We headed down the allotment on Saturday morning very excited at the impending arrival. It wouldn't be delivered until later that week but a base needed building for it. Old paving slabs were located and builders sand purchased. It was a lot of hard (dull) work getting all the sand laid out and the slabs level but once finished looked like a little patio! My Father had managed to lay his hands on a few unwanted wooden pallets so they were soon put to use with 4 being turned into a compost bin and 2 being knocked apart and the planks used for raised beds. All were stained the same colour (I like a neat plot!) and the raised beds were filled with a mixture of compost and topsoil. The right hand one had lettuces sown in it. The other one will become home to tomatoes and chillis.
You will also see above the addition of some posts at the far end of the allotment. The smaller ones closer to the camera will be used to build supports for the raspberries.
The others have caused mass bemusement among the old chaps on the plot with numerous people staring and popping by to ask what the goal posts are for! Well, they're for beans! It's a method of growing that is much reported on veg gardening forums but is entirely new to my site it seems. Basically, you build a set of "goal posts" and run strings from the higher set to the lower set then down to the ground. Runner and climbing french beans climb up these instead of the traditional canes. The main benefit of this method is that the beans hang down under the strings in a canopy so are easy to pick, rather than the traditional cane teepee most people use, where the beans hang down the middle so are harder to spot and pick (many people have also reported much greater yields of beans using this method). The shaded area underneath the canopy of leaves can be used to grow things like lettuce which don't like too much direct sunlight.
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