Our Allotment

This weekend Julie was at college during the day, so there wasn’t a lot of free time to visit the allotment. Nevertheless, the girls and I did manage to grab an hour or so to pop in and tidy up a little.

The girls were nervous about weeding, but once they figured out which was what they were pulling out tiny nettle seedlings quite happily. The Roo bimbled around as usual, helping himself to blackberries and walking on the beds to enjoy my reaction.

Our one unpleasant surprise was finding that someone (or, more likely, something) had uprooted two of the lovely asparagus plants so kindly donated by Bob. Judging by the shape of the holes and the copious prints left on the membrane nearby, our prime suspect is a local fox. I had no idea that foxes liked asparagus to go with their chicken. Urban foxes clearly have sophisticated tastes…

The uprooted plants weren’t far from their holes, and the roots didn’t look too badly damaged or dried out, so we re-planted them and gave them a generous splash of water. With luck they may pull through…

I remembered to take some photos this time, and in uploading them I came across a picture we took when we were laying the membrane last weekend. it was a rather bizarre-looking spider which Julie spotted. We’d never seen anything like it, but it turns out (thanks to Google) that this is something called Argiope bruennichi or the Wasp spider. The photo I took was blurred and black-and-white, but here’s a dedicated page…

 .  .  .

Julie discovered a couple of marrows in the back garden which had hidden undetected for long enough to grow to a remarkable size. Clearly too good for eating, the plan is to follow some instructions from the interweb to make these into marrow rum.

If you look very carefully at the bed next to the kids above, you’ll see little hints of green apprearing. Those are our “early” peas! Growing! If only the forecast for the next week weren’t as bleak as it is (ugh) I’d be reasonably confident that something might come of them…

This is just a quick post to see whether i can really update my blog from my (non-smart) phone using opera mini. It kind of looks like i can… Also, the lovely news is that we have photos of the allotment in all its black-fabric finery, which i will post in due course. Watch this space…
Hmm… This works pretty well, in fact. Cool…

My parents came over to visit last week. Dad had a school reunion in Brighton; Mum had the burning desire to see the plot and her grandchildren, although probably not in that order. Probably not. I’m sure Mum would have been happy to have spent more time working on our plot for us, but if I’m honest we were so happy having them over that we spent more time bimbling about together. And why not, eh?

 Even so, by the time Mum and Dad (and, to some extent, myself) were done we had three beds in a state ready for planting, and two of them were (at least partially) planted. Now, I know the growing season’s pretty much over, and the idea of planting early peas and salad crops might make some people smile in a superior fashion, but bear with us here. Our logic was that earlies require a shorter growing season than mains or lates, and we do get a longer growing season (on average) in the South-East than most places, so why not give it a go. Another thing to bear in mind was that these seeds probably wouldn’t have lasted until next season anyway. One way to be certain they wouldn’t grow would be to leave them in the drawer. Sticking them in a well-watered drill and keeping an eye on them gives them a chance at least…

Anyway, my Mum was impressed with the growing area we have available to us, and envious as anything about the quality of our soil. The implication of which is that, if we can’t grow anything here then we’re pretty rubbish gardeners. So, no pressure, eh?

The more attentive among you will have noticed that we prepared three beds, and will be thinking “so what about the other seven?” Well, the bad news there is that my folks reckon our plot is riddled with couch grass. This is a particularly tenacious weed which will insist on returning again and again and is unlikely to be discouraged even by repeated digging-over. Our neighbours said they’d gotten rid of theirs by digging out the roots and “disposing” of them (composting, perhaps? Burning? Who knows?) but since our plot was rotavated this isn’t going to be an option. Apparently having a couch-grass-infested site rotavated is A Bad Move.

Oops.

So plan… (erm… running out of letters…) G-ish is to cover the rest of the plot with light-excluding, moisture-and-nutrients-transmissive fabric which my Mum very kindly ordered for us from Gardening Naturally. This will effectively kill all the weeds and grass which are already beginning to take over the rest of the plot, leaving us with a more manageable third-of-a-plot with which to work for the winter, and preventing us from becoming despondant as the next year begins. The fabric arrived today, so we’re well-placed to lay it this weekend. Expect an update and some pictures then…

In the meantime, here’s us…

Okay, so it’s been a few weeks since the last update. What can I say; things to see, people to do…

Last thing we heard, the plan was to define the beds negatively by setting out the paths; the beds would be the areas in between. Sounded good, but when we came to start setting out the paths (on a day which was only a little bit breezy) the underlay membrane kept threatening to escape and it turned out I’d drastically underestimated the sheer quantities of bark we were going to need. Once again, the scale of the plot fooled me. A couple of weeks later, and the paths were still ill-defined, the string with which we’d marked the beds was fraying, and the whole thing was looking a little less rosy than I’d previously hoped…

Fortunately, a local business’s waste disposal problem turned out to intersect nicely with out timber needs problem. Webb’s Forest Furniture build sheds, fences, birdfeeders and so on, using logs as their source material. These logs are sawn into planks, and the offcuts and oddments are then bundled up and piled outside their premises. They were only too happy to give us a stack of timber for a very reasonable donation, which left Storm and myself with the task of transporting the wood to the allotment…

With the back seats folded and the front seats crammed as far forwards as they’d go, we were able to stack a fair haul of planks into the boot of the car. The driver’s seat position wasn’t optimal for driving, but we managed to ferry the wood to the plot and pile it at the end. Two piles: Wide-ish planks suitable for edging, and narrower oddments and peggy bits which I hoped to use to fix the boards in place.

 Storm and I took turns , with one laying the boards out in position on the plot while the other used a makeshift sawing table to saw the fixing posts and pegs. I’d already tried out a method of placing the boards which seemed to work reasonably well (a 1′ stake behind the board to hold it in place, with a narrower peg hammered in in front to press it against the stake) and by the end of the day we’d managed to build a whole bed.

Okay, doesn’t sound (or look) like a lot, but we’d also laid out the boards ready for the other nine, and we’d worked out some details of how to finish the rest off. We’d also gathered about a pound-and-a-half of blackberries, so we figured we’d get away with calling that a job well done…

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…

We finally managed to visit our allotment this afternoon. I say “We”; I mean myself, Poppy, Sage and Reuben. Julie was, sadly, at work and Storm had a social life to pursue…

I managed to snap the following shots using Julie’s phone camera. My own phone was with Julie because… Well, it’s a long story. Probably not worth going into at length. The photos:

I measured the plot at 28 paces by 7. Now all I need to do is figure out how big my paces are and we’ll be ready to start planning…

I was heartened to receive my newsletter from gardening.co.uk this morning; its lead article was all about the success which is possible with plantings as late as July. I know that there’s little realistic hope of actually seeing anything much growing in our plot this year, but there’s a chance. That’s something.

 Well, it’s hardly a secret that I’m a bit of a geek. However, if there were ever a need for hard evidence, the fact that I’ve set up an allotment blog before we’ve even picked up the allotment key should probably count for something.

In our defence, we simply didn’t have an opportunity to pop round to the council offices during office hours last week, and given the weather this weekend gave us (It only rained once. For two days.) we wouldn’t have gotten much done in any case. Yes, this was definitely a weekend for planning, dreaming and setting up websites. Julie’s getting the key today, and we should have some “Before” shots by the end of the week.

Now the question of exactly why we need a blog for our allotment should probably be addressed. Truth be told, the world would probably survive quite well without yet another contribution to (*shudder*) the blogosphere, but this seemed a handy way to keep interested parties (my Mum, basically) up-to-date with developments chez nous. I’m also hoping that the “log” part of the “weblog” will help us to keep track of things that need doing, stuff we learn and mistakes to avoid next time.

 For example: Since I still have no idea what baby kohl rabi look like, I’m going to mark each station with a lolly stick (or similar) next time, so that I don’t end up with a lovely row of poppies where I was expecting tasty brassicas. Don’t get me wrong; the flowers are pretty and all, but as my old Mum always says “A weed is a plant growing where you don’t want it.” Or something like that anyway…