So here we are, one year on, hooked on our home-grown vegetables, addicted to our little plot of land, and forever fighting the war against weeds (I seem to be winning at the moment but how long for…?).
But sometimes, when things don’t go quite so well, when the weeds seem to grow faster than we can pull them out, when it rains so much that our plot turns into a very large pond, when it feels that we’ll never be able to keep it as tidy as our neighbour, I need a little reminder of how far we’ve come. So, what did plot 52 look like a year ago?
Well, it looked like a very overgrown tiny orchard!
View from the entrance gate - the central path was hardly visible and the weeds were flourishing!
The previous tenant obviously loved his apple trees (we’ve got 5 on our little plot!) but didn’t seem quite so keen on actually cultivating the rest of the land. What had previously been carefully delimited beds and paths was almost totally covered in a thick mat of weeds – couch grass, bindweed, horsetail, the lot! Our predecessor was also keen to squirrel away all sorts of bits and pieces of various interests: a large number of glass and window panes, piles and piles of wood in various rotten stages, plastic pots scattered all over the place. Even an old orange fridge and a rusty filing cabinet!
Rotting pile of wood, old windows and the filing cabinet at the back!
We picked this plot out of the 3 we were offered because it had a shed and the old foundations of a greenhouse. Said greenhouse had been vandalised by kids from another neighbourhood some time ago and we still find bits of shattered glass surfacing everywhere.
The greenhouse foundations and more rubbish!
And the shed …
The roof had not been looked after for a long time and was full of leaks. But that wasn’t the worse. The inside of the shed was where the Squirrel had stashed away all his most treasurable findings: dozens of packets of out of date seeds, bottles of unlabelled pesticides, old tins of paint, plastic containers of old children toys (creepy…) full of stinking water, piles of broken CDs, computer games, an old computer keyboard, and the worst of all, rotten carpets, inhabited by slugs and unidentified creepy crawlies. The smell in there was almost unbearable and my brave boyfriend volunteered to do all the clearing – he was almost sick on several occasions, disturbed several mice, and had to make countless trips to the skip. Not the most pleasant memory of our time on our plot!
Apple trees' blossoms
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