Allota love for the allotment

Several years ago, Paul put his name on the city registry to get an allotment -- a small parcel of land where we can grow vegetables. These waiting lists often take years. Last year we were both surprised that his name had come up and there was a 1/2 allotment plot waiting for us. The letter mysteriously said they would give us the second year free as "there was a lot of work to be done to repair the state of the plot."

When we first went to see the plot -- the entire 150 sq meter area was covered in 9 feet tall blackberry brambles. Here is a picture of Paul last autumn -- on our second attempt to cut down all the brambles -- at this point 1/2 of our plot was still covered.

Here is the same vantage point earlier this month -- after all the clearing had been done last year we went back to burn the dried out bramble remains this year. The large amount of rain we had in January and February had done their magic -- bringing us now an entire plot filled with grass.We came back just last week and pulled up some carpet that a former owner must have put down over 5 years ago. It was buried underneath a layer of dirt and many new grasses and plants, therefore pulling it up was hard work. Here is a picture of the pile of carpet we pulled up.

Here is the state of the entire plot from the same view as the above pictures -- note that you can now see the entire building behind the allotment...and.....and.....DIRT! Hooray!

We sprayed a bunch of round-up on the grasses and are heading back later this week to take a peek at how things are going. We have seed potatoes chitting (such an awesome word) in the window-sills at home right now. We will be planting those in the coming weeks.