February 9th, 2009 by Rich

Contrary to weather reports, Saturday was a nice day. It started off a little on the chilly side but as soon as the sun came out it was nice and warm (warm for February that is.) We kicked off Saturday morning with a trip to the badlands or Reading (known locally as Whitley!) to visit the Lidl there as our local one didn’t have the fruit trees that were on offer this week. Fortunately they had plenty in stock but none of the varieties they had advertised so some off the cuff choices were made. After a few minutes of deliberation we had ourselves 1 cherry tree, 1 apple tree and 1 pear tree (I can’t remember the varieties off hand so will post them later.) And how much did this mini orchard cost us? I hope you are all sat down…. they came to a grand totoal of ……. £11.97! I honestly don’t know how they sell ‘em that cheap and still make a profit. We then left the badlands unscathed and returned home for bacon butties.

Around an hour later we set off down the allotment to get some more paths covered in wood chipping, we aimed to at least get a single path from the gate to join up with what we did last week so that we could get from gate to shed without getting muddy and dare I say it without having to resort to wellies.

Four to five hours later we had met our goal and more we have completed the central path to the raised bed and have two paths down the raised beds and to the gate. This now leaves four paths around raised beds at the top end of the plot and the fence side and behind the greenhouses to do. By my reckoning I think we will have another 11/2 to 2 days of work to do that if it was that simple. However when do I do things the simple way? Behind the greenhouses I want to get a small pond put in to attract in frogs, toads etc. This obviously needs to be done before the wood chippings can go down around it. The other slight problem we have is there is still a giant poo pile at the front that needs shifting to allow the last raised bed to be put in properly and for us to put the path down. Still a fair bit of work to get done but its starting to look good, it will be even better once the paths are finished and we have trimmed the excess membrane away.

Here is a photo from the gate showing the two paths we did: (notice the new paving slabs by the gate to prevent the gate catching on bark ~ clever eh!)

As for the fruit trees, given the less than favourable weather conditions at the moment, we have placed those in the shed to protect them until we are able to get them in the ground.

We celebrated our hard work with Chinese, which was very welcome and then sat down to watch a film …… my work was done!