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.

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.

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 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!

So we have started on a new piece of land. It is great to see what the folk there have already achieved and to feel we can help to make a difference to this.

Good work was done pruning, surveying the plot, deciding priorities, starting some ph metering and digging raspberry bed for anticipated plants, planting some onions and garlic.

The select crew on this occasion was Nick, Eleanor, Eddy, Dirk and Adelle with their girls and Claire.

A good Wednesday morning’s work was done with Paul, Angie, Eleanor, Glenda and Elaine. The focus was on digging trenches for raspberry canes, adding in manure and doing some ph measuring.

We also harvested some potatoes!

We had a very hot time at the Hagg House Community Allotment on Saturday 22 May, seeing what has been going on there, weeding, planting and watering, as well as climbing onto tree platforms, making a solar powered oven and having a BBQ.

A good group of 17 gathered together with some surprise guests joining us – Clive, who is wanting to do a PhD in creating archives of community groups and wants to create a photographic archive of Crosspool Harvest from its first beginnings, and Mark and Christina, from the Crookes-Walkley Transition group.

As part of the afternoon, we walked up to the Bole Hill Road to view some ancient private allotments sites up there that are offer our current best prospect of providing us with land to set up on. We think these have real potential but there will be quite a bit of clearing needed.

We should go back with the plan, when we have it, to start to think about which plots would be best for our purposes.

An exciting end to a busy week!

A gathering of Crosspool Harvest growers came together on 13 March to plant our first seeds ready for having some land! The focus was on herbs and also on distributing some rhubarb plants that Eleanor and Helen had been able to secure (with Council permission) from some unused allotments.

While the adults chatted, younger Harvesters climbed, swang, ate biscuits and admired Flossie’s white rabbit – Dennis.

A great start to our project!