Just had good news!

After being on the waiting list almost 12 months we have just had the news that we have been successful in getting an allotment. It's on a colony in Chester and we are lucky as there is already a shed on the site and it's not too badly overgrown. There are mixed feelings of excitement and trepidation as we consider where this will take us in the future. My major concern at the moment is our 16 month old daughter and making the site safe and enjoyable for her but I'm also excited at the prosepect of the many educational benefits of gardening and the eventual prospect of serving up healthy home grown fruit and veg to her. We had the news confirmed on New Year's Eve which is rather ironic as we embark on this new project for the New Year, tomorrow my husband will go at 9am to the council offices to sign the tenancy agreement and then it's all ours.

We are relative beginners to all this but we have made some plans and I suppose that the test year will always be a trying one, in fact we don't hope to have the plot fully furnished for at least 5 years and it will always be a work in progress I suspose. We have read around on the subject and I can highly recommend the book, 'How to Plant your Allotment' by Caroline Foley, it is a great introduction and has many ideas to mix and match. We have an ambitious range of fruit and veg we are hoping to grow but we don't expect to do it all at once. In the first year we are hoping to get four 4ft raised beds going to contain the families potatoes, legumes, brassicas and roots, these will then be rotated around to help confuse pests and reduce soil bourne disease. Sounds good in theory doesn't it? I just hope it translates ok when we actually get on the ground. I'm also quite keen to grow some asparagus as I just love the taste of it and it can be expensive to shop for.

I have practically no experience of gardening, 2 out of the 3 houses I have lived in since being married including the present one have had no garden only a small yard, the middle house had a large garden but we were renting and it was fully laid to lawn so all my husband did was cut the grass in the summer months. Having said that I have happy memories of a time when my brother and I as children had a small section of my Grandfather's veg plot which took up most of his large back garden and we spent many happy times there planting seeds, watering and eating delicious fresh peas straight out of the pods. If we were having a salad when visiting he would go and pick the produce fresh and within an hour it would be served up usually with some fresh salmon or some sandwiches on hearty bread and followed by tinned peaches and evaporated milk, that was the life eh? Alright so perhaps this is a fairly romanticised view but I loved that garden the rich smell of tomatoes in his greenhouse and the onions strung up and drying in the shed it was an important and unforgettable part of my childhood. My husband has slightly more experience of gardening and has grown veg before, we have even tried growing veg in pots in our small back yard in the middle of a city whilst waiting for an allotment site to become vacant. This year we have successfully grown, all in pots, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce leaves and the herb chives, utilising a small cold frame in the back yard and our sunny windowsill, before allowing them to be exposed to the elements and grow outside in the weather but in the shelter of a walled back yard. Thinking about this seems so simple now compared with taking on an allotment which as I think now I recall being rather huge. It seems a rather overbearing task.

This blog is a way for me to chart our progress, we are growing for the future in so many ways with our family and friends in our jobs and our community and now with our fruit and vegetable on our new allotment site. Tomorrow we'll visit for the first time as official tenants of Plot 3, our only plan is to mark our boundries with short stakes and garden twine and to padlock the shed and re-attach the perspex windows, we can then assess fully what work needs to be done as we go forward.