Allotments past

Ten days ago, the allotments at Stamford Green where I laboured for some years had a plant sale, coupled with tea and cakes. An opportunity for BH to investigate plants and neighbours and for me to take a look at what had been my allotments, at the top corner of the field, next to the school, just about where the orange spot is in the snap from gmaps above.

I am sure the club hut had moved from my day, getting on for twenty years ago now; not that I could say where it was. I do0n't think that it was very lively at that time. And we certainly did not hold trolleys from places like Wickes, or, indeed, anywhere else. This being the path running along the edge of the field to the northwest, from the bottom corner.

Just past the turning to the north. With the fence line left looking a lot more grown over than in my day. I used to know the couple who had the shed right, or perhaps the one before the present one.

Looking down the path between what was my two allotments. Deer fenced fruit enclosure left. Nothing left of what I had been doing on the right that I could see. No pampas grass, no compost heap, no anything else.

The deer fence survived, although the fruit trees had not been looked after and it all looked a bit overgrown. Some sturdy suckers or seedlings along the fence line. Where I had planted green willow posts, just sprouting at the time I left - the idea being that intermediate live posts, if kept under control, would do better than dead ones.

Walking back, a dog rose looking well.

A lot of raised beds and netting. But I did not see anything in the way of compost heaps: people seemed to prefer to get the council to dispose of green waste for them.

The only broad beans that I came across. A poor show compared with what I used to do!

Out to climb over West Hill, where the tulip tree was going well, now blasted by the sun,

Easy meat for Google Images.

PS: the (default) results at reference 1 are incomplete and are not in chronological order. I used the power of Gemini to tweak the URL provided by the blog search function to try to do better, but this ran into a few problems to do with the number of results and time zones. The close of our conversation is snapped above. Breaking open somebody else's black box can be tricky!

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=allotment. Some of the archive.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=allotment&updated-max=2008-01-01T00:00:00Z. Trying to be clever.

Group search key: 20260516