Well, I am just back! It was a bit of a trek over to Coralies on the bus but I got there in good time. We had a lovely lunch and I got to play with Evan for a while before we walked down to meet the allotment man Nick.
The allotments take only 2-3 minutes to walk to from Coralies house and we waited just a few minutes for Nick to get there. He showed us a couple of plots but we went for number 92. Yes, it is now ours!!!! How exciting is that?
As you can see from the photos it is very over grown and the lean to shed is just a rickety shell. Plot number 92 is only 4 down so only a minutes’ walk from the gate meaning Coralie will be able to walk from her house to our plot in less than 5 minutes. I think it is about 4 miles from my house, so I may cycle there when the weather improves.
That's me there!
The plot goes to the back fence and the right edge is where you can see other stuff growing on the right. That belongs to the Italians.
Looks like the last person left behind some old cabbages!
For now the plan will be that Simon drops me there on his way to school about 8am and I will get the bus home. We have opted to have the council bring in a rotovator and get it all prepared for us as we can’t see ourselves being able to do that much digging. Coralie has a bad back and I have weak wrists. Nick did tell us about some special kinds of spades that make digging easier though and said they sometimes come up on eBay or at car boot sales.
The disadvantage of having it done with a rotovator is that it will apparently stir up all the long dormant stuff and we will get a lot of weeds but hey, we can do weeding! The council will probably be a month before they can do that for us as it is so wet at the moment. In the meantime we get our gate keys tomorrow and we will go in and see if we can clear a bit of it ourselves.
At the weekend I will get Simon to have a look and see if he can make the shed thing a bit more stable. It’s only to store a few tools in, plus maybe a couple of chairs so we can sit there in the summer and eat our lunch. It is not the shed in the photo!
Nick was very helpful and told us about a few books and said if we have any questions to give him a ring. The 2 plots either side of ours are tended but Italians and he said they are extremely friendly and very knowledgeable so they will hopefully help us too.
We didn’t have a measure with us today so we couldn’t actually measure it but the standard size is 300 square meters. It looks very large to us. I called into the library on my way home and picked up one of the book s that they had already got in for me, so I have some reading for tonight. It’s called the “allotment keepers handbook” by Jane Perrone. Coralie is going to start doing some more online research.
One of my American friends Kim, didn’t know what an allotment is; maybe you don’t have them there? They are owned by the local council and most towns have some land set aside for allotments. As town houses often have small gardens people rent an allotment plot from the local council to grow their fruit and veg.
They are very cheap, just £50 per year, although as Coralie has a city active card the cost is reduced to £31 per year. The active card costs £16.50, so in total saves us £2.50 on the yearly rent. On the site you have stand pipes for water but there are no other services. Everything is done by hand.
Anyway, expect more updates and photos soon. Right now I need to go and get on with preparing something for dinner and I also want to make a chocolate cake. I may be back later if I get time.
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