Country Amateurs

Our alltoment garden was established in 1929, 80 years ago. The house was originally built by amateurs with materials from old shipping crates for cars etc. Since then, the house has been extended, refurbished and maintained mostly by amateurs.

I myself am a complete amateur. We have fixed up the main room (paint, wallpaper, changed cabinet doors, installed hot water tank) and the bedroom (paint, wallpaper and built beds). I am actually impressed with the work.

This summer has been pure joy. Long spells of warm sunny weather. Lots of fun in the garden. And then the rain started...

The small house does not feel any larger after a few days of rain. And one night going to bed, we discovered that the rain seeped in through the roof into the shed on the back wall... Lovely...

Up onto the roof. Into the dark. And rain...

I did not really know what to look for. But even a complete amateur could not miss it: some of the corner coverings had started to crumble. Up onto the roof with everything waterproof we could find. A small sheet of plastic, a couple of plastic table cloths and a couple of loose roof gutters. Luckily the quick fix helped!

Our local hardware store had the necessary tools and after a dry day or so the roof was ready for some fixing. It was almost dissapointingly quick! Since then the weather has been quite nice. Still, I am sort of hoping for a real bout of rain during the summer. I do not want to wait until autumn to test if the roof is yet again waterproof!

Country life inside city limits

I am a computer scientist. In live in Oslo, Norway. Downtown, within five minutes walk of everything. Nicely urban.

In August 2007 I got a an allotment garden with a small house (cottage, really). This is my first country house. This is my first garden. This is the first summer spent in my house in my garden.

The garden is about 400 square meters. When we took over, the house and garden had been empty for almost two years. It looked and felt like a secret garden!

2007 was spent fixing the inside and getting some control over the garden. 2008 was the first garden season. I got a grape vine (Frankenthauler) and planted a lot of sweet peas, a childhood favourite of mine. The summer of 2008 was already planned, so we missed most of the summer last year.

Now I am experiencing country life for the first time, staying in the garden throught the summer. A great experience with some unexpected side effects.