Anyone with an allotment?

Done built a shed. Not the greatest quality but it will do a job. No excuses left now for not clearing and digging the rest of the plot

3 year old is insisting it gets painted in pink and purple stripes, which is an uncharacteristically good idea

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Picture suggests your allotment is covering a gravitational anomaly.

Certainly appears to have been sucking in bindweed, brambles and cinquefoil from all corners of the galaxy

Is cinquefoil a big problem? Noticed it in our garden and thought it was wild strawbs from next door, but then just kept it because it was quite pretty…

It spreads a lot (in my garden conditions at least) and is very hard to eliminate. Having said that it never gets huge, and once it gets big-ish it's quite easy to pull out the leafy growth (the rhizomes stay put when you do this though and will regrow). It grows easily through woodchip and gravel so it's hard to eliminate from paths.

Personally I wouldn't deliberately let it grow. But I wouldn't necessarily go to town on removing it.

Has anyone tried getting a second crop of potatoes? Worth doing?

We planted second crop last year but they died back long before Xmas which was kinda the point of growing them for us.
We got some spuds but wasn’t anything spectacular.
No harm in throwing some in if you have the space.

Cool I’ll give that a go 👍🏻

Not the best garlic haul this year, elephants did well again.

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Chillis and toms coming along nicely.

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Impressive Elephants!

Red silks on my Baby Sweetcorn ('mini pops') 🤔

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Bees loving the Globe Artichokes ...

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Something ate all my sweetcorn. Deer?

Finished the greenhouse, probably a bit late to do much but might migrate my chillis.

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Moles and rats like sweetcorn too, I've seen people put socks over the developing cobs to protect them

Badgers like them as well

Yeah, on our site badgers are infamous for taking out corn

The corn on the plot opposite ours is up to 10+ft tall now. No badgers getting up there :)

On our site they battering-ram them down, everybody builds cages

Last year my parents veggie plot was getting terrorised so they bought one of those remote night cameras and it was a badger on a mission. I don’t know if it was worms or carrots they had a taste for but they turfed up every single one!

I think I was overly optimistic that covering weeds with a layer of cardboard then compost would kill them off and planted into that compost. Bindweed & Horsetail has gradually come through the cardboard as its broken down and now requires regular digging up as its between plants.

For second lot of beds, im going to just tarp it until next spring.

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We did the same, no bindweed but mares tail galore. Even through the double layer of weed membrane and 15cm of gravel I built the shed on...

I think the bindweed and horsetail was also much more established in the other beds that had cardboard as it turns out the area had not previously been cultivated at all...

I removed weed membrane on the walkway between the beds in the pic above as Im not a fan of weed membrane. As you say stuff still gets through and tears up the membrane and it becomes a matted mess, getting plastic everywhere.

I've probably spent 40hrs at the allotment since getting it a few months ago and not much to show for it!!

In 4yrs we’ve never really got on top of the bindweed, we just do all we can to pull it up when we see it. Now that we’re overall mostly on top of maintenance it’s not too much of a hardship to keep up with.
Covering over winter slows it down but it’ll never stop.

Convinced the woodchip/manure deliveries this year had weed seeds in as we’ve had a fast growing woody thing this year we’d never seen before.

Yeah Mare's Tail just survives under the tarp and pokes up where it can. It might even make the roots push deeper (total speculation). It is easy to pick off the surface stuff when you remove the tarp though.