My new allotment

This is a repost from a defunct blog (...I forgot the old login details...).

Yesterday there were 400,000 allotment tenants in the UK. Today there are 400,001; I have joined the crowd.

My shiny new allotment is in Swaffham Prior, near Cambridge. The shiny and new bit is a fib. I was so excited when I heard I had finally got to the head of the queue (a story in itself, but for another day) I rusched out with Drc to look at my new estate. And there it was. Waist high in weeds. Last year's parsnips now shoulder high. Nettles growing through what remained of the rhubarb.

Doom. Gloom.

Right, I need to be straight with you here. My allotment isn't in some backstreet a mile or more from my home. It's the other side of my garden fence, more an extension vegetable patch really. So I've got no excuse - any work that needs doing means I have to be out there.

We have watched this allotment, Drc and I, since we moved into this house. From her bedroom window you can see 5 allotments, the cemetery and, most importantly for her, horses in the paddocks just beyond.

And in these allotments we have watched Early Man (for he always appears early in the morning) growing row after row of brassicas and cut flowers. Next to him are Ant and Dec (Alex and Mike in reality) with their polytunnel, rotovator, and fondness for strong chemicals. There's also Mike2, labouring away under the midnight shadow of the giant Leylandii tree. And finally there was old Sid whose allotment we now have. Years ago Sid had all five allotments, but where he got the time or energy to handle them all I will never know. More recently he has let first one go, then another, until finally he was left with just this one, his soft fruit area. So even today raspberry canes can appear overnight among the lettuce.

The allotment itself? Well. The soil here isn't very good. More accurately, it's c**p. After it rains it turns into sticky mud; once it dries it is like parched white concrete. Between the two there is a window of maybe 6 hours when all the digging has to be done. Chalky clay they call it. Bl**dy awful stuff I call it.

(A friend from London visited, and politely looked over the allotment. After enquiring after the various plants, she asked what the strange white stuff covering the soil was. "That's the soil" was the curt reply).

I bought a ton of horse poo pretty much immediately. Yep, spent £45 on the biggest pile of excrement I have ever stood next to let alone been responsible for. I am told that plants love it, but the thought of barrowing it up from the road makes me prefer other chores. The theory is that I dig this into the soil to make it wonderful again. This is euphemistically known as 'organic matter', and gives the soil cheek bones and a lantern jaw, so I am told.

So what plans do we have? To make this as easy as possible - rescue as much of the soft fruit as we can. There are blackcurrants somewhere under those brambles. And two lines of raspberries cosying up with metre-high grass already setting seed. And 50 alpine strawberries laid out with military precision before succumbing to bindweed. And another 50 old strawberries spreading every which way in a patch near the gate. And some roses. He liked his roses did Sid - white ones, red ones, yellow ones, pink ones. Huge bushes hiding whole rhubarb patches under their spreading canopies. And a line of privet. I can't work that one out - maybe he kept stick insects, who knows?

The grass weeds looked like they were staging a coup so set off with my trusty Honda lawnmower, only to be beaten back. So I attacked with my Makita brushwood cutter, but it was beaten too. So I borrowed a friend's brute force strimmer - the sort that comes with bull horns, chaps and what looks like a fencing helmet. That worked. Flattened everything I went near, including many raspberry canes in the grass. And two lines of baby beets. And rows and rows of onions. All hidden under feet of coarse grass - isn't it amazing what can grow in a year?

So now it looks like a motorway verge. Time to decide next what to grow.