The Story of an Allotment
April 27, 2009 by erica
Filed under Allotments & Gardens, Featured Posts
Why an allotment and why now? Last year I finally got round to getting an allotment. I’d talked about it before, but my excuse was always lack of time. It’s not that I have loads of time now – I’m a fulltime mum to a 2 year old – but I have a willing helper to entertain, and an allotment seemed as good a way as any, of spending some of our time. Obviously, there are other benefits too : fresh air, exercise and of course, our own organically produced vegetables.
What did I have to do to get it? It took about 8 months to get a plot – I had my name down with 2 authorities as we live close to the boundary. We were offered one with our authority in September, but the site was run down and unsuitable for a toddler. Eventually, we were offered a plot on our closest allotment site and we got the keys in December. The site is a busy one, but our plot was fairly badly neglected. We had wanted to get the bulk of the digging out of the way before the frosts, but that proved impossible. We were still cutting back vegetation when the snows came. This meant we had to scale back our rather grandiose ideas about what we would plant.
What have we done so far? I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of our plot as it started out in December and the picture above shows the site in mid April with a fine crop of dandelions and dock. Since the thaw we have double dug 2 beds about 3 metres by 1.5 metres, added compost, planted and sowed. I’m afraid to say that we dug the easy bits first as this area was covered over with plastic last year so the vegetation was minimal and were able to get our spades in that much easier than elsewhere. I guess this means that it will take us longer to get our next beds dug.
The first bed contains our early potatoes and they are just starting to clear the ground after about 3 weeks in – we were starting to panic thinking they weren’t going to come up. We hope to be using these for salads and new potatoes in a couple of months.
Our second bed has onion sets (doing very well after 2 weeks in the soil), parsnip seeds, carrot seeds and garlic in it. It’s too early for the seeds to have come up yet, so I’m really got my fingers crossed as I understand parsnips are a bit tricky to grow.
How did we decide what to plant? So far it has been a mixture of what we have been given to sow and what we eat most of. Potatoes and onions are staples in our house so they were dead certs. Garlic seemed a easy option after our early success with onions. The parsnip and carrot seeds were freebies. We’re not looking to spend a fortune, so we have taken advantage of various free seed offers and we’re been given some seeds by friends.
What next? We are in a race against time to get more beds done so that we can more crops in before it is too late. In a few weeks time there won’t be as much available to plant that we could get a crop of this year, so we are pressing on as fast as we can. I have our maincrop potatoes chitting on top of my kitchen cupboards so I want to find them a home next.
I’ll be writing more about my allotment in the coming months so look out for further posts on the subject.
Related posts:
- The Story of an Allotment Continued…
- Allotment Update: End of an Era
- Allotment Update
- Allotment – Harvest and Getting Ready for Winter
- Allotment Update
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] A few weeks ago, I started to tell you about our allotment and now I thought I’d update you on our progress. If you want to catch up on the previous post, please click here. [...]
[...] since I last told you about our progress on the allotment. You can catch up on my initial post here and my last progress report here. Onions to the left, potatoes to the right and weeds [...]
[...] It’s about time I updated you again on our progress at the allotment. If you haven’t seen my previous posts, the story starts here. [...]
[...] only a little over a year ago since we got our plot – you can read about how we started out here. It was great to get our first harvest last year, but our stored potatoes and onions ran out a [...]
[...] a Comment I’m a great believer in encouraging children as readers of my allotment posts will know. My son is an enthusiastic participant in growing vegetables and he’s [...]