The BIG sort

Once again, I feel I must sing the praises of my fellow human beings. It was an early 9am when I woke both Johnny-boy and Alex up from their dark slumbers and if the groans and curses I could hear whispered beneath early morning yawns were anything to go by, I expected it to be a lonely day on the allotment. Imagine my surprise, however, when I found myself woofing down a hot, greasy breakfast in the Bond Street Cafe with my two handy workers in preparation for what would turn out to be one of the most productive days on the plot I have yet experienced! Where does one start... We arrived and Alex and John started immediately with turning in the Rye grass green manure on the future potato beds, whilst I worked on cleaning and weeding up the bed next to the strawberries in preparation for the brassicas. This took absolutely no time at all, which was a pleasant surprise, seeing as on my own, this job would easily have taken me all day. Next, we moved on up to the ground next to the broad beans. This turned out to be a little more nightmarish and took a large chunk of the day removing roots, weeds and spear grass from the well-trodden earth. We did it though, and a shout must go out to John who had the in-enviable task of removing the last of the old left-hand side path, with the stupid amounts of couch grass that go with it - good work matey ;). From an aesthetic standpoint, the plot had a rather shambolic appearance due to both water-butts being very wonky. So, with the 3 of us lifting, grunting and shuffling, we managed to wrestle the butts of their stands and place a big bit of plywood under one and some old cement blocks under another to make them nice and level. It actually made a very pleasing difference to the plot.

Next job - Bonfire!!! Yay..so much fun - we were very careful, plus we had an experience Scout leader amongst us (Cheers Alex) who oversaw all fire management duties. We had all the old Jerusalem stems, Sunflowers, etc etc to burn off, plus Keith wandered over with a few arm loads of old rotten wood to burn, so it turned out to be quite a big one. While that was burning away, Flo and I had been noticing for quite some time that the leaf mould pile at the back of the plot had been drifting and leeching into the grass, so we raked it up, put in some metallic edging and basically turned it over (its looking really good too!). The
purple sprouting broccoli has, up until this point, grown into lovely big plants, but as yet to produce any edible heads because the netting that had covered the whole of the brassicas had fallen and draped, therefore letting the naughty pigeons have access to nibble away. SOOOO, we took up the old netting (encrusted with weeds), folded it and re-arranged it over them so hopefully giving them a chance to show us what they do. And as if that wasn't enough, we made a separate Couch Grass/nasty weed collection point next to the leafmould to free up the compost bin at the front that had been overrun with grass - so that involved trekking back and forth with the wheelbarrow full of old grass - what a fun job!

So, basically, that was it, but the plot is practically ready to go for the year now - everything has been dug over, the water-butts are upright and catching the rain, all the rubbish from last year has been burnt off and the leaf mold/weed grass has been moved and stored! What a day!