Anyway - made it over there with some kind of determination. Prepared anyway, having bought a load of seeds in Lidl (always such a bargain and never let me down), plus a buy one get one free on compost in the Co op (even cheaper with my student discount thanks to my NUS card), gloves and my phone loaded up with great podcasts.
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| The tunnel is in a fairly terrible state of repair. One of the doors at the back has fallen/blown off completely, and the other is hanging on by a prayer. |
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The interior just needed some serious tidying and organising, plus the horse poo I'd started digging in last October was still sitting in pretty large lumps all over the surface of the soil. Priorities
I decided I was going to have to prioritise the jobs, or it was all going to be too much and I'd give up althogether. Looking at the rest of the allotment was quite overwhelming. I couldn't imagine how I'd ever worked it all alone, and reminded myself that I had already decided that the half containing the tunnel would take precedence, and at the end of the season I would be happy to pass the other half to another would-be veg grower.
Today, although still early in March, I really wanted to get some seeds on the go, so my priority had to be the tunnel. One half still had bits of parsley and self seeded rocket growing in clumps mixed with grass, so I decided to focus on the other side with the clumpy horse poo.
An hour later, I'd managed to produced a whole mountain of plastic to recycle, tidied up the chaos generally and dug out a barrow of weeds from the edges of the tunnel.
The surface of the soil was really clumpy still, and it took a few more hours of working it before it was anywhere near ready to sow seed into.
As I tidied, I came across various old boxes of fertiliser, fish and bone meal, some old tomato food and chicken poo pellets and scattered them all onto the soil to dig in. It then took me another couple of hours of working that one side of the tunnel with plenty of tea breaks.
Connie stayed with me all day, a great companion, she mooched around the allotment, snoozed in a warm spot of the tunnel, and drank rainwater collected in pots.
 Sowing
Finally, as the light was getting low, I started sowing some rows of seeds. I made little trenches, carefully and quite thinly dotted my seeds, then covered the seeds with a layer of compost to mark the rows and give them some rich unlumpy soil to push up through.
So I have planted a couple of rows of spinach (I spend a fortune on this stuff in the supermarket and can't wait to have my own), a couple of rows of carrots (why not? The only time I've ever had success with carrots was in the tunnel). I decided to try a couple of rows of mange tout, I've never grown them before, realise they'll need supporting, but again, why not give them a go? I then shoved in a row of chard and a row of lettuce.
I had no means of marking the rows, it was getting dark and I had to find a way to shut up the tunnel for the night, I therefore recorded myself stating what was in each row.
So, now it was actually dusk. I jammed the half broken door back into place, somehow squished the completely broken door back into the hole left, and wedged a lump of wood up against it. It seems pretty solid, unlikely to blow down, and I added a table against the inside gap between the doors, to stop the draught from disturbing my baby seedlings when they start to show.
 
I awoke this morning feeling really happy and couldn't work out why - then I remembered - I've made a start. There are seeds in the ground. There will be food on my table which I have grown myself later in the year, and all feels better with the world. :)
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