The Allotment and Garden Year: November 2018

Saturday, 10 November 2018

10th November

Well, things are pretty slow in the garden now, and also pretty wet. We have had some serious rain with some local flooding that has caused a nearby crossroads to be closed after a car became stuck in the water. I was diverted coming home by the police and fire brigade who were there to rescue the car. This sounds huge but I could still see the car's tyres so it wasn’t like the real floods you see on the news.

My brother-in-law has taken out some fir trees in his garden and is trying to clear soil away and a few weeks ago he left 10 bags of soil for me which I took down the allotment where they are still sitting. Last week, my wife passed a local house outside of which are a fair number of bags of soil with ‘free garden soil’ written on each. Last Friday I took 2 bags – it was all I had space for, but today I took 4, and I will have more space tomorrow. So the allotment looks like a building site – various bits of wood and plastic sacks, and not much of use growing except spinach and some leeks which are still small.

Some allotmenteers are hanging up their gloves for the year!

I came across a sign for a local reclamation firm that was advertising railway sleepers so I phoned them to see if they sold scaffolding planks – the ideal raised border fencing. They did! The cost is £10 for a 10 foot plank. I was keen to get to the allotment and measure the width of the plot – 20 feet. So for 9 sections I would need 36 planks – two each side of each section, bringing the cost to £360 and that would be just for the long sides of each section, not the end pieces. So my hopes raised and dashed once more. I was foolishly thinking I could do this for around £60, silly me.

What I have done is planted the new bag of 10 purple tulips in the back garden, and harvested a couple of handfuls of carrots from the tub.

Next post: 15th November