What do you need if you have a new allotment?  New wellies of course.  Couldn’t go up there in my shocking old ones!  So we went shopping for a few gardening essentials which usually involves me ending up buying more seeds…..  So on the shopping list today, wellies, garden fork, string, modules for planting, gloves, compost for home.. and broad beans!  Had a good look around for a decent fork, was hoping for a Bulldog as I had heard they were particularly good, or a Spear and Jackson.  I had always ‘made do’ with cheap and cheerful before and had learnt that it was usually a false economy as they were flimsy and broke easily.  So I was determined to not skimp on a decent fork as it would have a lot of work to do!  Found a very good one however for the £15 mark, a bright yellow one in B&Q, made of carbon steel and very sturdy looking, not a world famous brand but looked like it would do the job pretty well and for a decent price.

Got string to mark out borders, new gloves so we could have one pair for each site, home and allotment.  Tried on loads of different wellies, flowery ones, dotty ones, stripey ones, leafy ones, ended up with bog standard short green wellies, were the most comfortable of the lot.  And picked up some Sutton broad beans as they seem to be very popular on allotments and will hopefully do a little better than our overwintering broad beans which look like they have been stretched on a rack.

So armed with all our necessaries we relaxed after our shopping expedition and prepared to head to the allotment the next day for our first digging and sorting session.