Have you ever purchased some veg from your local supermarket to discover the next day it has gone off? Ever wondered why it all tastes so bland? These are two things that we were finding so we looked at alternatives, this lead us down a route of discovery which started with visiting the rather good farmers market that is held in Reading and starting to purchasea lot from a farm shop in Englefield. Both of these were great, we rediscovered how food should taste. Was it a cheap alternative to souless supermarkets? The answer is a definte no however all was not as you might expect, the food was more expensive no one could deny that but the taste was exceptional, the meat we got from the farm shop was simply outstanding. This meant we were willing to have less overall to appreciate the real tastes and flavours.

One day I had the brain wave (I have quite a few of these, but this one was a winner which is most unusual! but I digress) What if we grew our own vegetables? How cool would that be? Oh hanf on we have the worlds smallest garden and its all paved…what to do. One quick phone call later and we were on a waiting list for a plot on our local allotment site; Cow Lane. Then we waited….

And waited….

And waited…..

Then we got a letter telling us we were top of the pile, giving us a map of unused plots and the magical key to the gate, all we had to do was choose a plot. Now prior to this, the most we had managed to grow were a few chilli plants in pots on the kitchen window sill, this was a whole new ball game. After a few hours of walking around the site, taking photos and making notes we chose a plot, number 25. Hell it must be good soil the weeds are 7 feet tall (I shit you not on this … somewhere we have photos to prove it!)

This was back in March 2006, since then we cleared the plot and had a good couple of season growing everything from chilies to apples, squash to rhubarb and everything in between, it was  a challenge, the results were rewarding, we met some great people and on top of all of this our food bills went down. Winner!

Then along came our wonderful government and network rail who to cut a long story short found it within the countries interest to throw us off of the plot so a car park could be built for a rail yard over the top of the allotment site. I could go on for quite some time on this but it would just make me very angry and we don’t need that kinda negative energy do we?

Now we have moved sites, we are now residing on the Scours Lane site on an area of  the site brought back into use because of the destruction of the Cow Lane site(insert something about cloud and silver lining here……) The good news was that a lot of the back breaking and expense would be taken care for us courtesy of Reading Borough Council and Network Rail. In reality this meant we took on a brand spanking new plot 25m x 10m with a new shed , greenhouse and fairly well fenced (basically giving us what we had before but replacing old item with new ~ modern economics state its cheaper to buy and erect a new shed than move an old one!)

We have now started the transformation of this plot into being our new home, progress is being made and we look forward to future growing seasons, making new friends and of course enjoying our harvests. As we do stuff I will post on to the blog, we have learnt so much since first getting an allotment and we hope to correct some of our past mistakes, who knows may be I can win the best phallic vegetable competition after all