Manchester Drive Allotment Society

Unfortunately my son was taken ill towards the end of 2009. He had a persistent digestive problem since birth, and in December it was discovered that he was having Hypoglycemic episodes. This culminated in a 4 month stay in hospital, which ended up with a probably diagnosis of being unable to digest fat. We are still working on this, and it will probably take many more trips to London for this to be confirmed. However, he is now much happier and healthy on his minimum fat diet. All of his food must be less than 0.5g of fat per 100g, or less than half of one percent fat.

The upshot of this was that the allotment was untouched from late November until June 2010. I apologise to everyone for the state that my plot managed to get itself into during that period, but I am hurriedly making amends. I will be taking a year out from growing in 2010 as it is now so late in the year, and will focus on getting the plot into a much more manageable state for next year. There are some minor engineering works that I want to undertake which should make my life much easier in the future. There will be a small number of crops grown, but there probably won't be many green plants to see throughout 2010.

My 2010 season started late - it was the beginning of June before I managed to get to the plot. A friend of mine came along with his generator and lawn mower, and I bought mine. We managed to cut most of the grass down, but only to the highest settings on the lawn mowers. They couldn't cope with chopping it any lower! I also decided that the blade on my mower was totally blunt. In fact the square face of the opposite side of the blade seemed sharper than the rounded cutting edge! Once sharpened, it cut the lawn at home beautifully. Back at the allotment a couple of weeks later and it was much easier to cut the grass! It did however take me two attempts and about 5 hours to cut all of the grass. That is my new record, and reinforced my desire to dig up more of the grass!

I have also cut down quite a lot of the weeds. You will see that there are many poppies all over the plot which I am leaving because I like poppies! They will be removed before the heads release their seeds! The weeds that were cut down are being used as a temporary mulch to try to stop more weeds from growing. The grass trimmings are also being used as a mulch, so although my plot may look quite messy there is a method to the madness. Please bear with me whilst I try to get it all back under control again!

The wire on the Blackberry fence snapped last year, and over the winter I found some much thicker wire at Altons. Whilst I was weeding / cutting the grass I found that I could not get to a large are around the blackberries without damaging the new shoots, so I decided to put up the new wire and tie the plants out of the way. 

The old wire was removed, and the new wire unwound. I attached a bolt to one end of the wire, and drilled holes right the way through the posts. The wire and bolt was attached at one end the wire was threaded through the centre post. A bolt was threaded through the post at the other end, and the wire stretched through the eye. I tightened the wire as much as I could (which was not a lot as the wire was so thick) before bending the wire slightly around the eye of the loose bolt. The end of the wire was cut leaving enough to fasten to the bolt. I was using formers at the bolt end to stop the wire from kinking. I attached the former to the bolt, and then used the bend in the wire to position it on the former. Once assembled the bolt was attached to the second post and tightened. I need to fit larger washers as it is looking like they will pull into the post quite easily. Once these have been fitted the bolts will be split and spread to stop the nuts from being removed.

Once the wire was up I could tie up the Blackberries. I cut out the thorny blackberries which are weeds where they are as my blackberries are thornless . With the Blackberries tied up and out of the way, I could finish cutting the grass and weeding the areas I could not reach before.

This is about where I am up to now, so all of my later blog posts will be what I am doing at that time.