Sunburn is worth it.

• By Alison
• 11 July, 2007
• 3 Comments

Finally a good day, and the allotment starts to take shape. After the beautiful weather for the Summer fair on Saturday, Sunday was just as glorious. Leaving
swamped husband to work feverishly on this laptop, I dragged the children down to the allotment to commence digging.

This is the before
picture!

The girls were so helpful pulling weeds out – for about 5 minutes. That’s the threshold of attention span. About 10 minutes after that, number 1 suddenly
needed to do a poo. There is a toilet block on the allotment – it’s entirely on the other side of the area, and it wasn’t open. I rang swamped husband
to come and pick up the girls, but he told us to go to the dodgy toilets in Elmers End where the gay guys meet. Charming.

Luckily for us, we ran into one of number 1’s school friend’s dad – coming out of his own allotment. They lived on the same street as the allotment, so
we went down to visit, have some squash and use the facilities.

Overall, the loo break took about 45 minutes. So in the first hour of work, I’d done very little work! We went back down, and I managed to dig over half of
the bed. It’s back breaking work, and there is bind weed in there too.

Eventually, swamped husband surfaced, and came down to help. That was a slight mistake, as he has the “can’t really be bothered” method of
gardening, and didn’t bother to remove the weeds as he turned the soil. So when he got bored and wandered off to erect a hammock, I redid most of his work.

By this time the girls are in “we want to go home!” mode. But the cavalry arrived – my friend and her two girls. This added another 2 hours to the
potential work time, as the girls dug and watered their own hole together, then played school.

So now the bed looks like this…