Roo and I bundled off to inspect John’s progress.

We arrived just as John was finishing up, and the results were certainly impressive! As you can see from the photo, the plot looks enormous now! We did some more-accurate measuring, and the rotavated area (which isn’t even the whole plot) is 6.5 x 23m, with a corner “bitten out” because of a heap of composting vegetable matter ‘donated’ by a neighbour. Even leaving out that corner, we’ve enough room for ten beds, 6.25 * 1.5m, with a 50cm path between each…

So, next stop: the local builders yard to find out how much the edging wood will be; and here things stopped going quite as swimmingly. Their estimate for the timber was roughly £220 + VAT; this would, obviously, leave us with nothing with which to buy seed or any of the other stuff we’re going to need. Clearly a rethink is needed…

…So now we’re looking into recycling wood. Watch this space…

Thanks to a generous “seeding grant” from my parents (thanks again, folks!) we were able to buy a strimmer and start work on Saturday. Sadly, the strimmer doesn’t seem to be designed for quite such strenuous work and developed something of an overheating problem. This could be down to my technique, or possibly some issue with the fuel/air mix (the spark plug is already quite sooty after a short afternoon’s work, which I seem to recall might indicate the mix is too rich) but the upshot was that we didn’t manage to get quite as much done as we’d hoped…

On the other hand, we did manage to meet a couple of our new neighbours. First, there was Bob, a fellow Scot, who has two plots next to each other and is growing an impressive array of butternut squash, sweetcorn, potatoes and beans. He was also keen to show me the sweet potatoes he’s growing in his greenhouse (news of which, in turn, prompted Mum to ask me to pass on a request for some advice…) Bob also presented us with a bag of new potatoes; as delicious a welcoming present as we’ve ever had.

Another neighbour, Richard, recommended a friend of his who’ll happily flail and rotavate our plot for us for a nominal sum. This is an attractive offer, not least because I wasn’t really looking forward to digging over all those beds. If the plot’s been rotavated already, then building the raised beds and preparing the paths should leave us with an allotment that’s pretty much ready to go! Okay, we’ve missed the main growing season, but there’s always late crops and winter brassicas. And next year…

Heh. Getting ahead of myself there, did you see? Walk first, then run. I’ve booked three days off work this week to spend some quality time with Julie before the kids’ summer holidays start driving her to distraction. We’re taking the Roo swimming, we’ll go for walks and rides and I’d like to think that some of that time might be spent pottering about on the allotment. It certainly felt like quality time on Saturday…

Okay, so we didn’t get an awful lot of gardening (or allotment work) done this weekend. The weather was dead against us; I think we can reasonably claim that this wasn’t our fault. On the other hand, the veg patch in our back garden yielded still more delicious beetroots and spinach for our sunday dinner, and some decent-sized unrotted courgettes for this evening.

 I was prompted by this morning’s report on McDonalds’ plans to re-investigate the subject of biofuels. More specifically, biodiesel. The more I look into this, the more I think it’s something which we ought to be doing - converting a waste product into a valuable resource (and reducing the need for fossil fuels as a result) can only be a good thing. The only question is how much time and effort can I afford to devote to yet another project?

Well, it’s a thought at least. It’s also worth considering that this biodiesel would also work as fuel for an oil-fired boiler, for example. Not much good for us (with our condensing gas boiler… Oops…) but there it is.

Hmm… I wonder whether freecycle might be a good source for transesterification processor parts…