Communion Gravel... the truth (read Blog below first)

Communion Gravel, what the hell am i going on about, who knows, maybe Communal Gravel might have been the correct word, i don't know i went to school in the 80s

enough said.

I apologise for this brief 3rd blog, communion gravel.. bloody hell, d'oh

Green Fingers and dirty knees....

And we go on, part 2 of my blog and i thought I'd update you with all the work we have done. Thankfully, after a few days of heavy rain, we managed to get a dry spell so we could get back on track.  

We decided to use a weed killer to get rid of the weed on the allotment, and did some research and found Weedol was the best and safest weed killer around 

Weedol available in all good gardening shops and some bad ones too

It was a pretty effective weed killer, within days you could see the change in the colour of the weeds, we would recommend it, if your looking for some for your plot. So with the weed killer set to work the next plan is to get the shed up, we marked out the area at the back of the plot to put the shed up and started to dig out the area, fortunately it wasn't to cluttered, which was good as it only needed digging and flattening. with the help of some communion gravel, and some of the larger stones, it was quickly prepared. 

Space for the Shed

The shed arrives on Saturday afternoon, so hopefully it will be up and full of our stuff by the end of the weekend. I've (Scott) been spending my time digging up tree stumps, now i don't know if anyone out there has good experience of this but they're right awkward little buggers. Three and a half hours to get one out on Thursday, i dug, i sawed, i didn't conker. eventually after digging deep all around it and making sure i got all the soil from between the roots, i managed to saw it in half, its only then i got any good movement from it and eventually managed to lift it from the ground in two pieces, anyone know how this can be done easier without help of mechanical aids, I'd greatly appreciate the advice. 

Liz is the brains behind the organisation, its really her passion that's got this off the ground and she's way ahead of me in terms of knowing what she's doing, she's planned where the beds and paths will be, what needs doing to get them there and what we will be growing. She's been doing everything, last weekend she did so much work, clearing, setting out paths, completing shed space, motivating the kids to help etc, whilst i did nowt as i was struggling with a cold. Its beginning to look like a working piece of land now, rather than the dumping ground it was. 

Have we done any work

Although looking at this picture you might disagree with my last statement, so what next, well hopefully we will get a full weekend on the plot, when your both working full time, its hard to get up there, but I'll hopefully do some more digging on Friday whilst we will continue clearing over the weekend hoping we will be ready to rotovate  the whole plot in late October. 

i dream of being able to wear jackets like that

As you can tell I'm no Alan Titchmarch from the lack of technical knowledge in this blog, its gonna have to be in layman terms, as I'm totally new to this and Liz is the boss. Anyhow i will bore you no longer, if you've read this and over 200 read part 1, so someone is, thank you, all advice welcome, cheers.

So allotment, easy eh, own food on tap, just sit there and let nature take its course, if only.
Welcome to our blog, My name is Scott and my wife is Liz, we live in Hadfield in the Peak District, with our two kids Sophie and Mathew. 

We always fancied the idea of growing our own food, but sadly our lovely home doesn't have the garden to help us live our dreams, so in 2010 Liz joined a scheme in the town called "Dig Hadfield",a group formed by like-minded people to find suitable land for allotments. In mid 2011, the land had been found. A piece of wasteland on Salisbury St, owned by a Quaker gentleman who didn't want the land built on, so Dig Hadfield benefited with a 20 year lease.

Our plot is good and bad in equal measure, its good because its a total of 110 sq metres, in a great position with views over the Peak District. BUT and its a big but for now, the plot we have is probably the worst in terms of it needing clearing

Picture shows where we are right now, we have spent about 10 hours in total on site and it doesn't look like we have got very far. First thing we decided to do was cut back the hedge at the back and try and level the land at the back of the allotment so we could get our shed in and assembled so we didn't have to carry our tools up from home everyday. We were lucky that as we began to clear the back of the space, we discovered a path way made of stone slabs about 5cms under the surface. 

Its look not a lot but i promise a lot of work has gone into it, I'll go into more details another time, but look at the pictures now and look again over the next few week and I'll keep you posted on how we approach things and maybe anyone reading can pass on there experience, like how i get a large tree stump out the ground, that's Thursdays job. 

Liz and sophie ready to go home for tea. 
When i've got more time, (in a few days, i'll give more detail of where we are up too, what we are using and what we are going to do next. 

I make no apologies for my bobbins use of the english language, i blame thatcher (thats my first and last political comment)