Introducing.......Plot 51b

As promised a couple of weeks ago, an update on where I am with the 'new' half plot. You can see what it looked like when TK and me took it on a couple of years ago here. I guess I really started working on it last summer. I had previously tackled an area at the top end of the plot with the vague notion of having a polytunnel. One of the storms put paid to that notion when I saw another one on the site flattened for the second time....our allotment site is on the edge of town with farmland bordering on two sides so it's very open and the wind really races through when it blows!

As the plot was in quite a poor state, the worst weed to deal with has been couch grass and really the best way of dealing with this is to literally remove every root; and when every spadeful you dig up is just a mass of couch grass root system, you know it's going to take a while to make sense of a plot. Before long though I'd dug one bed which equated to about a quarter of the plot. I decided this would be a bed for currant bushes as I loved a blackcurrant cordial I'd made from the berries from my father's garden.

Blackcurrant bed

One bush was inherited on the plot but needed relocating for a second time; this time I made sure I cleared the rootball completely, When we had moved it the first time, in our innocence we just dug it up and replanted it with the result that the poor bush was being smothered by grasses.

A purchase of a proper bush, Ben Nevis, from the now defunct Edible Garden Show, a bargain buy of another variety called Ben Ojebyn and cuttings which had rooted filled the bed nicely. I just need to create some kind of fruit cage to protect them now!

Next job was to try and limit the out of control raspberries to one section, so I've made a bed in the middle of the plot so that I can contain them more. There does seem to be a rogue plant in the bed which I think is a thornless blackberry. It has flower buds forming for the first time this year so hopefully we'll know more soon!

The raspberry bed with the possible thornless blackberry in the foreground

There will be a flower bed but this area is pretty much overgrown still. I did cover it with cardboard to keep the weeds down, but many of them have grown through it as it breaks down.....

At the top of the plot is the lovely shed we inherited from another plotholder. The area next to it is where a couple of fruit trees will go together with the thornless blackberry. The plan is to train it as a cordon along wires between two fence posts. I'm in the process of creating this area at the moment. I'm also planning on erecting that short length of chestnut paling between two of the posts to act as a wind break of sorts. One of the fruit trees is a small pear tree called Little Sweetie from Blackmoor Nursery. It won't ever get bigger than 5ft odd and as it blossoms so much earlier, I figured the more protection I can give it on our open site the better. The other fruit tree is a Victoria Plum, also from Blackmoor. Thank you Santa!

So still very much a work in progress (aren't all allotments?!) but it's starting to take shape.

Plot 51b - April 2017