Kitchen Garden Forum

my allotment's just been taken over by jcb's as part of northumbria water's flood relief works in our village, I hopefully will get it back in february after they have tunnelled down 4m and laid a pipe through the middle. so in the meantime i have only you guys and the seed catalogues for inspiration!

WOW I want one of those

Dear Mandylew, make sure they reinstate your allotment with at least three feet of the finest topsoil, seriously though, make sure you don't get subsoil left, i know what these contractors can be like.

Dear macmac, can you imagine peoples faces if you suddenly turned up with one of those to dig your allotment with .

Evening Mandylew,
I echo OH's remarks about contractors and topsoil.Welsh Water put a new sewer through our site a few years ago and the topsoil that was taken from the site was good but the soil which was brought back to the site was rubbish,full of stones, weed and other odds and sods.It didn't affect me but other plot holders are still having problems.The site lost five plots due to poor drainage they flood when it rains and where the road was ripped up and reinstated it sunk and still hasn't been sorted properly.
The plot holders were compensated for losing their produce but very few went back to their plots when the work was completed.
The site secretary is trying to get further reparations from Welsh Water but not much positive response so far.

they only appear to have taken a dozen 1m bags of the topsoil off, thats it on the right of the picture, trouble is i've spent 7 years taking all the stones out of the beds and putting them on the paths, now they are all mixed back in again. I've no idea the quality of the subsoil, theres nothing going away though and nothing extra coming in, its just all getting churned up, could be i can grow the best carrots ever when they are finished, i'm really not sure, but we had no chioce in the matter. I will get a new shed which will be nice, and i have new pets in my garden too now, 3 hegdehogs that were under the old shed!

Snooky i have serious worries for one regular in particular who came rain or shine every day for years., may be spending too much time at the club from now on and might never see him again. They have no idea the effect they have on peoples lives when they propose these schemes the pipe could easily have gone under the road and just been a bit longer.

Please delete your photo and replace it with this one - if you post photos 1024 or smaller by anything they display a lot better.

sorry geoff i got no idea how

Wonderful opportunity to get them to double dig it for you,cup of tea and some biccy's to the driver normally works wonders.

its more than a double dig the pipe is going 4m down, but it could mean i can grow some cracking carrots next year!

We had a water pipe replaced down the edge of our plot. They dug a channel about 2 metres wide which brought all the cly up to the surface. The clay is such that you could make pots from it. The soil was heaped up beside the channel but when this was filled they somehow managed to bury the topsoil and leave the clay on top - even after several years the soil is still poor where they worked.

Moral being it isn't just getting them to leave the topsoil but to actually leave it on top where it belongs!!!

yes that is what i am afraid of, it is what we have in our garden which is just up the road from the allotment, and other houses on the estate complain of the same soil, so i suspect that is what is under the ground in this area, indeed likely the reason they need to improve drainage at all.

glallotments wrote:We had a water pipe repalced down the edge of our plot. They dug a channel about 2 metres wide which brought all the cly up to the surface. The clay is such that you could make pots from it. The soil was heaped up beside the channel but when this was filled they somehow managed to bury the topsoil and leave the clay on top - even after several years the soil is still poor where they worked.

Moral being it isn't just getting them to leave the topsoil but to actually leave it on top where it belongs!!!

That's exactly what happenned to us last winter! The council installed a completely new water pipe system, and in doing so, upended each trench with the top soil buried and very heavy sticky clay on top. There are over 270 plots on our site, and now each plot has its own tap. It was worth it I guess, but, heck what a mess they did make.