What allotment holders do when it rains

And rains, and rains and rains …

Well, some of us are honing our crime-scene skills like Garden Punks Chris and Katie who’ve been on the trail of a seed thief. Others are counting their seed potatoes or weeding out the couch grass.

We are trying to re-roof 201’s shed. Compared to the tiny shed on Duncan’s plot, 201’s shed is palatial: we’re calling it ‘The Swiss Chalet’ – but it don’t half leak! There are three reasons for this:

1 – the holes rubbed in the roofing felt by the branches of the pear tree means that the rain comes straight through the roof and drips down the rafters

2 – the blocked guttering and stolen water butt that mean a trickle of rain runs down the side of the shed and seeps mordantly into a puddle that then travels up the side of the shed by capillary action

3 – the eejits who nailed a batten to the shed roof, with three nails, meaning there are three routes via which miniscule amounts of water can sink through the roof and drip to the shed floor.

And a wet shed is a miserable thing. So we’ve spent the weekend trying to lay roofing felt in the driving rain, while getting our eyes (and other bits of anatomy) poked by sharp bits of pear tree. Which makes it all the more galling when you see that one of your neighbours is so far ahead of the game that they’ve dug over all their summer beds already … honestly, some people are just too organised for their own good!

Labels: allotment-autumn, allotment-beds, allotment-rain, allotment-shed

Rotten allotment tasks

Things I have discovered I hate doing:

Digging potatoes in the wet – I know we should have got them out of the ground when the weather was fine, but remember, strictly speaking they aren’t our potatoes: Duncan grew them and we felt he should have first dibs. Then the heavens opened and it doesn’t matter who dibs now, the spuds are lurking sullenly in clayey, gluey soil and are horrible to dig out. They have to be washed in a bucket of water before we take them home, where the first ones we dug could actually be laid out in the sun to toughen for a few hours before transporting home. If you can do that, they keep a lot better, but if you leave them in the sun for more than about eight hours they start to go green. Fat chance of that, this week!

Weeding in the wet – Yes, you can hoe, but if you have clay soil like us, even the sharpest hoe gets clogged with clay very quickly, so bucket number two (the one that doesn’t have potatoes in soak) has to be used to wash the clay off the hoe every few feet. Ugh.

And I hate not being able to get my storm kettle going ...

Labels: allotment-potatoes, allotment-rain, allotment-tasks-july, allotment-weeding