The First Real Signs Of Life

The essentials on a cold day: a flask, some gloves and some bacca for the breaks... you can kind of make out the fact that we put bricks around the beds to define them - big mistake, in our eyes anyway. It's slug hotel and the view from their balcony will be irresistable when the plants start growing. We got rid of them a few weeks ago.

This second picture is of some tomato seedlings on our windowsil (what must the neighbours think?!!). At first we worried about giving them too much light, we soon learned better though when we started getting long, spindly seedlings, our first casualties... :>(

Since moving them to the windowsil everything's come on leaps and bounds.

The last 2 pics are me flower obsessing yet again... The daffodils were just about the only thing out at that time and they looked so beautifully delicate in the evening sun.

Phase 2

After the gargantuan task of geting the allotment relatively clear of junk we could start the proper work of actually getting some beds dug. We decided because we're first timers, and this is our first attempt to grow anything at all really, that we'd just start with 4 small beds on one half of the area that had previously (though god knows when) been used to grow vegetables. In this first picture you can see that we got 2 beds roughly dug and weeded pretty quickly, the weather conspired to make digging the last 2 pretty impossible for a few weeks so we concentrated our attention on getting some seedlings started.

The second picture is of yours truly, in freezing cold weather wear. Note the Tom Goode influenced green v neck, a friend for years now, spending it's last days in honourable service on the allotment...

green v neck, you're a star!!


This last picture shows the tree zone, I can't really describe it as an orchard but it does have apple, plum, pear and cherry trees on it... you can just about make out the first daffodil's starting to appear on the right.

In The Beginning

Well, this picture is what I grabbed off google earth (i've outlined our plot), I think it's a good couple of years before we got the site... pretty overgrown even then, as you can see. You might also be able to make out the caravan, but more of that later...

The second one's from the start of October last year, during a break from one of the many tidying sessions... (that's Marjon, Lisa and The Dude, by the way) Note the big old shed in the background...
Tidying sessions that lead to the bonfire that we had in November last year. Here's Strokes standing proudly next to the pyre...

The 4th picture is just a litle bit of the junk we have had to sort and remove from the site, not to mention the carvan that bit the dust on bonfire night, (ok, we were a bit drunk, we did throw a big old shed on there, and we did finally wreck the already wrecked caravan!!!)

It took quite a few really cold January days to sort everything that was burnable from the general rubbish, glass and metal that was left over from the bonfire. My brother kindly threw a door made completley of glass and metal on the fire late on in the proceedings (you can actually see the remains of the door propped up against the fence in the background of the last picture). Hours of fun digging hundreds of thousands of little shards of glass out of the ground.

This was only the start though, we then had to deal with the actual body of the caravan. My brother (in a fit of guilt) arranged for someone to pick the chasis up, which was really helpful but we still had to strip the carcass back to the aluminium sheets it was constructed from before we could fold it up... once it was folded up we just left it outside the allotment, someone took it a few days later....

job done, one caravan gone, phase one complete!!!!

Leucojum Vernum, i think!

Anyway, this is the same plant a month later, looking gorgeous as the sun breaks through the trees...

I'm getting obsessed with photographing flowers at the moment, presumaby because i can't wait wait to see the first (edible) fruits of our labour!