Happy New Year. I hope everyone had a good break, and that you are now looking forwards to a productive year ahead.
As I write this, our first spell of really cold weather is forecast, so I hope you manage to get some leeks and parsnips and other winter veg home, before you can't dig them out of the ground. Remember February tends to be our coldest month.
The committee have been busy with various matters of admin. We have now set up a separate bank account for the gardening club, so that they can move quickly with their own events. A number of you, I know, have enrolled for the Kew trip in April. There are probably no seats left on the bus, but do remember that the monthly gardening club meetings are free to HRAA members to attend.
Please encourage your friends who are not allotmenteers but who may have an interst in gardening, to join the gardening club, because the more like-minded people we have in St Ives, the better. Quite simply, the more people we have enrolled as HRAA full or associate members, the more clout we have when talking to the council.
We have also after many months of trials, got an on line payment system for your HRAA subscriptions. The HRAA home page has been redesigned slightly, and improved so that you can find the payment options straight away. The on line payment method is PayPal. Note that you do not need a PayPal account, you can simply pay by credit card. Or you can carry out an electronic bank transfer. Thanks very much to Mark Bottoms for sorting out the HRAA PayPal account - it was not a simple, or quick exercise I can tell you!
Please tell any new allotment neighbours who ask about joining the association about this new facility, and tell them they can now pay on line. For anyone who finds printing off a bit of paper and sending it with a cheque or cash a problem, then hopefully on line payment will be a way forward.
We have just had a liaison meeting with the council. We raised various issues (John's notes are on line, on the Committee page of the web site), the most common one which had been brought to my attention recently, being the state of the roadway into the site. In part, this is messy because water and mud ran out of the car park, through the gateway and onto Hill Rise. This should improve now because the groundsmen have put a drain across the bottom of the car park which will take off some of the excess rainfall (a request from previous liaison meetings finally accomplished).
We have also offered that HRAA will invest with the council to improve some facilities. We had already made this decision at the AGM, and we have now agreed that we will, between us, install two new water butts in 2012. We have time in hand to plan for this before the dry weather comes (although I may well be eating my words if we have another dry April..... !). These new water tanks will most likely be sited in the central part of the original allotment site.
Remember if you have an question or comments relating to how we can improve facilities then please contact a member of the committee. If you want to get involved with improving things on site, or running social events, then we still have a couple of spaces on the committee.
So, I will leave you to get on with sowing this years seeds, and look forward to seeing you up on the allotment site now the days are getting longer.
Richard
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