Cheap, simple allotment paths

We finally got round to starting to lay some paths last week, and it makes arriving at the plot so much more pleasant! After much uhming and aahing, we decided to go for wood/bark chip paths on the allotment. We have such a terrible problem with marestail that we needed paths that consisted of several layers to try and stop anything getting through. Our heavy-duty weed membrane has proven to be no match for the ever-tough marestail, and the nasty green spears were popping up all over the covered parts of our plot all summer and spring.

We certainly didn't want to spend too much cash putting down allotment paths, so tried to keep it cheap and simple. The photos below show the beginnings of the main path down the side of the plot last week. We've done a fair bit more since these pictures but forgot to take photos at the weekend. 

First, we cleared as many of the weeds as possible. Some parts of the plot have been covered with thick weed membrane since last summer, and we've been pulling up the marestail as it pokes through wherever possible, so some of the path areas weren't too bad. Next, we laid down a couple of layers of thick cardboard, hoping this would provide another barrier against the weeds. It will also rot down over time into the soil. On top of the cardboard we added heavy-duty weed membrane, which we pegged down on either side at intervals of about one metre. Next, we heaped on mounds of wood chippings and bark chippings. We got a lot of chippings free as the council had recently delivered a truckload to the allotment. We also bought some very cheap chippings from Asda, Home Bargains and Wilko, and will continue to snap up any we see on offer in the end of season sales! We'll obviously need a huge amount to cover all our planned allotment paths, but we're not in any huge rush so will continue to grab the free council chippings whenever they're delivered.

Finally, we have started laying paving slabs on top of the chippings. We've got a fair few slabs scattered around the plot and thought we'd try them out for this purpose. 

We've had very limited time down at the plot this summer as we both work full-time and this year has been horribly stressful due to family illnesses, bereavements and a number of other things that have taken up all our weekends and energy. It's so nice to see small signs of progress on the allotment though, and we're excited to get some more paths finished over the autumn!

I'm looking forward to seeing how the paths fare against the marestail next spring - fingers crossed it can keep the stuff under control!

Dismantling the broken greenhouse...after we find it

When we took on our allotment 22, there was a smashed greenhouse at one end, near the entrance. We made a brief attempt to clear it last year but we had so many other tasks to do that this one kind of fell by the wayside. We finally set aside a whole day to work on this area last week and managed to not only dismantle the metal frame and clear up lots of smashed glass, but also unearth a pretty sturdy looking brick base.

The marestail (OBVIOUSLY) had taken over the whole area, along with long grasses, brambles and bindweed. For want of a more refined technique, we simply hacked away at the weeds with a pair of garden shears. This at least allowed us to see bits of the greenhouse frame poking out from the greenery. We worked section by section, trying to take apart the frame as we came across new parts. The metal was pretty twisted in places and a lot of the bolts and screws were no longer usable so we ended up pulling most of it apart rather than using any tools.

There's a greenhouse under there somewhere...

It took most of the day to clear the greenhouse and part of the surrounding area but it's made a huge difference. Now when you're working on the plot, you can look up and see other plots and people walking by rather than just a 5-foot high wall of marestail!

Partway through

Unearthing parts of the greenhouse frame...

...and lots of old gloves, trays and rusty tools

We have a greenhouse base!

We've managed to get up most of the glass and that will be heading to the tip. As for the frame, we're going to keep hold of that until there's another scrap metal collection on the site. 

This weekend will involve clearing more of the land around allotment 22 and possibly even laying our first section of path! We're planning on using heavy duty weed membrane with woodchip on top. Handily, the council have just dumped a pile of woodchip inside the site entrance so we're hoping there's still lots there tomorrow. The problem with working full-time when half of the other plotholders are retired is that they're there every day in the week so we miss out on things like free woodchip as it's all gone by the time we get there!

Tackling the Brambles: Part Two

We've been pretty busy lately and haven't had as much time at the allotment as we would have liked. The arduous task of removing brambles had been left for the last couple of weeks as we've only really been down to collect redcurrants and check on the fruit bushes. Yesterday, however, we had a good 5 hours down there and made considerable progress with clearing the space where our shed's going to go.

After Googling how to get rid of brambles and reading up on other people's experiences, we just opted for the simple method of cutting them back manually then digging the roots out. We don't have strimmer so just cut them back with secateurs then dug into the ground with a fork to loosen the soil until we could start pulling the roots out. God, those bramble roots spread far! It was an eyeopener to follow them along under the surface and see just how far they went.

We've now cut back as far as we plan to so once we've removed the rest of the bramble roots, it will (hopefully) just be a case of keeping the brambles cut back to the area they currently occupy and taking care not to let them start taking over the bottom third of the plot again. If we were planning on removing ALL the brambles, I think we'd have to give in and borrow a strimmer from someone, and we'd likely need a lofty stepladder too as the brambles are so high. We're going to leave the brambles right at the end of the plot though as that patch doesn't get a great deal of sun and there are lots of frogs living down there. I like the idea of leaving one little part of the plot as natural as possible and I love blackberries so am happy to leave one section of brambles!

We had originally decided to leave the bulk of the brambles until after we'd collected all the blackberries in a couple of months' time, but yesterday, we just got on a roll and kept hacking and hacking! The section we removed was absolutely swamped in bindweed, and there was also a lot of dead wood mixed in with the brambles. We must have cleared about 15 square metres of brambles and bindweed. We need to go back this week and finish digging up the roots but we got some seriously heavy duty roots out yesterday - so satisfying! Equally satisfying is removing bindweed - metres and metres of it - in one movement! That stuff is relentless yet weirdly satisfying to pull off other plants and bushes. Of course, the omnipresent mare's tail was also shooting up alongside/inside/all around the brambles so we pulled up a lot more of that too, some of it 5 or 6 feet tall. I hate that stuff!

Before...

After...

Before the sunburn :-(

I also got a bit sunburnt, which I'm really annoyed about as I'm usually so careful. It was blazing sunshine later in the day but distinctly overcast for half the time we were there and it just slipped my mind to SPF up. I'm starting to understand why all the allotment holders have such a healthy glow all year round.

We're hoping to get down to the plot a few evenings this week - weather permitting - and get rid of the rest of the bramble roots, as well as level out the ground ready for the shed base.

All being well, we're aiming to get our shed delivered on Saturday and spend the weekend constructing it. So exciting to think we won't have to cart our tools back and forth every time any more! It will make it so much easier to pop down to the allotment; plus the car will no longer need valeting every 5 minutes. I think having the shed will make the plot finally really feel like "ours" and I can't wait to turn it into a little haven where we can sit and have a break from all the hard work and get out of the sun/rain as needed.

Weed Suppressant

As our plot was so overgrown when we took it on, we decided to start by clearing the worst of the weeds and then laying down some kind of weed suppressant. We researched a few different options and spoke to other plotholders and friends who were experienced gardeners. While a lot of people seemed to favour old carpet in the past, this wasn't an option as the use of carpet is banned on our allotment. The reason for this is that chemicals can seep into the soil. We didn't have ready access to carpet anyway, so this wasn't too much os a disappointment! Cardboard was another option, and we still intend to lay down some very heavy cardboard in some parts of our plot, possibly the more heavily overgrown sections that we won't get to just yet.

We also considered black plastic sheeting. There was already some of this on our plot, albeit very ripped and cracked. While this is a popular option as it keeps light AND water off the ground, thereby killing weeds more quickly, we were put off by the fact that the ground would be very dry and hard to work. We always planned to uncover small sections of ground at a time, and map out and dig over our beds one by one.

As the vast majority of the central part of our plot was taken over by mare's tail, which we'd be breaking off at the ground, and various grasses, we opted for weed membrane, which we hoped would be able to cope with finishing off the grass while preventing the mare's tail from popping up again. We read lots of reviews online and checked out forums to find which one would suit our needs. We knew we'd be traipsing back and forth over it, and that it needed to be heavy duty. We also wanted something that would let water in but was thick enough to effectively block light.

We checked out a few fabrics in shops, but lots of them seemed pretty flimsy and let a lot of light through.

 Eventually, we decided on this Yuzet Heavy Duty Weed Control Fabric from Amazon. It gets great reviews, and seemed reasonably priced for a heavy duty weed membrane. It also came in 50m rolls, which was great as we knew we'd need a lot! While it's only really been a couple of months since we laid the first of our weed control fabric, we're really impressed so far. It's withstood all kinds of weather so far, and has remained firmly in place. There are absolutely no signs of wear and tear yet, except at the odd edge where we've snagged it while cutting, or have had to pull pegs out to move them.

Weed control fabric on Allotment 22

As you can see from the photo, it's got a bit of a sheen to it, and is a little more plasticky than lots of fabrics. I was concerned it might tear easily because of the texture, but this honestly hasn't been a problem. The guidelines down the length of the fabric will be helpful when we come to lay paths in future and the fabric is really easy to cut with regular scissors.

We started off holding it down with bricks, but this wasn't ideal as they're easy to trip over and kick out of position. We got these Yuzet 6" Weed Control Fabric Pegs, also from Amazon, and they've been great to use. We push them in as far as we can with our hands, then stand on them firmly to push them right into the ground. It's a lot easier when it's rained recently, that's for sure! The only problems we've had are when the pegs have hit stone or pebbles - all too common on our plot, sadly - and we have to pull them out to re-position them. When you do this, the hooks on the pegs can catch on the weed control fabric and fray it a little but it's not too much of an inconvenience.

All in all, we're impressed with this product so far and will certainly be buying it again when we run out of our current supplies.

The Dreaded Mare's Tail

I'd never heard of mare's tail - or marestail, or horsetail, or Equisetum arvense to give it is proper name - before we took on our allotment. When we first viewed allotment 22, most of the weeds and grass had very recently been cut back by the council. Although the council have a policy to not get involved in the upkeep on allotments these days due to a lack of funds, apparently our plot was so bad that they made an exception.

When we viewed our plot, it was neglected and overgrown, but I didn't notice any mare's tail. When we returned two weeks later, it was full of those strange cone-like stems. We had no idea what they were, but a friendly fellow plot holder told us. After plenty of online research, we established mare's tail is almost impossible to remove, but that it is possible to weaken it dramatically.

This was taken before the mare's tail actually got too bad :-/

Most of the online resources I've used state that the fir tree-like mare's tail plants can reach "up to 2 feet in height". All I can say is, I wish ours was only 2 feet tall! In certain spots - usually in and around bushes and brambles - ours regularly reaches heights of 5-6 feet. Yep, it's as tall as we are. In fact, it's a lot taller than us in places but we haven't got round to tackling the more towering stems yet!

How to remove mare's tail

The one good thing about mare's tail is that it's easy to remove the shoots and fertile fir tree plants by snapping them off at the ground. We must have filled about 10 huge cement sacks (the kind you could fit a small car in) in just a couple of weeks by doing this, and there is still a lot more to go. I think we've been to the council tip more times in the last few weeks than we have in our entire lives. It's very satisfying to get rid of them, though, even though I know they'll return!

My mum and niece working on the mare's tail

Our hope is that once our plot is cultivated, we can try and stay on top of the mare's tail as much as possible, removing shoots as soon as they appear. Considering our plot has been neglected for so long, and due to the time of year we took it on, it's safe to say we shouldn't experience anything like the same level of problem with mare's tail again.

Although there is a fair bit of mare's tail on the rest of the site, it's nowhere near as bad as on our plot. Our neighbours have the odd stem sprouting up among their crops, but the majority of sites don't have any signs of it. 

Resources

If you're determined to eliminate mare's tail, horse tail, Equisetum arvense, call it what you will, this site has some great tips and case studies. We're sticking to the snapping-off-and-hopefully-weakening technique for now though!

Tackling the Brambles: Part One

...part one of several hundred, sadly. Probably. While we haven't attempted to measure how much of the far end of our allotment is taken over by towering brambles, it's possibly around 20 square metres, and they reach heights of well over 8 feet.

As well as the monstrous brambles at the end of our plot, there are several smaller bushes scatter along the perimeter fence down one side. It was these brambles we tackled at the weekend,  digging up the roots of two very well-established bushes. We'd cut the brambles back during the previous week so all we had to do this time was dig up the roots. I say "all we had to do", but this was far harder than anticipated!

We also found lots more glass, an assortment of very old, very rusty old garden tools, a manky soil sieve and a few broken plates, pieces of old metal signs, lots of bricks and a metal pole inserted so solidly and deeply into the ground that we initially thought it had been cemented in. It was exhausting, and we probably only managed to clear about 2 square meters of ground in the end. It's satisfying to know we've got rid of two very stubborn bramble bushes and a great deal of rubbish though!

We're planning on laying a path down both edges of our plot this summer, and hope to order our shed in the next couple of weeks, so this is what we're working towards at the moment. We've selected a spot for our shed and are planning to have a small seating area next to the shed and apple and pear tree.

We've currently got around 54 square metres currently covered with heavy duty weed membrane, We've been using Yuzet Heavy Duty Weed Control Fabric from Amazon and we're pretty impressed so far! It's managed to withstand lots of very strong winds (several other plotholders' greenhouses unfortunately didn't) and seems to be doing the job. We've held it down with a combination of bricks - as you can see in the picture - and pegs. I'd definitely recommend using pegs if you can as they look neater, you're less likely to trip over them, and they hold the weed membrane firmly in place. So, while the weed suppressant does its job and (hopefully) kills off the remaining weeds underneath, we're concentrating on our first path and our shed. And also collecting a few berries!