Allotment Survivors
A good couple of hours work today. First, I got at the comfrey with the scythe, got it into a proper sack, (a batch of 10 I bought on eBay, the other 9 will come in for storing spuds, onions, neeps and what-have-you next autumn). And then I put a stone in the sack, and put the sack into the auld tin dustbin at the end of the path, which is nearly half filled with water, just the rain it collects itself, but with the Glasgow rainfall it'll be full soon enough.
Then I started digging on the East side by The Pond area, which is where I dug out the Camp Coffee sign. I uncovered an old brick path, running E-W, about a foot below the surface, (under where the the comfrey was. I should add, the comfrey, split out of 2 or 3 plants from the old allotment I shared with Dad in Jarrow at the real Pig Sty Avenue, had grown into 12 colossal root systems since early July).
I was all for digging up this old brick path, and adding the bricks to what I was calling the Frogs Winter Palace but must now just call the brick pile, because it's... well, a massive brick pile, now 10x4x3ft. But then I thought, hang on, maybe someone laid this, god knows when, back in the 20s or 30s? Let it be. It's going to be right by the pond eventually, and will make a nice place to put a bench or something.
It was good to be getting earth from the Old Greenhouse/Pond area and hoy it on to the E bed, levelling them both. The malleability of an allotment is fascinating to me: you look at beds and they look fixed, but a couple of hours on the end of a spade can shift them, one bed raises by a spit, and the other sinks by the same amount. This afternoon, a beautiful, sunny, early winter afternoon, I learned that it's all do-able, just a couple of hours hard labour two or three times a week. I walked home with a profound sense of peace, stoned on endorphins perhaps.
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