Site Preparation

Hot and Bothered

October 2, 2011
Hot and Bothered

I haven’t been down to the plot since the great leek disaster but this morning my electronic to-do list beeped to inform that it would soon be time to plant broad beans so we gathered our sun screen and headed off into the heatwave to prepare a bed. Here’s the M1 Gardener basking in the [...]

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Putting Down Roots

October 17, 2010
Putting Down Roots

I must feel settled here. I spent the afternoon preparing a permanent bed, with manure, trenches and finely sieved soil, all for a crop that won’t be harvested for about 4 years. It’s an incredibly high maintenance crop, at least at the outset, and it only produces edible shoots for a couple of weeks. Hardly [...]

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M1 Gardener

May 19, 2010
M1 Gardener

We were on the plot by 10:30 ready for a full days labour. I collected one of the communal petrol lawn mowers on the way in and then wasted 30 mins wrenching every muscle in my shoulder trying to get it started. I managed to get it going long enough to shave a wonky line [...]

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Transferring the Peach in Severe Adverse Weather

December 21, 2009
Transferring the Peach in Severe Adverse Weather

While Lynn snuck out of bed to source cups of tea and toast, I churned out image after image of Gripple circuitry. I’d woken with a plan in my head and as an ever ready kind of a Scout, I just happen to keep a pad of grid paper by the bed for this sort [...]

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A Stormy Kind of Calm

November 16, 2009
A Stormy Kind of Calm

A post storm reccy revealed that the wind had completely denuded the shed of its patchy roofing felt. With only 15 mins allocated for the plot visit there was never going to be time enough for a full repair job. A shed related edginess cast it’s shadow over our corner of the site as a [...]

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Secret Stash

October 21, 2009
Secret Stash

We decided to show mercy to our remaining forks by building raised beds in the concrete zone and filling them with the soft crumbly mound of compost piled high in the Clampett’s yard section of the plot. Lynn spent the best part of two days trying to clear this area of unmentionable cruddiness. Hundreds of [...]

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Fork Graveyard

October 4, 2009
Fork Graveyard

It was our first weekend on the plot. As I arrived I plunged my fork into the ground, Scott of the Antarctic stylee. It twanged as it hit the surface, bounced back 2 metres and propagated an agonising wave up my arm. I started hopping around, whining about stress fractures and the general impossibleness of [...]

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Two Plot Family

September 29, 2009
Two Plot Family

We went to examine a vacant plot last week and came away having signed on the dotted line. I see before me a winter of heavy digging in an attempt to tame yet another South West London allotment. It’s only two years ago that I took over the plot at North Sheen. That plot was [...]

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