Thursday, January 04, 2007

Deforestation


Dan's father gave us a bit of help weeding the new allotment, by cutting down a few trees.

There’s a dangerously large willow weed that Southwark Council have told us we can’t remove, because its roots are holding the hill together. But they let us take off all the branches, which was kind.

Dan spoke to an allotment holder who thought we should pretend we didn’t understand, and we should just cut it down anyway.

But that might be reckless. One of the old boys says that some years ago there was a mudslide here, and most people’s allotments ended up on the London to Brighton railway.

Amy and Dan expand


The allotment next to ours has been in a miserable state.

Each winter, an aspiring Monty Don was plucked from the allotment waiting list. Each spring, they purchased an exciting set of new tools. Each summer, the plot started to increasingly resemble a railway embankment. Each autumn, the committee informed the poor souls they were no longer welcome.

So the chaps on the committee have very kindly let us have some of it. Desperation, we think.

The people who abandoned the plot have got a point. The weeds are offensively successful – a mess of couch grass, brambles, bindweed, and a twenty foot poplar tree. The soil has no structure and no fertility, and any lump of it would perform particularly well on a pottery wheel.

But in spite of this, we have some more land. Huzzah
!

It's cold and dark


Perhaps sure you were thinking that our silence on this blog meant we’d either given up on the project or been killed, but we’re happy to announce that we’re quite alive and that our harvesting has been going much better than our blogging.

We had a good harvest, in spite of terrible weather. The tomatoes and fine beans did particularly well.

We didn’t enter our produce into the village show, because we ate the lot, and because we don’t live in a village, and because we’re not 85.

Next year, we’re planning to grow more than fifty varieties, including ridiculous things like chillis and aubergines which will never survive outdoors.