GARDENING – MAKE DO AND MEND – ALLOTMENT STYLE

The sun is out and we are looking forward to some outside time this weekend, how about you? After a visit to an amazing allotment site in London last week – my brain is at full capacity with make do and mend inspiration. Woweee what a place. It was a peaceful Wednesday afternoon and while Dean finished up on our location photo shoot, I snuck off and wandered the foot and a half wide pathways that wove through the ramshackle plots.We have friends who own two magical plots here – (yep the ones with the amazing garden) and I cannot wait to see how thier crops and flowers grow throughout the rest of the year. There are so many colours, textures and ingenious ways to re-use and recycle to be found on allotments. Small shanty style gardening towns, only inhabited when a morning or afternoon can be spared and overflowing all year round with edible produce, flowers and artistic creations.Bricks holding down flapping roof felt,  pallets and drainpipes customised to build fences and growing planters. Onions springing merrily from the ground alongside daffodils.   Borders cobbled together using old brick, branches and floorboards and items no longer useful at home, repurposed for pots, shelves and more.  Bath pond! This is definitely going to be a feature in our garden. We should be renovating our bathroom this year fingers crossed, so rather than send our bath to the bulky waste section at the tip (that section makes me so sad) we will sink it into the ground and make a feature of it. I am not sure how are neighbours will feel about our recycling allotment-style garden makeover – but we are very excited about it! This stop on my wander was a highlight, a living collage of amazing layers. So many of the sheds are like works of art and others very ordinary but still somehow magical. A place like no other, suspended somewhere between the Second World War and the power lines towering in the background connecting us to the modern world. The naked trees are starting to grow back their clothes of green leaves and petals and everything else is slowly waking, peeping up out or the ground ready for a summer of growing and harvesting.When we were kids our family allotment had a perfectly dilapidated glass summer house on it, my memories of picking gooseberries, blackberries and green beans and fresh peas are vivid, there was a paddock at the bottom of the site where we could feed horses apple halves through the fence and we had so much fun wandering the paths past all the grown ups tending their plots at the weekends.  Happy weekend to you whatever your plans, I hope I may have inspired you to get outside and build something or plant something allotment style if you weren’t already going to, though! :) xxx