From here to here (AGGIL 13)

​It may not seem like much of an auspicious start... but it's a start!!

Almost three months ago now I first noticed that a whole load of bricks had been stacked up against a wall at the bottom of our road.  Who had put them there?  Was someone going to use them for something?  Was there a carefully concealed camera looking on to catch a thief?

All fair questions maybe, though knowing folk in our area often 'freecycle' by popping unwanted items on the pavement or their front wall, my immediate thoughts were "Can I take them?", "These could be very useful at the allotment", and "I need to get a wheelbarrow to trundle them across to our plots."

And the next time I passed them I had exactly the same thoughts... and the next time I passed... and the next time... and the next...

On Monday, I took the bull by the horns, or maybe it's better to say I took the bricks by a wheelbarrow.

It might seem like a relatively simple job, and it certainly was, though the time it has taken me to get round to doing this is symptomatic of the last few months.  I'm really hoping that now, as we get in to the real darker days of winter, I will have more time at the plots, allowing me (and Richard!) to get them sorted for spring sowings and the happy onslaught of growing all that is green.

So this simple job was really our first task to getting the new plot into some sort of shape; albeit only by moving bricks from one place to another!  The bricks, which are a hodgepodge of different colours, shapes and sizes, will be used to put on top of cardboard to weight it down so that the winds don't blow this ground cover away over winter.  When we can get compost, from our bin or elsewhere, we will place this on top of the cardboard, and the weight of that compost will replace these bricks, though these bricks will do well in the meantime.

So it was from here (above left), at the bottom of our road, that I wheeled the bricks to here (above right), at the side of the shed on our new plot.  We also acquired some tiles (though I'm not really sure what we can do with them!), and a few pieces of wood which I'm sure will come in handy at some point.

The scavenging of bits and pieces that one finds on one's daily jaunts certainly help keep the cost of an allotment down, and sometimes you get an unexpected and truly treasureable find.

Happy days.  😊

A Guernsey Gardener in London, Day 13