More eviction bits

Great article in the Telegraph about a poor chap evicted from his plot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/rowanpelling/5389415/Theres-more-fun-to-be-had-on-an-allotment-than-gardening.html

Here's the original article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5387934/Gardener-evicted-from-allotment-for-not-growing-enough-vegetables.htm

A quickie picture update as well...

Here's a quick picture update as well. If you look really closely you can see the effect of the weed killer (look at the path in front of the potatos).

Still here

Well, the eviction notices have gone out, and we don't seem to have got one, so we're still here! Quite a few of our friends had 'the letter' over the years, and they are mostly pretty bitter about how it's been done. It's call Leisure Garderning. It's supposed to be fun! We don't want to have it ruined by not coming up the the same standards as those who spend their entire lives at the allotments. So long as we grow things then surely that's fine?

So, talking of growing things, we got the squashes in (the summer ones anyway), a couple more artichokes, a few peas and beans. They all seem to have survived the first few days, which is good. 

I've ordered a bunch of stuff from the Real Seed Company again after the success of their peas (all the seed I collected last year has grown. 

Weedkiller

Well, we've decided we are going to have to use weedkiller to keep the committee happy. We found a few stories around the net that resonated, like this one:

http://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/free/Good-Life-dream-goes-rotten.4042781.jp

and this one made me smile!

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/house-and-home/gardening/urban-gardener-organics-anonymous-888019.html.

Basically, its seems allotment committees expect semi-industrial style ground utilisation, and want your plot to be excessively tidy. To be honest, I don't really understand this - nature isn't tidy. Their advice on the couch grass is to keep digging it, but this is just making it worse (our plot was in a seriously bad way when we took it on).

So, there it is, I've spayed some weed killer on the worst areas.  

I've also had to remove my path that I was making out of recycle bits - stone, dries organic matter etc, as apparently it was just considered 'rubbish' on the plot.

We'll see what happens next I guess. Hopefully the weedkiller is a one-off appeasement act - the plot really needs to be covered for a long time to do it naturally, but I'm not going to get away with this.

Most of my friends haver also had 'The Letter' at some point - it's not very pleasant, and really should be done a different way.