Page 58 - ALG Issue 1 2017

South West
Our First Year
as Allotmenteers
I wonder if this can be called a beginners guide or the rst year of a beginner.
Let’s talk about the huge boots (he was
a size 13!) I had to ll when I took on an allotment. My grandad was a landscape gardener by trade and had an allotment at Turners for over 50 years. He was known by many and had the reputation of being at the very top of his game! I wish I could remember spending more time down there when I was really young, but I can’t. My earliest memories are probably late teens. In my earlier teens I used to pick the runner beans and sell them to the local butcher and I could keep the money but I don’t think that involved any work. My rst real memory was the potatoes
we grew together. One was a white and purple variety, the purple parts making me think they’d had it, until I was told that was just the skin, but the others were Desiree. Wow, these potatoes really roasted well and it seemed like we had them for weeks and weeks.
I always promised grandad that I would keep his tools and more than anything, keep the merry tiller super major going. I always seemed to be running it. Grandad never did things by halves and we used to run this little rotavator on six slashers (three each side). We had a titan that we used to ridge up the previously mentioned potatoes with wheels instead of slashers and a plough instead
of the depth skid. There was also a huge Howard but I couldn’t get on with it as I was always tipping it up.
Nearly 10 years had gone by since grandad had passed when my wife, Kristy, and I decided we would like to have an allotment. We were going to go somewhere else until a friend of Kristy’s took on a plot at Turners and it seemed right to go back.
I contacted the secretary and she asked about my gardening experience. I mentioned my grandad and low and behold, she knew him. Not only that, she also used to work with my mum. Small world some may think; with regards to my mum, I would say yes, but grandad must have been known by everyone!
Patsy offered us a plot fairly quickly but
told us that it needed a lot of work as it belonged to someone who had not been able to cultivate it for a little while, then someone else took it on and did nothing. We wanted
the challenge though, a fresh start with it all. When we went down to look at it, coming through the gate, I met someone else I knew, a school friend of my dad’s. Now it was getting really weird!
The plot was high grass and had a lot
of brambles. We had a fruit tree; Patsy introduced it as a cul de chien (dogs’ posteriors in French!) which was an old English medlar and we also had a couple of globe artichokes. We said we would have
it and Patsy left us to look around. Kristy called me over to the brambles as she could see something in them but couldn’t make it out. It turned out to be a
spade, fork, rake, watering
can and soil sieve! What
a start!
round up would be bene cial to clear a plot but as this was mid-winter and too damp, we carried on doing what we could.
A shed was important to us, more for shelter and a resting place than anything else. This was just a DIY store cheapy (and poorly cut in places!) but it did what we wanted it to do. This was laid on slabs at one end and really started to make the hard work seem to be going somewhere.
Finally in mid-March, we used weedkiller on the whole plot and left it alone for a fortnight, and when we went back, it had been transformed. All those weeds were
brown and dried out. We decided to start digging
it over by hand before rotavating. ‘Come over here it’s got a tongue’
was something Kristy shouted one day. It turned out to be a slow worm, something that I had never seen before. It was funny how calm Kristy was with
it. At least we had some form of pest control. The rotavator was dragged out of the shed, but although, with a replacement
spark plug, it would re, but it wouldn’t run. It needed a service as it had been standing for those 10 years and advice from Allan pointed to a perished diaphragm.
The day we took the rotavator was when I felt that I had kept that promise to grandad. Although it went well, for some reason, I had two left hand rotors so it went along at a bit of an angle. After two hours it broke down. We couldn’t understand it so I went home
We decided to do
a full day and get the
edges cut in so we could
actually see where the
plot was as there was a
2ft path between ours
and our neighbours. I got
hold of some pallets and batten and made a compost heap and we also did a lot of cutting back. Before we made a start that day, we went down to see Allan, grandad’s allotment mate who I had also kept in touch with. He has taken on grandad’s shed and had named it ‘Albert’s retreat’. It still had two of the three padlocks on it that we
had, the same steel door...Yes, grandad was not doing things by halves again. This thing could survive a nuclear apocalypse. Allan had made it his as well though, adding things that grandad would be more than proud of.
Slowly the plot came along, clearing gradually and
turning what
small areas we had into clear soil. Some advice from books was that
We decided to do a full day and get the edges cut in so we could actually see where the plot was
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