Hello from rainy Sheffield

[Christine]

I'm a relatively new allotmenteer - started last year with an overgrown plot consisting of burnt-out greenhouse, brambles and 20-foot high privet (the alotments are each surrounded by high hedges with one gate - locked, if you're wise!) and spent last year lopping down privet to let the light in, blasting weeds, removing glass and carpeting to stop the weeds coming back. This year, I have potatoes (doing very well, thanks for asking), runner beans (no produce yet), young cabbages (full of holes), peas (in flower but not worth the effort, I think), and three baths with young leeks, broccoli and LOADS of rocket. Oh yes! and loads of brambles and privet, bindweed and bracken ... at least this year I've been sufficiently organised to pick the blackberries.

[The Chili Monster]

Hi Christine,
welcome to the site. Whereabouts in Sheffield are you, I have some friends living in Burngreave.

[Christine]

Aha! another fan of Douglas Adams!
I live in Heeley and my allotment is in Meersbrook - paradoxically too far to walk carrying tools and nowhere secure to leave them, so I have to drive. There's green for you! the picture I uploaded is a photo I took when I'd just started clearing the allotment.
Burngreave is sort of the other side of Sheffield centre - but although it's a big city, it feels like a village.

[Andy Hamilton]

sounds like you had your work cut out, well done for perserverence.

welcome to the forum

[hedgewitch]

Hello and welcome to the forum

[funkypixie]

Hello!

I'm a newbie too & formerly from Sheffield. I wish I had a 'lottie.

[Millymollymandy]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

[Chickpea]

Hi, Christine. Allotments surrounded by high hedges? That's unusual. Don't the hedges cast a lot of shade? I'd be sorry to be cut off from my nieghbouring allotment-holders like that. Is there a club-house or anywhere you can get together and be sociable?

[gunners71uk]

hi christine i live in worksop just down the rd welcome

[Shirley]

Hi Christine... and welcome to the site :)

[Christine]

Apologies, Chickpea - I did reply to your questions but it seems to have got lost.

I quite enjoyed the privacy - leaving the gate open and saying 'hello' to the odd passer-by - but had a very dodgy incident with another allotment holder and now lock the gate from the inside. I'd much rather have open allotments now, as I'd feel safer.

The hedges do start to cut out the light from early afternoon, hence all the cutting down - I still have half the length of the allotment to do and will need to trim back the hedges I cut last year in spring. There's nowhere to be sociable, which is a real shame, and most people are shut up in their allotments, just like me so unless you bump into each other in the lanes, you never really meet.