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[speckleyboo]

Got my letter from the council today.

Very Excited, and though we are having a lot of snow at the moment, i still went to have a look at what i'd been given.

Its a patch of brambles, well, brambles and snow at the moment so it looks pretty but it is going to be a lot of work before i cant plant anything. It clearly hasn't been used in a while.

The snow should of gone by thursday/friday, which my aunt has off work and we want to get started right away.

Advice on clearing brambles?

I'm hopefully going back tomorrow, depending on the snow, and i'll get a picture.

Thanks

[Guest]

congrats

 

maybe this will help http://www.romfordsmallholderssociety.org.uk/rss_advice.htm

[Happy chickens!]

That's a useful link, Poet, but quite labour intensive.

 

If you don't have the manpower, then you can try what worked quite well for me, which is to cover and mulch.

 

Chop down as much of the scrub as you can - just leave it lying there or you will end up with massive, hard to compost pile.

 

Sprinkle ground with dried/calcified seaweed to help the weeds rot. (garden centres sell big tubs)

 

Scrounge some large cardboard boxes from your local tip or supermarket, and cover your plot with them, putting old bricks on top, or better still some mulch of some kind - eg bush/tree shreddings, grass clippings (if you start in the spring) or even better some kind of manure.

 

Leave........

 

Uncover only as much as you can sensibly tackle at once and then keep on top of.

 

You can still plant a crop of potatoes - you just need a thin layer of compost on top of your cardboard, then position your potatoes and cover with some more compost. You earth up with grass clippings, compost or rotted manure. Appreciate you are not likely to have compost at the moment, but worth trying to obtain some. The card will suppress the weeds, the potatoes will root through the cardboard and break up the ground and you shouldn't have to dig much next year.

 

Good luck!

 

Ps whatever you do, don't rotivate, it will break up the roots but won't kill the weeds necessarily. Plot will look good for a few weeks then become a nightmare. It's also bad for the soil structure.

[Saronne]

Agree with all that's been said. May I add that bramble roots (in my experience) grow fairly shallow in the soil - therefore, if you chop the worst of it away, follow what's left of the stumps down to the soil and then dig out the roots, you will probably get on top of it. But like the previous omleteer said, covering with cardboard/mulch/old carpets, etc. will help kill it off. Good luck!

 

Saronne

[Olly]

My friend took over an allotment 18 months ago which was covered, and I mean COVERED, in brambles - 5' high in some places. It had not been cultivated for years, however it was a choice between taking this one, or going on the two-year waiting list for a cleared one.

 

She was able to borrow a petrol brush-cutter from her place of work, and with this we cut down the brambles in two sessions. We raked them up (bonfires are allowed Oct-March) and covered the remaining roots with old carpet obtained via Freecycle. She is now uncovering a bit at a time and digging it over - slow work but the carpet has weakened the roots a lot, and stops the bramble regrowing.

 

It would definitely be worth looking into hiring or borrowing a brush-cutter, please note that the strimmer line wouldn't work, and she had to put a blade on it to get through the stems. You'd probably only need it for one day.

 

Others on the site have cleared theirs by hand, one lady cut up plastic pop bottles to make protectors for her arms! It is very hard and painful work though. I agree with the point above about rotovating, but if you saw Joe Thingummy's allotment on Gardeners' World last year, he decided to rotovate and then just live with the fact that he'd be digging out bits of root for the next few years. Good luck, it will be worth the work, whatever you do!

[speckleyboo]

Thanks for the advice

I do have some friends i can bully...i mean persuade into helping me with it

I may go for the first option as i want to use it this year, it might be the option with the most work but i just wont tell my friends that, bake a couple of nice cakes and cookies for them and im sure they wont mind a bit