Getting my Allotment (March 2008)

I finally got my allotment in march 2008. You are probably wondering why it took me so long to get an allotment and there were several factors that were involved. Like I said I had always wanted an allotment and thought the idea of growing more of my own food was great but I could also see how big they were when I went walking around the allotment site (I don't know exactly how big but I think they are all more or less the same size but I will take the time out at some point to find out it's size) and I knew how much time that it would take to maintain an allotment and with work, kids and a household to run doubted that I would have the spare time to put in to keep the allotment in top condition, (and no my Hubby is definately NOT into gardening so would be no help!!)

Then we had new neighbours move in next door and after getting to know them I found that Kate had very similar interests to me and would also like an allotment...this was where my proposition came in...and I asked Kate if she would like to share a plot with me. This decided we repeatedly went down the allotments asking around until we finally ended up with a number of someone we could ring and eventually (after 4 months of calls and pleading) we were offered our very own allotment!!


Above is the plot that we were offered..as you can see it was in a very big mess..(to put it lightly) and we knew we had a lot of hard work to follow. Kate and I decided we would split the allotment straight across the middle and have half each to do what we wanted with but started out with the tedious job of digging the ground over and taking out the weeds, grass, thistles, twitch and nettles. It was a very hard job as we decided we wanted our allotment to be totally organic so used no weedkiller on the ground at all. It was a nice surprise when we received the allotment newsletter with a reference to our hard work mentioned though and this made us seem like we were making progress...however slow that may be!!













After about 6 weeks of tedious digging we actually looked like we were beginning to get somewhere and were quite proud of our efforts.





We were both very new to the allotment business so we took it just one day at a time but after a while even we could see that we had no chance of digging the whole plot over before it was time to start planting out so we decided then to split the allotment so that we could go our separate ways and start planting out if we wanted to (we figured planting out half our our allotment this season was better than not planting out at all!!) I did manage to get the kids to help out a bit but I think sometimes it took me longer to get the work done with them than without them..(lol) At least they had some fun in the sun!!!




And so my allotment days started..in my next post I will tell you what I planted out in my first year...how much grew...and what happened to the plot!!!