Last year ended up being quite a big year in terms of the allotment. At the start of March I had the opportunity to move to the top road, closer to Mommas plot, and hopefully less likely to flood. I haven’t done a monthly update since June cuz we got really busy at work in preparation for GW Live, and then moved house straight after that!
I had been at my old plot since August 2009, so it's a fairly good block of time. I am now officially on my third plot on this site, as I briefly had two plots here. 11yrs on P31.
January and part of February was Lockdown v3, which I’d
totally forgotten about to be honest. According to the blog I saw some goldfinch
in January! I do love me some goldfinch. Apparently in February I saw a green
woodpecker.
The hard work started in March as we had to unbuild the old
allotment and move to the new one within a week. David and I had a week off
work to get married but that didn’t happen, so we had an allotment week
instead. He wasn’t impressed.
I hired a man with a digger to get the new plot levelled off – sod doing that by myself with a spade! Best £200 I’ve ever spent. Yes it was incredibly hard work and yes it was incredibly muddy and yes it was incredibly stressful and yes it was incredibly expensive, but by the end of March I had a new levelled plot, a polytunnel, compost bays, a raised timber deck for the shed base, and the basic layout of raised beds where I wanted them. We didn’t half do good. The full March update can be read here.
April saw the arrival and buildathon for the new huge shed. It took literally all day. I also entertained myself laying a slab path for the water butts to sit on, and I’m still very proud of myself for it.
So aside from a couple of months of hard graft, it’s been quite
a good year. It’s not been productive food year, but it’s still a baby plot and
has a long way to go. I am super pleased with what we’ve achieved this year,
and super proud of how we’ve turned it around from a tussocky hummocky
landscape to a laid out new allotment plot.
I have been working this year on getting the raised beds built, filled and fed, ready for them to start being mega productive this year instead. Last year was very much a building and getting the lay of the land sort of year.
I didn’t really go to the plot for a couple of months in August and September as I was busy elsewhere, and I purposely grew crops that could be abandoned for a while and didn’t need a lot of looking after.
Highlights of 2021: potatoes, carrots, peas, cosmos and sunflowers!
For 2022, I need to:
· Make/dig a pond
· Make a magpie & squirrel proof bird feeder
· Move the polytunnel
· Get new waterbutts
· Lift and re-lay the path
· Put up new guttering
· Make a waterbutt base
· Paint all the timber again
Anyhoo, here be piccies. I’ve tried to do them in some semblance of order so you can see the difference.
Yeah. Quite pleased with that. Here's some more highlights in no particular order:
