Plot 21

I must have had the allotment gods smiling on me, I had fully expected to have to wait years before getting a plot but a letter came in the post a few months later that gave me a glimmer of hope.

I live in a city that values its green spaces and whilst I was reading about people fighting not to have houses built on their own little pieces of land my city decided to make an old abandoned council nursery into a brand new allotment and I had the choice to join the new list. How could I say no? The site was beautiful surrounded by ancient woodland and golf courses, an old house with a lot of history and a field of deer.

We would walk the daft dog regularly past the site watching it gradually get cleared, the stand pipes go in, the deer fence (probably crucial) go up. I bothered the poor girl at the council with my email enquiries...what were my chances? Not good was her reply very sensibly, my name was quite far down the list as I was one of the last people to put my name down. I tried not to get my hopes up, in fact as a bit of childish foot stamping I convinced myself that I stood no chance and stopped reading every gardening book known to man and stalking seed companies online. I had done such a good job on myself that when Chris phoned me at work ( he knew it was still that important to me really) and tried to get me to guess what had come in the post that morning I really had no idea what he was talking about. Oh my god you've got an allotment! he finally had to snap at me when I was too thick to get his hints. Luckily the people I work with are all truly lovely an know me quite well so my shriek didn't surprise them at all, they've heard it before. I had my very own little plot of land...number 21 to be exact...that has to be a lucky number I decided, I couldn't stop idiotically smiling all day.

And so it started....the digging...the begrudging respect for the tenacity of bindweed and the oh so slow clearing of plot 21. And so it goes on, this will hopefully become the diary of the highs and lows of a girl that knows nothing about gardening and the lessons I learn with some other stuff thrown in every so now and again.

 Lesson number one, bindweed will just keep on growing, don't turn your back on a single scrap of its white roots or it will laughingly flower in your face whilst its children strangle your beans...




In the very beginning...there was this...At least the sun was shining!...my plot turned out to be just in front of  the more distant mound at the bottom of the site.
 

And the there was this...can't tell you how happy that tap made me!
 



There was a lot of this...so much of this...by the time I'd signed the lease there was a whole lot more!
 

So we got one of these. I know you shouldn't rotavate when you have weeds like bindweed but I desperately needed to see the soil. I was worried that someone who actually knew what they were doing would come and tell us off, in fact someone came and asked us where we'd hired the machine, I sighed with relief!

 



Which meant I could start to do this, actually that's my lovely man and daft dog but I was getting handy with a rake behind the camera. Did I mention the stones?...