What Next At Allotment?

I took a break from language testing work yesterday afternoon to get a couple of hours in at the allotment, and finished clearing the subterranean bricks from the far north east edge. The plan down there is to gradually work my way up through the NE bed, chopping down the phacelia and weeds for compost, digging the rest in, (hoping there are no perennials amongst the weeds, which mostly consist of a sorrel or small dock-like plant which I can't identify).

However, half of the plot's eastern boundary is a double row of fruit bushes, growing on a slight raise in the bed. They've not been properly pruned in years. When I started back in June, the first job was to get all the nettles out from amongst the fruit bushes, and cut back the absurdly overgrown bushes, (losing out on this year's fruit harvest). Now the plan is to cut them all (and that includes coppicing the cherry tree, which is part of the back row of fruit bushes) down to the quick, in the hope that it'll rejuvenate them.

The back row will form the back bone of the hedge down that side. The front row I'll replant along other parts of the hedgerow boundary. So, what with chopping down, digging over, pruning, digging out, planting, and levelling, bloody hell, we're probably looking at 20-30 hours work on the NE bed. Which, with the short days making weekdays increasingly impractical, means I'll probably be at it until Christmas. But then, I'll have two biggish beds ready for next year, the whole northern end of the plot.

There's still an awful lot of jobs to be done at the other end: the Old Greenhouse Foundations, the path, the pond, the shed, the poly tunnel, the midden... But they might have to wait until January. Still on schedule to be fully reanimated by, say, April or May.

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