Green Lane Allotments

In the first of her regular guest blogs from Green Lane Allotments, Susan Garrett introduces her plot and gets us excited about allotment gardening.

My husband and I took on our first plot in the late 1980s and gradually the area that we garden has grown to 5 plots. Before renting an allotment we had a vegetable patch in our garden but being keen gardeners we didn’t have the space to grow all the ornamental and edible plants that we wanted. I have to admit to being a bit reluctant. I imagined an allotment site to be a place where old men built rickety sheds from whatever rubbish they could find. The reality wasn’t quite that but at that time few women were in evidence on site and many tenants were much older than we were. Many of the tenants kept homing pigeons so the weekends had them waiting for their returning birds which they seemed to be able to spot and recognise from miles away.

The Green Lane Allotments site has 59 plots. There are 46 registered tenants as quite a number of tenants have multiple plots. This mainly dates back to when the site was almost derelict in the 1990s and tenants took on extra plots rather than see them become overgrown.

Obviously not everything in the garden is forever rosy. Our allotment site along with many others around the country suffers from the neglect of preceding years. All the plots are now rented and we have a waiting list of prospective tenants. One of our major tasks is to improve the security of our site. We have managed to replace part of our dilapidated fencing but the largest section still needs replacing and it is almost impossible to gain the funding that we need to do this. Improved security is needed as from time to time we suffer from theft and also mindless vandalism.

This year, along with many other gardeners across the country we have had to contend with the problems caused after spreading contaminated manure. After quite a bit of research into manure – sad I know – we have come to the conclusion that we will be giving manure a wide berth. The soil on our site is heavy clay which means that it becomes boggy in wet weather and rock hard when it dries out. For this reason we tend to sow seeds in the greenhouse and then transplant, where this is impossible such as when sowing carrots we sow seeds in drills of compost. Another problem is caused by shade cast from conifers growing in a neighbouring garden. This means that during winter and early spring soil is often frozen and unworkable.

As usual when growing on an allotment site successes and failures balance out. We had a bumper harvest of squash, something we haven’t really grown in previous years. The plants seemed to find their way in amongst everything so that were forever coming across fruits that we had missed. Courgettes also seem to do really well each year – and keep up a constant supply as do runner beans. Fortunately both freeze well.

Some failures were down to the poor weather over the growing season, we had a complete lack of success in growing melons. We were also hit once again by the dreaded blight which ruined our tomato crops both outdoors and inside the greenhouse. Fortunately although the potato plants were also hit we cropped plenty of potatoes. Less productive than usual were the sweet corn and plum trees. On the other hand our apple trees did really well.

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