The big allotment party!

Two days, five people and a healthy selection of petrol-driven machinery and we went from this overgrown and frankly daunting plot of land...

to this freshly dug, flat and (almost) weed free plot!

It felt like a long time coming, but the allotment party officially kicked off last weekend with two days of full on hard graft and thankfully two days of beautfully warm late summer sunshine. In the first couple of hours, whilst Mum and I went off to buy provisions for the weekend, the boys got stuck in and managed to chop down and burn the brambles. By the time Mum and I got back to the site, it looked like this...

This was the first time that we'd properly seen the full size of the plot and just having everything chopped back felt like a massive leap forward. James made a start on digging out the huge roots with a pick axe - exhausting but incredibly rewarding when a root this size comes out!

Along with feeding everyone snacks, juice and hot drinks I made a start on raking up all of the loose branches, grass and general debris for the bonfire. Andy got stuck into the 8 foot high brambles directly behind our plot with Mum and Nick dragging all of the loose branches away and onto the bonfire...

They say an army marches on its stomach, and any allotment clearing party worth its brambles needs a camp kitchen to feed the troops. With a roll of carpet, a wooden pallet and a paper tablecloth we had ourselves a fully functioning refreshment area!

We made good use of the bonfire too - I can honestly say that potatoes baked in bonfire embers are the tastiest I have had in a long time!

After lunch and half a day of James and Nick digging out as many big roots as they could find and generally starting to fork over the soil - it was time to rotavate!

If, like us, you've never actually seen a rotavator in action I can only describe it as comical. A rotavator is the bucking bronco of the gardening world. Its a fairly powerful bit of kit with a mind of its own on compacted earth, and watching someone hanging on to the handles for dear life whilst trying to keep it going in the right direction is just hilarious. We all had to have a go of course...

By the afternoon of day one we had all pretty much worked out who was doing what and it was an industrious group effort of digging, raking and rotavating...

By the end of day one over a third of the plot had been dug over and we all felt like we'd made a massive amount of progress. Exhausted and grubby we trooped home for a bath, pizza and a well earned glass of something!

Day two and our little group had become a well-oiled ground clearing machine... a new and more impressive camp kitchen complete with gazebo was set up in the newly cleared area behind our site and along side continuing work on our plot, the communal alleyway into the site was also cut back so that we wouldn't have to keep ducking and swerving around sharp branches trying to get to the site gate.

More digging, raking and rotavating and the remainder of the plot was getting cleared and dug over pretty quickly...

By the afternoon of day two, almost all of the plot had been dug over... the rotavator decided to go on strike towards the end leaving a small patch of ground to be dug by hand. Having to do an area by hand really did show us just how much easier it is when you have petrol-driven machinery to help you! Obviously there are lots of pieces of root to be collected and thrown on the bonfire... the price you pay for rotavating, however with a plot this size I don't see that we could have done it all by hand!

Taking on an overgrown, neglected plot is a pretty massive project and having this help really has moved things forward, probably a couple years forward, than if the two of us had tried to clear it by hand. Needless to say we are eternally grateful to Mum, Andy and Nick for offering to travel all the way to London (involving trains, ferry boats and automobiles) and help us out in this way. Some of the things we have learned in the process of clearing the plot so far are...

- Even with a rotavator, there is still a huge amount of back-breaking work in digging out roots and forking over the soil to be done before you can let loose with the machinery

- If you decide to use a rotavator, you have to be willing and prepared to spend quite a lot of time picking out broken bits of roots from the soil - it is however strangely therapeutic

- There is a huge amount of rubbish hiding amongst the weeds of an overgrown plot... highlights of stuff we discovered included a pushchair, a curtain pole, old paint cans and a metal chandelier

- A polesaw is the ideal tool for chopping through brambles

- Potatoes baked for a couple of hours in fire embers are fantastic for lunch : )

  

I've pretty much worked out how the plot is going to be laid out, with four veg beds, a long bed for permanent soft fruit bushes, herb patch and compost/work area. The veg beds have been paced out and marked with pegs and strings and just doing this makes it feel like the beginning of a real plot...

 

The beds will be sown with hungarian grazing rye green manure over the winter and dug into the ground in spring and we will continue clearing roots and weeding. Now I just can't wait for next year when we can start growing our first crops! Some serious planning needs to be done...