Anyone with an allotment?

My dad kindly donated us his little rotovator. Mantis with a wee Honda engine. Obviously a bit too wet still to do any real digging but gave it a quick blast. Definitely a game changer :)
Bulbs are out and looking fab.

2 Attachments

Glorious day up on the plot today, got the early potatoes in and disturbed one slow worm. Knocked up a little bed for kiddo to plant some stuff in.

Also got on the blag and got some steel roofing sheets and scaffold poles for future projects.

2 Attachments

Stepover pears are in. Need to pop back with my loppers to tidy up the second one, but excited.

2 Attachments

Gardening Club at Crews Hill is having a big terracotta clear out and 3 for £12 on big bags of miracle grow multipurpose.
Went in with a crisp £50 note and left with 2 nice decent sized pots, 3 bags of compost, 6 herb plants and 4 packets of seeds.

Highly recommend getting up there at the moment, it’s absolutely rammed full of plants and there’s bargains galore.

Herb village coming along, weird pic distortion tho :/

2 Attachments

Looks like I'm going to be joining the allotment club with a 75sqm plot.

What tools to remove brambles? chop them up and dig out roots?

1 Attachment

Brambles are an absolute bastard, make sure you dig all the root out

That’s a lot of plot and a lot of brambles!. I’d say you’d want a petrol strimmer or something like that. Digging out brambles roots is very difficult and for an area that big a huge task. I’d just start with a manageable area….getting some things growing for your first year. Looks like you’ve got some rhubarb there?

it didn't feel like a overwhelmingly large plot, there were full size 125sqm plots that were 90% brambles that I decided against..

There is more than enough plot for this year and can just take the rest of the year to get rid of the brambles.

Yes rhubarb, not much else, a plum tree on one edge but thats about it, pretty blank canvas.

Yes I'd say that its a good size. Best of luck. Hopefully it's a productive bramble patch and you get lots of blackberries whilst you get it back to a manageable level!

Plum tree is a winner.....usually very productive and very tasty.

Lots of bike boxes

We were neck deep in brambles when we got ours.
Petrol hedgecutter to dice up the worst of the brambles then a brushcutter to take them to ground level.
We had to scalp 6” off the top of the whole plot with a mattock to get the roots. They still pop up here and there but got 99% of them.

Took us quite some time to get through it all but was much more effective than just putting card down and hoping for the best.

Picked up 30 bags of manure today from Surrey Docks Farm. They were very generous with the bag filling and I reckon it must be a tonne of the stuff. Doubling the size of the vegetable patch in the back garden.

1 Attachment

I've got most of my plot sorted now and a few bits and bobs planted out.

I'm wanting to get the potatoes planted but was wondering how you go about it if you're doing no-dig and have cardboard under your soil?
Do you just plant on the surface and built up the soil around them?

There’s a Charles Dowding video about it on YouTube somewhere.

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Sorry was too busy herding children to look it out. It’s this one IIRC.

https://youtu.be/zXO_j0vriwk?feature=shared

Was sick of having a house full of fungus gnats so the peppers can htfu and go out early in the tunnel.
Whacked about 35 in the ground and there’s a few more in the potting shed.
Maybe they’ll survive, maybe they won’t. Checked on them today and they’re not dead.

1 Attachment

It's scandalous how plots are allowed to get into a really bad state when waiting lists are so big. Our site used to blitz really bad plots with weed killer before they were let and would loan a strimmer, it's a lot of work to get the whole plot sorted but you can make a big difference fairly quickly by taking on the worst looking stuff.

We pulled 5x 1m builders bags(the big fuckers that sand/ballast etc come in) of dumped rubbish from our plot. It’d be vacant for nearly 10yrs so had become the communal dump for the site. Obviously this was under all the brambles so we had no idea how bad it was til we hacked our way in.
The council won’t provide a skip or any refuse collection at all for the plots even if we offer to pay. Apparently I can use a private waste contractor and they’ll credit it against my rent. Absolute madness.

If I was a bastard I’d drag it outside the gate a few yards where it’d be collected within a day or two as fly tip no questions asked.

We have numerous ‘Santa’ plots on our site: they only visit once a year the day before annual inspection to wave a strimmer around and plant 3x tom plants from b&q that will be dead a couple of days later.
Those fuckers seem to get away with it but productive plot holders will get shitty emails if they neglect to strim enough in summer.

This was the state of my plot when i picked it out back in 2009
https://ibb.co/Y8RYcND

Sounds like a massive pain in the arse.

I was at ours yesterday and chatting to one of the old boys who's on the committee who was telling me about the meeting next week.
We've got plots going spare and starting to get overgrown. There's also the plots that are taken but left unworked.
The plan is to cut back and get some wildflower seeds down on the unused plots so they look a bit better.
We've got one plot where everyone dumps their rubbish and every so often there's a bonfire to get rid of it all!

Where the hell are all these free/empty plots?! Not in London I assume, the list here in Waltham Forest seems to be decades long

there were 20 free plots when I looked round mine (Merton council), think a lot of people that got them during covid have lost interest and are now too busy.

Just got the agreement signed and paid up my fees

Any tips for doing an allotment without a car appreciated - maybe its a sign to get a cargo bike

Shed and leave tools up there? Though then you have the question of how to get the shed there...

get a cargo bike

Yep,, definitely a cargo bike. And a shed as well mind. Can't have too many sheds in your life