My love affair with the allotment is at a low ebb at the moment. Those "lazy hazy crazy days of summer," when I will be munching fresh sweet peas, crunching crisp salad leaves and salivating over strawberries seem but a cruelly teasing mirage. Have you ever started on a task and then wished you had left it well alone? Well that has been the case at the allotment during this last week. When I took on the allotment five years ago I inherited some undesirable and unwanted features which I have slowly been working our way round with some much appreciated assistance from the muscle that is himself. The boundary fence has been replaced, the raised beds have been renewed and the layers and layers of carpet have been removed. There remained a couple of tasks for this year. One of them is to completely empty the shed. I think that I am wary of doing this because there are bound to be gigantic spiders or worse lurking in the inner depths. The former occupant's taste in interior design is not mine but I have been reluctant to remove his Liverpool Football Club memorabilia and do not have the heart to paint over the names of his grandchildren, which are written above the doorway leading into the lean-to/semi greenhouse. So up to now I have sorted through cupboard and shelves but have still to sort out the underneath clutter. At some stage though this summer though there will be a grand chucking out and brushing down.
The other task this year was to remove the gigantic slowly rotting wooden cold frame with its impossibly heavy lights, freeing up more growing space in doing so. Last weekend himself was in a demolition mood and having enlisted his help for the morning I could not stand in the way of so called progress. Within an hour the cold frame was reduced to smithereens which for the main part fitted nicely into our trailer for a journey to the municipal tip. What I have been left with though is a veritable crater full of grotty bits and pieces including a myriad of shredded bits of plastic. To add insult to injury himself emptied out the contents of a big bucket onto the ground sending rusty nails, nuts and bolts, old light bulbs, door knobs and other unidentified objects scattering out out in all directions. So this last week has seen me crouched on my haunches picking up the bucket's contents as well as riddling through the general debris. This is a work in progress and I will be there for some time longer before the space will be clean enough to add some top soil. Meanwhile the allotment inspections looms omniously near on the horizon and of course my plot would have looked better with the cold frame intact. Urgent cosmetic surgery is on the cards. In the meantime I am consoling myself that I read on this week on Carrots and Kids that rusty nails can be a beneficial addition to the planting hole when you are planting blueberries. I just happen to have six blueberry plants rescued from the cheap and cheerful section of the garden centre waiting to go in.
In the meantime if you are wondering where the brunnera comes into the story, I could not bring myself to photograph the hole so will leave you with an image of what has been bringing a smile to my face on my return home after stints at the allotment.
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