Monday 14 April 2014

Gardening bliss

 

 is what I experienced when the first really warm week hit us in the beginning of March. The warm weather then promptly disappeared, as you might expect at our latitudes. I went on work with this untidy bush (picture from the last summer):


and turned it into this:


Better suited for a small yard and giving some space for my beloved herbs.

I moved here from a far bigger garden and took me a selection of perennials and some herbs as you can see from the sea of pots. 


We also got ourselves on the Allotment Society waiting list. People we know waited a bit over a year when they got theirs, so I was thinking that if I was as lucky, we would get one in the back of this coming summer. Surprisingly, the gardening stars aligned for us and we got our allotment on Sunday!

The allotment has some weeds, but I would say that it is in an easy category. The soil is beautiful, totally different kettle of fish from my old garden. I had a feel of it and saw some over wintered root veg and it is promising great yields!

The neighbour allotmenteer, whose nephew had ours, cleaned it for handover in January.


The people who it was offered to obviously didn't turn up, so we got it! (We must have been next ones on the list). By the way, the neighbour is a really lovely, retired gent, who immediately offered his gardening tools for our use, while he is not there using them. He also showed us around in his sheds and in his heated green house, where the tomato plants were almost a foot tall already! You can see his tidy allotment on the left side of the path.

There is an amount of junk, which we need to get rid of. Amongst it a corrugated roofing sheet made of asbestos, which needs to be collected by the council. On the other hand there is a little potting shed cum green house:


All the allotment pictures are Elf Husband's. He also took one from the alley in the allotment. It looks like a shanty town and today someone was burning wood somewhere, so both visual and olfactory inputs lead us directly back to Africa. We share a gate with our neighbour allotmenteer. If you are not from the UK, this is how allotments often look like here; they are very much make do with what you can get for free or very cheaply.



2 comments:

Josie said...

Congratulations on getting the allotment, nothing beats 'home grown' veg. You have also done a fantastic job on the yard, it now looks a gorgeous place to sit on a sunny day. Finally, I really, really, love your new tiles!

Mama Elf said...

Thanks Josie! We had an "allotment" in our old garden, so I am familiar to growing veg, I just thought that this would be the season I might not have one.

The bathroom is coming on and is the first priority just now, but next week, oh next week, I am going mad on digging!