Fork it ... a Gloucester allotment: Housework at the allotment

So, the story so far...we took over a completley overgrown patch of an overgrown field and laughingly reffered to it as 'our allotment' and had very nice dreams of how we'd turn it into a productive allotment in no time at all. That was November of last year (06) and amazingly we're not doing to badly even though the reality of what we'd taken on hit us very hard after about 5 hours of strimming couch grass!!

So here we are nearly 9 months later (some people create humans in that length of time!!) and we decided that we had got to the time of year where we can relax with the tending of plants and do a little bit of housework by tidying up the plot a bit and continuing our journey in making it look like a proper allotment and not just a field with veg growing in!

Everyone knows that to be a proper gardener/allotment keeper you must create great steaming mounds of compost and also have an area for fresh horse muck to rot down before it is spread around. In true lottie style I had built up my collection of very useful bits of wood, old doors and bits of old tin sheeting.
So, D and I decided to build a compost bay towards the back of the plot, it's made from 2 old doors (the fanlight can be seen on the back one!) and it consists of 2 bays so that when one side fills up the other side can be started leaving the first one in peace to rot down into wonderful rich compost. It's a great feeling to be more organised and it's starting to look more like the sort of allotment that you see from train windows!

Compost bins made from doors

Next we decided to make the 'muck bin', this is made from 3 sheets of old metal (old shelves I think) that I found lurking at the back of my garden when we moved in.

We've dug a new bed out of the grass to continue the flower bed area so that come next summer we should have loads of flowers to be able to cut for the house. In the corner of this bed we've put the said muck bin which is right next to the track so we can easily dump muck when we drive in. I've just been told of a riding school locally that allows you to collect as much muck as you want for free, looks like we have a trip planned!! (much to D's horror!)