This is a separate page just to log the progress over time and link to various posts so that you and indeed we, can see how we are getting on as such things get lost in the day to day posts.
Firstly follow this link to the London Road allotment website. This is a page showing the new drive being put in and shows what the area looked like before the drive was put in. We took on the plot while the drive was being finished. The gate into the first picture is where the drive now comes in and our plot is on the right in the bottom row of pictures.
October 2007
This shows the plot as it was when we took it on, just grass really, which is in many ways better than most which were covered in brambles before they were cleared. At this point we only had 2/3 of the area as it was divided into 3 small plots and we took two of them. I wasn’t until 2009 that we agreed to have the final bit to make it up to a full plot.
November 2007
This picture show the part of the plot we didn’t have to start with after it was plowed. We opted not to have our section plowed as I was pregnant and I wouldn’t have been able to walk on it. There are pros and cons to both. The unplowed section is quite compacted and hard to work but is mostly grass and we can dig out beds as we go along. The first year the plowed bit was so lumpy it would have been very hard to know where to start, however a year on it has settled down nicely and rotervated well giving us a nice area to put in potatoes and so on so all in all it worked out very nicely.. though it is growing a very good crop of docks everywhere we haven’t got to yet!
We got three fruit trees in and some fruit bushes and built one raised bed.
2008 was really a null year for us. Esther was pregnant and got SPD so badly she was pretty much house bound till the birth in March and then we had a very small baby, Sarah also had a baby three months later so it wasn’t until autumn that we did more than occasionally visit and cut the hedge a bit.
However at the end of 2008 and over the 2008/2009 winter we got back into things and built the greenhouse that had sat in bits on the plot all year, got a new shed, planted some new hedge, though we need much more now we have a longer boundary, rotervated the new part of the plot, built more raised beds, and so on.
This is what the plot looked like in March 2009
New area mostly dug over
Currently it is early May 2009 and while much of the plot is still rather wild we are bringing more and more of it into production and planning more long term.
