Ahead of the crowd?
Welcome to our little blog. This is really just a dumping ground for our ideas but hopefully others may find it useful too.
We have been growing our own veg for a couple of years now and even keep chickens mainly because we want to know where our food has come from, reduce the carbon footprint of our food and generally have the satisfaction of sitting down to a meal which we can say mostly grew in our own garden.
After we got the chickens, it soon became apparent that they are incompatible with growing vegetables! They will eat anything they can get to and have been confined to one part of the garden. This does, however, mean less room to grow veg. We have 4 reasonable sized beds (2m x 1m) but short of going the complete Good Life route of digging up our entire garden, we were never going to really grow enough to make an impact on our weekly shopping bill over a sustained period. So, In November, Michele started looking at allotments and inadvertently (and luckily!) put our name down on the waiting list, we though we were just going to get some information. However, in early December, we got a letter from the council saying we had been allotted a plot and we would be getting a welcome pack soon!
This is the plot as it looked on the 12th December 2008.
Luckily, we knew that it would be rotovated as part of the startup fee, otherwise, looking at this, we could have easily been put off at just the thought of having to dig this over!
Even knowing that it would be rotovated, we still had work to do. If this was simply rotovated as it was then we would end up with a beautiful clear patch full of chopped up weeds waiting for the spring sun to help them grow and become even stronger. So the first job was to try and remove as many of the big established weeds and old vegetables, left behind by the previous gardener, as possible.
Initially we thought that we would have control over when the plot would be rotovated so we took our time doing a bit every week for a few weeks.
Here’s the plot after a few weeks, 28th December.
It doesn’t look like we’ve done much, but we certainly felt it! Then suddenly, we arrived one day to see this
our work had now truly begun!