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Lessons from the allotment

Remember the wonderful new allotment? Well, it’s starting to look rather more lived-in now.

When I first arrived at my marvellous allotment in January of this year, I was so very, very happy. In front of me was the most amazing expanse of grass, waiting eagerly for me to start growing.

It has been a hard slog getting this plot up to scratch, but I’ve loved it. I spent months cutting the beds out, composting the turf and enriching the soil with horse manure, green manures and compost and plant teas. There is still so much to do, but here we are:

Now that there’s just one uncultivated bed (in the bottom right-hand corner, built as a lasagne bed and covered in a mustard green manure before it receives its final topping of horse manure for the autumn), the plot ticks over nicely. I spend an hour there each week, strimming the grass and weeding the beds on a rotation system. Normally I need to weed each bed every three weeks, and it helps that any part of the plot I’m not actually growing on remains grass. I decided to stick to a narrow bed and grass system, even though it means strimming every week, because I’d seen what had happened on other plots where the whole allotment had been dug over. The tenants on the plot to my right are very attentive, but have a monumental task of weeding all 100 metres of it, and the work never stops. There’s still plenty to be done on my half plot, but it feels entirely manageable for someone with a mad job who is married to a man with an even madder job. Life really is too short to be endlessly weeding, after all.

I’m currently not making the best use of my space, though. The beds could extend far further into the central path on the allotment, and I intend to underplant a lot of the fruit bushes with a dwarf comfrey and some other low-growing plants which offer a symbiotic relationship with the soil and the plants around them, offering more nutrients. The poppies you can see in the foreground here will make an appearance across the rest of the plot next year, particularly in the rows between the asparagus, which are the worst for weeding. I’ll also grow many more flowers: the sunflowers I’d intended to grow this year never materialised because I was disorganised, and I’m desperate to grow delphiniums after seeing them flourish on my neighbour’s plot. Next year will see more bee-friendly flowers on the plot, too: agastaches at the end of each row, and chives underneath the espalier apple.

It’s been an odd year so far: the weather has not been kind, especially to plants like pumpkins. Mine are only really getting going now, which is very late in the season indeed. But there’s always next year, and really, I’m thrilled to have this little space and to have made it mine.

One Response

  1. Ann Eyre

    Very impressive - good to see it all going so well - I like the poppies and gladioli too!!! Will look forward to our next visit!

    Reply

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