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…

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

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.

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!