Work on the allotment is coming along with the creation of a number of beds. I've been taking several approaches to this bearing in mind the allotment is overgrown with grasses. First step as you see on the above left is covering areas with black landscaping fabric. The grass dies or is at least suppressed by the absence of light.

 On one small bed I removed the fabric and applied a 'lasagna mulch'. First I covered the area with a couple of layers of brown cardboard from various delivery boxes. On top of this I laid a thick mulch of half rotted leaves. Any kind of compost will do but I happened to have bagfuls of soggy leaves from a Christmas tidy up which were well on the way to becoming leaf mold.
 The idea is that the cardboard lasts long enough to suppress the weeds but in due course rots and the mulch merges with soil. I've worked with this method on several community projects and it seems fairly effective. It's part of the 'no-dig' school of thought of gardening and growing. In a nutshell you keep adding to the soil structure rather than constantly turning it over thereby damaging it.
 I remember the first gardening book I bought in my teens advocated not just digging but double digging. Instinctively I thought it seemed counterproductive to be digging and turning over to the depth that the subsoil was being bought to the top, and the fertile top soil was ending up on the bottom.
Since then I have learned more of the extraordinary nature of soil structure and I think there is a lot of merit to no-dig approaches.

 Then again I do think there is a place for digging where it can help with overgrown areas and compacted or claggy soils, particularly early on. And digging can I think open up the soil structure in a beneficial way rather than simply obliterating many of the beneficial relationships which exist within it.
 So on this bed I removed the fabric and did some weeding and turning and sifting; first with a mattock then with a fork. The mattock is a great implement- it's basically a grubbing out kind of tool. I suspect something like it would have been among the first tools developed by our ancient ancestors.
 Anyway the aim of the exercise is to have several beds ready for spring planting. It's a work in progress but it's getting there...