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…