The polytunnel is complete and now full of tomatoes, melons, courgettes, salad and much more.  Thanks to everyone who helped raise the polytunnel.  Come along to see it in its full glory! 

As well as that the children set to building a den under the tree platform and also made substantial progress clearing out a lovely space and starting to lay a floor. Any ideas/offers of materials to make the walls will be gratefully received.

As ever, there was also substantial progress on the various beds and many weeds are now no more, while new beds are fully planted up.

Finally, we have seen some very sizeable taddies in the wildlife pond so watch out for their legs next time you go down…

We constructed a series of tipi ready for our beans to climb up.

Yes we have found instructions for how to build your own polytunnel and are having a go.

Having hired a digger to clear a sunny spot of land we set about getting the various components and tools needed to get the job done.

Then it was time for some hard work....

And there was more activity elsewhere.....

Younger Lotti members got creating making clay signs to put around the allotment.  They also added to their ever growing tree house (or should I say fort?!) 

And we put some time into developing our wildlife pond.

A productive and rewarding day for all involved.

We have had seed potatoes in egg boxes on window sills for week and finally the time came to plant them!  We have also planted red and white onions.

A digger came to site to clear a 'hill' of earth ready for the erection of a new polytunnel.

Yes, it is an exciting time down on Lotti, as we are seeing the seeds we have sowed in the “greenhouse” starting to come up to provide us with some early salads, and as we gradually work through the 37 raised beds, clearing them of weeds, putting on a layer of our lovely manure and covering them.

We are starting to get some new members as well, which is always good!

We went to Lotti a bit after the heavy snow and were sad to see that there has been quite a bit of damage as a result of this with the fruit frames and a lot of the netting over the veg having suffered from the weight of it.

This will need some repair work…

In December Nick went to Sheffield College’s National Enterprise Academy in their new building and gave a talk about Crosspool Harvest to help them understand what it can be like to set up a social enterprise.

In January he is planning to put on seminars about the project for folk in different Government Departments who are very interested in it as an example of Big Society in action.

A good group gathered at the Rousseau’s for a great, all-age, party on Saturday evening.

The centre-piece was a delicious chicken stew featuring the cockerels we have raised from eggs, but there were lots of other contributions from Sarah, Claire and Lorna and the Aderholds, Mulcahy’s, Halliwells and DeBrouwers.

The children played sardines and Bibbity bobbity boo while the grownups chatted and tried to start a bonfire.

We spent a good afternoon under a grey sky (but no rain!) with a focus on manure, shifting soil, planting broad beans, putting up some netting, cutting up recently felled branches and clearing and removing rubbish and generally tidying the plot.

As well as Nick, Eleanor, Eddy, Glenda and Angie, we welcomed Kiri, a Masters student at the Uni.

We are talking about how to make a really good plan of the plot so we can start to see how a rotation system might work.

The most satisfying aspect was that we had bought, for £50 a trailor-load of manure which created a rather smaller pile than we had hoped, but four of us spent an hour at Clough Fields and were able to bag up and bring back a rather larger amount of rich crumbly stuff!