3. Let the digging begin!

On my next visit to the allotment on Saturday, I was disappointed to find that it hadn't dug itself!

However, this time I had back up. My parents had come over to have a look. After an approving look round, both were ready to get stuck in. Mum did the final bits of clearing in the greenhouse, and Dad was straight in with the digging. He gave me a quick lesson in trenching, which involved digging four sides of a square patch and then levering it out of the ground. All weeds can then be pulled out.

I have no doubt that the weeds will be back with a vengance, but I plan to minimise this by putting black bags etc so they aren't back to 4ft tall by planting time in the spring! The trenching still takes a good while just to do one trench, but it is a lot quicker than the poor effort I made just using a fork!

On Monday Mark had managed to dig another trench and a fire pit by the time I arrived. As it was such hard work, we spent the rest of the time there planning when to have a fire to get rid of some of the weeds we had strimmed.

We have kept on the good side of the resident robin by putting up a bird feeder in the pear tree.