New Allotment: Old Weeds and Exhausted Strawberries

Yet another lovely experience shared by many an allotment holder who takes over a plot that’s been neglected for a while is the sad realisation that to preserve what you’ve got might be a harder task than starting from scratch.

Last autumn we built a strawberry bed on 235 from salvaged wood and planted it with strawberry runners offered by lovely neighbours. We lost two of those runners over the winter (one was dug up by the fox, no idea why) and replaced them in April with plants that are flowering beautifully. What the crop will be like in year 1 is anybody’s guess, but it’s very easy to hoe between the plants and maintain the raised bed.

Then we move to 201, where the strawberry bed is said to be productive and to have very tasty fruit (at least neighbour-but-one Tracey tells us she had a good crop off them last summer, which is good to know, it would be horrible if they’d been wasted!) but which was so overgrown that I despaired. Today, after two intensive weeding sessions, I still despair, but more of ever being able to stand straight again than of the strawberries.
Essentially, to try and rescue the bed, I’m having to hand-weed this enormous bed, pulling out clumps of grass from between the plants, cutting tangles of runners that have obviously run riot for five years or more, taking out all the diseased leaves (and a few plants) and trying to get a bit of nourishment into the soil for this year.

I shall then take this year’s runners and stick them in pots over the winter, so that they can establish a root system before cutting them from the parent plant next spring, and then create a whole new bed somewhere else on the allotment where the soil is less exhausted.
And of course, the dear strawberries haven’t stayed in their bed – runners have travelled several yards away from their original home and even crossed the path and rooted on the other side of the plot!

Still, strawberries are worth it, aren’t they?

Labels: allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-strawberries, allotment-strawberry-bed

Great big cold frames …

… and what they cost to renovate.

We inherited this when we ‘moved in’ to 201. And, next to our ‘Swiss Chalet’ shed, it’s been our favourite new toy. A cold frame – lovely!


We’re still not entirely sure what we’re going to do with it because we’ve never had one before. But we knew what we had to do to it, if you take my meaning.

It had to be painted, well repainted. The lids had to be rehung but before that, they had to be repaired and the glass had to be cleaned. There should have been a central strut supporting the cold frame but there wasn’t so it had bowed both back to front, side to side and (annoyingly) both ends to middle. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye but when you tried to level it to the soil, you couldn’t, nothing was quite square, or true or flat.

By this time, I was starting to think our new toy was a blithering nuisance. So on Sunday, while I weeded the strawberry bed, Tony spent: the whole day, a tin of paint, several metres of weed-suppressing membrane and a couple of bags of gravel, creating this.



Much better. Now we only have to finish the lids and we’ll have a cold frame to be proud of.

But we’ve still got no idea what to do with it …

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-renovation, allotment-strawberry-bed