FYI

Clicking on any of the pictures will open them at full size in the browser window, which means you will have to use the 'back' button to return to the main pages, whereas clicking to the left or right of any picture will open them in a new window, if you fancy a closer look at any of the piccies we've posted! We've included a Google Earth satelite picture of our plots and this years planting plan at the bottom of the page, next to each other. If you choose the Earth view on the satelite image you can rotate the image until it is lined up with the planting plan, then use the arrows in the plan to scroll from Plot 2 to Plot 1.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

The story so far!

Welcome to our online Blog! We are Lee and Suzanne, a married couple from Partington in Manchester, and this is the Blog of our allotment, named The Dobby's Pumpkin Patch!

Lee has always fancied growing his own veg, and after we reached a point where we had finished sorting out our home (we bought our house as a repossession, so had to spend a lot of time fixing it up to get it to a reasonable standard) we took the decision to do something about it! Lee joined an online Gardening Forum, the Grapevine, (the online forum of the Grow Your Own magazine), with the user name of Dobby (we are both Harry Potter fans!), I joined soon after (as Mrs Dobby), and not long after that we found our first allotment! It is on the Moss View Plot in Partington, and I think we both knew that we had to name it after our alias's on the Grapevine, so we called it the Dobby's Pumpkin Patch!


When we took it over at the beginning of September it hadnt been worked for over 12 months, so was looking a tad overgrown (as you can see from the pictures), so we faced quite a job in removing the weeds and trying to get rid of their roots, especially as we wanted to stay as organic as possible and not use any chemicals!


Fortunately underneath all the weeds the soil was in good condition and there was some useable structure there too, making it a much easier task to get the plot cleared, which we did with a slash and burn tactic, and then spent a few months double digging the plot to remove as many weed roots as we could!

5 comments:

podster said...

Suzanne, like to blog, I'll add a reference link to it on my blog.
Best wishes Peter.

Mrs Dobby said...

Thanks Peter, I'm hoping to get it up to date soon and then carry on with it, your blog has been one of those thats inspired us!

Nick the grief said...

Looking good Mrs D. Keep up the good work

ntg

Lozza said...

excellent blog

Loz

Mrs Dobby said...

Thanks Lozza!