I started the week a little bit overwhelmed and isolated. I felt the council wouldn’t help and my husband was dead against the idea of an allotment: “I will never visit.”

I met a few allotment owners who explained the previous person had the whole full plot and there is a guy who has the other half now (completely bare except for one water butt). Obviously, they chose to take the half that didn’t have all the rubbish and then just smothered it all in weed killer! Explains why it was yellow and dead looking. ☠️

I looked around – everyone was making progress – working the earth and piling on compost. Not me, I was still trying to get rid of the structure! It did move me to a few ‘fed up’ tears!

So I wrote to the council lady imploring her to help. She promptly called me and said I would need to dismantle everything and put it in the corner and then she’d arrange for some council people to take it all away. If it wasn’t in one corner they would likely not take it. If I couldn’t move it all then she would help me. Love the lovely council lady!

Mr B then said he’d help me dismantle (yay) it if the council would take it away.

It was quite wet all week and was really hard to dig over. On Tuesday and Wednesday I clipped the tree and two huge lavender bushes. It created so much ‘stuff’ – not compostable. I then managed to move the front of the structure.

On Thursday, it rained all day so I didn’t visit. I took Friday off as leave and my amazing Draper tipper cart arrived which I put together in the morning and took down in the afternoon to shift some of the weeds I’d dug over. I did a bit more digging as the ground was a bit better although still quite wet.

The cavalry arrived today (Saturday): Mr B and the girls!

The tree is gone (not the stump yet) and the structure is down! We also took a lot of twigs and everything that would fit in the car to the tip!

It’s looking much clearer now!