New Routes: December 2008

by Jill Coleman
 

A few years ago, when the MacIntyre Workshop (as the Learning Centre was called in those days) was starting to expand we thought about running a few gardening sessions. It was probably in about 2003 that we got our first allotment which we cultivated with some success for a few years. Although it was fun and we learnt a lot, it wasn’t the best suited site for our purposes. There was no shelter, so we could only work on fine days, and there was nowhere to make a hot drink. 

Once we started working at the New Routes Garden we found that the allotment was too far across the park for us to just nip across to, and you could almost guarantee that by the time everyone got there someone would want to go to the toilet and you would have to trek all the way back again! It was with some relief then that we found we were able to swap our plot for one of the allotments adjacent to the New Routes site: through the gate and down the path, and we’re there.

Now that our raised beds are more or less finished, this month we have been able to break the ground on the new allotment. All thanks have to go out to the Victoria Park staff and the allotment committee members who have started us off nicely by clearing the rubbish that had accumulated on the site, allowing us to lay out our first plots. This will be the work area for our more able gardeners, and we hope that much of the produce will go to the MacIntyre Community Café in Warrington. 

We have begun modestly, digging just a couple of beds which should be enough to overwinter some onions, shallots and broad beans. It’s nice soil there too – lovely and silty and easy to dig, unlike our old site which was full of clay. We have tried to get going with a good weeding session: like many uncultivated allotments, bindweed and couch grasses have taken a powerful hold. We reckon we’ll be able to fit about eight vegetable beds down one side, and then have some soft fruit bushes and some flower beds down the other. We think that there may even be a paved area at one end, under a tangle of weeds, which should make a good spot for some benches and tubs one day. We plan to get some chickens eventually, which would be good for our learners to experience some animal care. I know people who have adopted ex-battery hens, so I will be looking into that.  

We dug those beds in the nick of time because winter hit with a vengeance last week. It seemed to catch a lot of plants by surprise. I’ve never seen so many flowers around in November and December. Where we cut the perennials back for the winter they have already started to throw up fresh new growth, while many of the rose bushes on the site and round the park have buds on them.

We had an orchard day planned with the Groundworks Trust on Wednesday, but an earlier hailstorm had frozen the ground into an ice rink the night before, so we cut the work short and retreated to the warmth of the cabins. Liz was good enough to come back to us this week to run through some of the principles of pruning soft fruit bushes and helped us tackle the black- and redcurrant bushes that we moved from the old allotment which definitely needed thinning out.