i spoke too soon!

Toronto has had an incredible amount of rain over the past few weeks and specifically the last two days - it rained non-stop. so i approached my after-work visit to the garden with some trepidation. There has been no sign of flooding so far so how bad could it be? sigh.... pretty bad it turns out.

About this flooding...

On Saturday May 30, the rain finally came to Toronto.  And plenty of it!! and then it rained again pretty much all day Sunday too. When the rain let up a bit on Saturday night, I headed down to the allotment to check out the space to see if the flood predictions were true. Nope,  no flooding.

I went back on Sunday during the rain and still no flooding.  Now the ground is pretty dry so its possible we have to go a long way further with rain to see any impact. But I still feel good about the space . My neighbour is still insisting I got off easy after this rain. We shall see....

Spent Monday night doing a final weed pull.  I'd say i haven't got all of it but almost all that I can get for now. Tomorrow night I will get my seeds in.....

The Hard Work Begins.....

So now that I have the plot, its a bit overwhelming.  I stared at it for about an hour. The neighbouring
 plot holders are all very kind and are offering a lot of advice.  I suspect one actually wants the space for himself. he has been telling me with regularity that the space WILL flood and it wont be worth the effort I am going to have to put in.  I remain undeterred.....

after the first night of just staring at the space, I started to plan.  My brother-in-law has assessed the space and is sure it wont flood.  He came out with his Ryobi battery-powered weed whacker and got a lot of the weeds down to an inch high - just so we can see what we are working with , not as my weed solution.

The ground is VERY dry and hard so I soaked the space with the hose (the allotments come with a water spigot - one for every 10 spots) and spent a Saturday afternoon turning over the soil on half of the allotment space as stage one of the preparation work.

Next day, we added 8 large bags of peat moss and b-i-l used his roto-tiller to turn it over again.

I let this all dry out again and came back a few days after to start pulling out the weeds to prep the soil for planting.  I am not sure how good the soil is - it looks good.  I suppose until I get a bit more experience, this will be a bit of trial and error.  i do have to get the seeds in soon if I am going to see a decent harvest so a few more nights of weed pulling and I shoudl be ready to go.