Allotment

nina I am married to your husband's twin! The Wonderful Man is often on the allotment until after dark! However, he's just been away for a few weeks and left me 'in charge' and believe me I was just as obsessed. I couldn't bear him to come home and find it neglected so I was there morning and night for the whole time he was away. He got home on Friday and was there from before 8am until nearly noon - it would have been longer only he had to come and visit a fundraiser I was involved with.

lol, one of our friends has all the gear in his shed to make tea and bacon butties. The chaps often collect down the allotments for an hour or two, my OH included and he hasn't had one for years!

He's in the pub!

Aah! I remember our allotment shed with great affection ?. Ahem! Yes, as merlot says he’s probably in the pub, or someone has opened the home brew!

It is a well known fact that allotment time runs on a different system from ordinary time.
My DH can vouch for that - I used to regularly 'pop up to the allotment', only be asked where on earth I had been every time I got home. We calculated that one hour of allotment time must be about four or five hours of normal time. Strange!

I have just taken over an allotment, it is about 5ft high with brambles and nettles and the path to it is very high grass. I just don’t have the energy right now to deal with it, I should imagine it will die down in the winter and I will be able to start cutting back, this will be a one woman exercise with secateurs and a rake.

merlot
he never goes to the pub.

On Sundays at our allotment we have a cafe, cake, tea and cafetieres of coffee. The charges are cake £1, coffee £1.50, and tea 50p. It's run by volunteers and despite only getting the water from an outside tap and heating the kettles on calor gas burners we have a 5* rating from the council! It's one of the reasons why so many people come down on a Sunday.

That sounds like a bridge too far for secateurs and a rake, Hillwalker. I think you may have to offer to throw an allotment clearing party and enlist a bit of muscle if it is brambles. I wish you well with it, though.

Hillwalker, unless you have scruples over chemicals, you need to give it a healthy dose of glyphosate now, not wait until next spring. Leave the foliage intact because glyphosate works through the leaves. Take great care not to let the glyphosate drift onto the neighbouring plots. If you leave it 'til next spring, you will be hard pushed to have it ready in time.

Our next door neighbour gas an allotment which is highly productive. He lives on his own so we get loads of produce left in the front porch. Sadly it is more than we can use so I spend a lot of my time finding people who can use the result of his greenfingers!

Hillwalker your allotment sounds like our new back garden.
Except ours is only 3 by3m.
We had some land like yours when we were in France. The first step was to cut the brambles etc to ground level, using a tractor, or similar, if you can get access with one . Rake up the cuttings and burn them. Then there's a selective weedkiller that deals with new growth of brambles, nettles etc which really works well.
You will have to wait until next year then rotovate and remove the remaining roots etc manually. Then add organic material before starting to plant.
Quite a challenge.