Rent Day and Started work

 

Where do we start??!!

Sunday morning and no lie in for us today..... flask of coffee made and home made buns and apples, bag packed with hand tools, wellies on, fork ready, off to the allotment for our first day of allotmenting!  Paid our years fee of £16.50 and met our allotment neighbour Alan who was also starting today for the first time.  He lived in a flat overlooking the site and had been waiting for 18 months for a plot, certainly a lot longer than we had, made me realise just how lucky we were.  He had chosen the plot on the end which meant we had a plot between us and it seemed like a good opportunity to increase our plot size if the middle plot was still vacant.  Alan was agreeable to take on half of it if we had the other half so when Dave, the chairman arrived to see how the rent day was going and to check on us newbies I asked him if anyone had taken the middle plot and they hadnt, it was still very much available.  He agreed that we could split the middle plot and left it to us to sort out the boundary, as there was a sort of boundary there already Simon and Alan agreed to use that, even though that gave us an extra metre or so.  Paid another £8.25 for the priviledge of making our plot over half as big again and it felt a lot more substantial and gave us a lot more scope to be able to do our crop rotating properly and to be able to grow everything we wanted to in decent quantities.

So first task, tackling the compost heap/rubbish pile.  It all looked a little daunting, lots of bin bags, fertiliser bags and general debris, bits of metal, old canes..... we started clearing.  Metal bits were going to a pile at the end of the site for recycling, the wood went down on the bonfire, the fertiliser bags were to put any old rubbish bits in.  We sorted out the top layer very quickly, then came across a sheet of plastic, and carpet, then.... compost!  Beautiful, crumbly, rich A1 compost.  It almost felt like finding buried treasure!  Other jobs on day 1 - Simon sorted out some concrete blocks, turned one into a step for the little shed (which incidentally held a bent fork which we recycled, a watering can and a plant pot) and the others he turned into a little raised bed after he'd cleared the top corner of the plot.  He filled it with a bit of the good compost and stuck our plot number proudly in it!  Will be lovely to see flowers or herbs growing in it.  I kept myself busy with the new fork, digging out the first of the two veg beds, hard work and found muscles that I had forgotten existed but with Simons help we got the first two done by mid afternoon.   Met a few fellow allotmenters through the day, all very friendly and encouraging, think it will be a nice place to spend time.  Got home tired and muddy but very happy and pleased with our progress so far.