THe site was part of a much larger original allotment set that is now part of the CH liesure gardens.... apparently it's a statutory site so the council got in trouble for closing it.....THe school up there is a Special Needs one and they've got a sort of animal sectiopni backing onto the plots.... will have to see if I can get some chicken and llama pooh for the site... was talking to a parent who hepls on the chicken rota through the summer and they seemed to think it woudln't be hard to arrange....
Anyway, I'm on plot 14 now and have started meetiong the other folks there.... bit shocked to fins I'm one of the more experienced growers there, all the folks I've met so far apart from Brian the dahlia and crysanthemum growing vintage horticultural machinery fiend (he has 125 assorted rotavators, powered scythes, two-wheeled tractors etc) have been new to veg growing.... Some of them were getting Brian in to plough their plots up with a classic old British Anzani Iron Horse with a single share plough fitted to it followed by what I think was a Norlene rotavator (like a Merry Tiller basically).... great to watch but given what i've been digging out the last thing I want through there b efore I've dug it over is a mechanical rotavator..... there's enough couch to make that impractical, though there's very little bindweed..... I've got a bunch of plants in and dug over about a quarter of my plot, and have agreed with the neighbours one side that we'll use a path as our boundary, that way a 2' wide path only costs us a foot each of growing space.... useful when you consider the plots are only 20 metres by 6 wide........
THe bit I've put 27 assorted peppers, aubergines and chillis in was about 1.8 metres wide but took a thousand litre bag of horse manureto make it even start to look like it might have some heart to it.... we've got about 8" of topsoil over a hard clay pan, so looks like I'll be doing some shuttling in the van to get a lot of horse manure (the stables will be happy) and compost in there... want to get some carrots sown, probably shift some more half-hardy stuff out of the polytunnel to free up some growing space and try and prep the ground to recieve beetroots once they hatch in their modules.... might look at putting the overwintering onions in there too, try and get some field beans into a chunk of it too..... ome Catawissa and welsh onions, get soome soil prepped for the garlics too.....
chrisc
