With the weather being set fair I have devoted some evenings this week to the new allotment. The sowing season is upon us and so there has been no room for delay.
The soil on the allotment is not brilliant. However, there is a large pile of good topsoil just to the side of the field. A few enquiries revealed that the soil belongs to the farmer who is intending to move it elsewhere. A few other allotmenteers have been discretely inching some of this said soil in the direction of their own plots.
And so Tuesday evening saw me carrying buckets of soil to be hurled on top of my plot. This has had the effect of burying all the weeds that were formerly growing there. The plot now looks remarkably good and almost well-tended. A barrow-load of top-soil covers a multitude of sins as they say somewhere. I was just in time: the following day the farmer moved the soil.
I wanted to put a path right down the middle to create two beds of roughly five feet in width. By this means I should be able to reach over and work the beds without needing to tread and compact the soil.
Charlie told me of a skip outside one of the houses in the village which looked promising. I thought of doing a night-raid but instead I did the honest thing of knocking on the door and asking if I might help myself. It is surprising how possessive folk can be, even of stuff being thrown away. However, the lady of the house was most charming and let me take what I wanted.
Amongst a broken chandelier and a table football game with one player missing laid some tongue-and–groove boarding which was almost ideal for my purposes. There were also a couple of beach wind-breaks; the material was shot away but the poles still useful.
I then lay two strings to mark the position of my new path and scooped the earth out onto the beds. The planks were laid in position and supported by the wind-break posts cut to size. I am no handy-man and Geoff Hamilton must be turning in his grave, but it should work and any improvements or reinforcements can be made as I go along.
A layer of chipped bark will be added soon and Bob’s your Aunt Sally as they say in these parts.
Now that most of the landscaping is complete I can focus on actually growing things.
Nice skip dive! For a soil thief 😉 I must have short arms or something – I could never manage 5′ wide beds without standing on them. I love the 1m wide beds I have and am already wondering if I will regret having the 3 1.2m wide ones, not as easy to work at all! Good start, nice path, I could have done with boards to edge mine with, but no suitable skips around at the moment.
Hello Janet, thank you for your approval! 🙂 ah yes the width of the beds, will mention that next week, and i have only ‘borrowed’ the earth, i will give it back one day, honest!
Hope Farmer doesn’t read your blog…
Too late if he does! Please dont tell him….
Commendable you have the time to tend to an allotment. Good luck with it this year.
Thank you Susan, I think I will need it…
That’s the best kind of landscape architecture. It doesn’t get greener than a skip raid and a spot of half-inched soil! I hope you will stretch your career as amateur tea leaf to some seeds from the Duchess’s bolted lettuce?
PS Where are you going to put the chandelier?
Hello Marian, its where I am going to put the table football game with one player missing that is bothering me…perhaps in the stables but I can imagine all sorts of arguments betwixt Charlie and Bones as to who plays which side…
If I had the discipline to wait until the landscaping was done to grow things, the next ten years would be pretty barren.
I have the matching broken chandeliers at my place if you want to complete the set. People are pretty stingy about their rubbish here. I don’t know why, the dogs and bears have probably already gone through it.
Christine in Alaska, nothing growing
Hello Christine, no need for another chandelier but if you do have the missing player from a table football game then please send it over…
Mike from Dorset, few bears