THE PLOT THICKENS

Now things have got very busy around here over the last few months and so I have to apologise to you for the extended lapse in blogs. Over the last 3 months we have been fully booked in the cottage and pretty close to fully booked in our Bed and Breakfast room.

This, of course, is bloody marvellous and has totally exceeded our expectations. After being given notice of redundancy from HSBC Alison elected to take up an option to take one months gardening leave followed by a further option to leave 1 month early and so she became 'available' in July. This was very useful in managing the busy time in the B and B.  However it was not her intention to get sucked into the daily running of the business but she can expand more on this in a later episode...

Alison was particularly helpful in stepping into Claire's shoes in cooking evening meals for the guests and making jams and has created quite a reasonable additional income in doing so but I will also leave this for Alison to expand upon at a later date.
Within this toil we have had the added workload of one allotment to concern ourselves with. You may recall that we have taken the rare opportunity to acquire an allotment just so we don't get too bored. Now this allottment plot is not a full sized one, no it is just half a plot and only measures 15 metres by 39 metres, that's 585sqmtrs or about 6,000sqft every inch of which was full of 3' high weeds. I have worked in several supermarket stores that were smaller than this and all I had to do there was sweep, mop and buff the floor and that took long enough.

Both the sheds are within the plot.

6,000sqft of weeds and debris and several anxious neighbouring allotmenteers all watching to see if  I, no WE are up to the challenge. So in July and August I made several trips down to the plot to try pulling out as many of the largest weeds as possible in the hope that I could stop them dropping their seeds but this was futile as for every plant that I plucked out my arse or elbow or mere presence caused a further 20 to shed 10 million other seeds. Also weeding a reasonable garden plot is one thing but this is more like a field!

The allotment has world heritage status as it contains 95% of the known worlds grass species and 12 as yet undiscovered ones.

It is rumoured that 'Big Foot' has been spotted here too.

A decision had to be made. Either we were going to try to manage the plot using as green and eco-friendly methods as possible over many back breaking weeks or.....
Several gallons of farm strength weed killer on the lot and start the whole thing from scratch.


So off we went to buy some weed killer.


I don't feel too guilty about this as it is exactly what Farmers do after every harvested crop, no it is a needs must sort of choice. So my neighbour across the road told me about a guy who lives at the end of the village and can supply me with the said weed killer and anything else that I may need to set up the allotment. Well Alison and I nipped down there to see what he could do for us. We had no idea that he sells stuff from his out buildings as he has no signs up or displays or any indication at all that he is in business. All he has is a wind sock in the field behind his house where his private runway sits for his aeroplane. We just assumed that he was a rich city gent or perhaps a pop star, we know that Martin Shaw lives in Norfolk and owns a Tiger Moth so we thought he would be of that ilk.
Far from it. The guy is well into his sixties and retired and being a fairly hefty old Norfolk farmer type he uses a mobility scooter to get around his yard but yet he owns a plane and regularly flies off to Essex in it. As we drove onto his property a sensor picks us up and the next thing you see is this cheerful Bernard Matthews kind of geyser whizzing around the corner on his mobility scooter. He explained he and his wife don't need to use them but it just means they can get around the property a lot quicker!

After some 10 minutes of conversation pretty NFN (Normal for Norfolk) he says "follow me" and we had to jump into the car and pursue his mobility scooter which was rapidly disappearing around another corner...

Eventually stopping by what appeared to be a couple of aircraft hangers where he took us into one of them and opened one of several boxes of weed killers followed be a full run down on its capabilities and useage. We then received a précis of his life story  'The later years....'  this is fairly typical up here and if you go into any pub and buy a fellow a pint you will find no problem in obtaining his, his wife's, his parents and indeed even his wife's parents life story. I believe that it is the very reason that they created kicking out time in the pubs just to give the poor sod at the receiving end a chance to say "Oh, is that the time?" "I guess I'll just have to hear how your great Aunt Meredith got on when she moved all those miles away to.....?  Oh, the next village you say, well I'll look forward to hearing that story another day... such a shame they called time."

We bought the weed killer, a pump and a pair of gloves and we were there for nearly an hour. Afterwards I explained to the neighbour that had sent me there that I could of driven the 10 miles to Fakenham bought some from B&Q and driven back the 10 miles in that time. He said "Why would you want to waste all that time when you've got a guy right here in the village?".


 They live in a far simpler and happier time zone here in Norfolk and I still haven't quite got it yet.....   but I will, I will.