Sunday 17 February 2008

Preparing for the plough

After a lot of deliberation, we have decided to get our patch ploughed and rotivated to help us prepare the soil. We feel it is just too big a job and too de-motivating to clear it all by hand. One of our lottie neighbours lent us a lawnmower and Simon spent a lovely afternoon in the winter sunshine pushing the mower to get rid of the last of the tufts of grass. The whole plot is looking much better now, we have cleared many of the clods of grass and dug out some of the bigger bramble roots - its just impossible to get them all. More photos next time but i think we are nearly ready to start planting stuff. I have bought a huge number of fruit bushes and have my site already marked out. Next update and photos after the ploughing

Monday 4 February 2008

Well, its a start....January and early February 2008

Our Allotment Welcome to our blog. We (Simon and Jo) welcome you to share in our successes and things that are not quite so successful in our new adventure...the allotment. Just so you know who we are, this is what we look like. We are both fairly new to gardening, I (Jo) have grown a few veggies and flowers in the past, while Simon has created the lovely, natural garden that forms the outside space of his very old cottage. We have a lot of plans for our allotment, we would love to grow our own veg obviously but also find space for flowers and herbs, composting and an area to encourage native flora and fauna to share the area too. Now, for the bit you have been waiting for....what our plot actually looks like. This is what it looked like when we were first give it to work on. The weeds were waist high with a great deal of dried thatch from grass that had died off, nettles and dreaded brambles everywhere. It also gives you some idea of size. We think it is about 20m x 17m - I think that is a mahoosive plot This picture shows the length of the plot. Ours ends more or less at the end of the brambles This one shows the width - roughly from where I am standing to take the picture, right down to the chain link fence you see there. We also usefully found a water butt with a hole in it and a water carrier thing, a lot of bricks and about 10000000 golfballs.





This is where we are now as at 4th February 2008




Rubbish cleared, thatch cleared and some clods of grass chopped out. Also see the bonfire we had - that burned really well!









Good picture showing full length of plot with Simon at the far path. You can see how much has been cleared!











Again showing the length of our plot - the blue bucket in the far north corner is the end of our plot!