February saw me fast becoming one of B&Q's most regular customers.  I daresay I could have sourced the wood for the raised beds from a timber merchant, but the convenience of one stop shopping won through, even if it meant shuttling multiple loads in a Vauxhall Corsa, and generally ruining the interior of an otherwise sound vehicle. After hearing what chemicals are used in wood preservatives (arsenic, chromium and assorted bad boy compounds) and how they can leach into the soil, I decided upon untreated wood as the safest option.  I planned to have 23 beds, each measuring 8 foot x 4 foot, which in metric terms is just over 168 meters of wood that would need to be cut and given a double coat of water repellant paint.   In practice this took longer than expected to carry out, especially as the paint often took a week to dry in our cold damp garage, and the overall exercise wasn't completed until well into April. On weekends when it wasn't raining I continued digging the beds, but it was slow progress, and I seemed to be recreating the conditions encountered in the Somme.  I also suspected that the previous tenant had been cultivating docks but got quite proficient at slicing the clods to extract the huge tap roots.  The main paths, and especially the area around the gate and compost heaps was now a full blown marsh, so I laid down plastic sheets in the more problematic areas and covered them with wood chippings, which meant I no longer sunk deeper than my Wellington boots as I went to and fro. Although not a huge fan of potatoes, I thought it would be sacrilege to have an allotment and not include them.  Potatoes  are traditionally planted on St. Georges Day, but the chitting process takes 6 weeks or so.  You basically leave them to sprout in a room that's not too hot, not too cold, not light and not too dark (fussy buggers).  A trip to our local garden centre Peter Barretts found me a bag of seed potatoes allegedly resistant to everything but toxic waste.  Kate wasn't overly impressed with our spare room becoming host to multiple egg boxes filled with spuds, but the promise of roast potatoes later in the year gave them a temporary respite.