Top tip:
It's not just important to mark plants when planting out but also clearly label seeds and seedlings to avoid confusion later on. Pinch out outdoor grown cordon tomatoes after they have set fruit on 5 trusses. Remove lower leaves if they look a little crowded.
One important thing when growing any seedlings is to mark the varieties well. Something I failed to do earlier this year when I grew two varieties of tomato - 'Garden Pearl' and 'Alicante' (or 'Moneymaker' - it's a mystery plant). Both sets of seedlings did well and once the risks of frost were over I proudly planted them out. I couldn't label them as I couldn't remember what varieties they were and which was which but they looked happy and I gave them a good feed of tomato fertilizer to set them off on their way. So far so good.
Unfortunately it turns out 'Garden Pearl' is a trailing bush variety. There are two types of tomato - bush and cordon (also sometimes known as indeterminate). The bush one grows as a bush and you don't need to pinch out sideshoots and the cordon one grows as, you guessed it, a cordon so in one main stem and you remove side stems and stems that form in the leaf joint so that the fruit produced by the main stem can get all the goodness. As you can see, once the seedlings really got going the difference in plant types is pretty obvious.
This particular bush variety is also a trailing variety and very suited to hanging baskets and pots but not so great at ground level. Bernard suggested I lift the tomatoes on straw to improve air circulation and protect the fruit from the earth - this is supposed to ward off a bad disease called blight where the leaves turn black and the plants collapse.
I also have a couple of other plant varieties - marmande (a large beefsteak tomato) and baby plum tomatoes and another mystery one picked up at a local plant fair.
I have just read that it is a good idea to remove lower leaves to allow air to circulate and let the sun in and the fruit to ripen. Also we should pinch out the growing tip when the fifth truss of flowers has set flowers. this allows the plant to concentrate it's efforts on growing the existing fruit without wasting energy on creating new fruit that will be still too small and unripe before the frosts come and stop harvesting. I tried to do this on my cordon plants but I fear they may have gone too far. I have roped them in as much as possible as they were flopping over the other plants. I did snap off some of the stems that had grown in the leaf joins and replanted them as tomatoes often can grow roots from cuttings. Again, I fear this may be too late in the season but will keep an eye out.
While I did have a tomato ripening on the 12th July that was from a plant that had been raised in a greenhouse I suspect so further on in the growing cycle. The 'Garden Pearl' cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen up now and I suspect we are in for a bit of a glut - over 500g collected today but I worry they are a little pink and watery and I might have to be better at feeding them next year.
Top tip: Know your weeds and don't dismiss them all as enemies.
Quite apart from the hackneyed phrase that a weed is just a plant growing where you don't want it, weeds can actually be quite useful.
They can attract beneficial insects if they have attractive flowers such as dandelions.
They can improve the minerals in the nitrogen fixers, clover.
They can be edible - apparently chickweed is a good salad leaf as is dandelion. Brambles of course provide fruit but need to be kept in check. Nettles are also very nutritious and can be used in a potato champ or soup. In fact this was the first official crop from my plot - I made a delicious nettle and potato soup (basically chicken broth, cubed potatoes, onions, nettles and salt boiled up and chucked into the blender).
They can also create great fertilisers. Both comfrey and nettles can be turned into 'tea'. Pop the leaves into a bucket with water and wait for them to rot down a bit. Pongy, but a very effective fertiliser if diluted and fed to tomatoes, beans, sweetcorn and squash and other hungry vegetables.
I still haven't found a use for other weeds such as bindweed or couch grass but watch this space.
I am not just greedy in terms of growing or shopping, I also love food. And hate waste. At the same time I try to stop my greed from expanding my waistline so tend to cook healthily avoiding cream, butter, salt and too much sugar but have been known to indulge occasionlly and have a weakness for cheese.
This is a simple weekday recipe that you can adapt to whatever you have to hand at home but it's perfect to use up a glut of courgettes and tomatoes. It would serve 4 or else you can portion it up for a healthy packed lunch - it's good hot or cold.
3-4 courgettes - sliced on the diagonal
1 butternut squash - chopped into chunks
1 can chopped tomatoes
1-2 tbsp tomato concentrate
1 onion roughly chopped or sliced
Garlic powder and mustard to taste
Scatter in some herbs - I used ras el hanout (a Morroccan spice blend)
80g plain couscous
1 drained can of chick peas
Put the lot into a slow cooker and cook on low for 4-5 hours until it's all soft. Blend half of it into a chunky soup texture and mix in a large bowl with the couscous. Cover until the couscous has fluffed up (should be fine in 15 mins max). Roughly chop the remaining vegetables, drain the chick peas and mix in with the couscous. Healthy, speedy and ideal for summer.
PS This is a very versatile dish and you can leave out the couscous and serve the vegetables as a side dish (seen this refered to as a tumbet) or whizz it up in a blender as a thick soup or pasta sauce (thicken it first).
26.07.10
It is not just food, plants and land that I am greedy for. I obsessively buy books and magazines to help me learn more and find new ways of growing and cooking produce. My current measure of if a book is a good cookery book is the variety of courgette and potato related recipes it offers.
Some books defy classification into gardening or cooking as some have cleverly combined the two but tend to skimp on detail for either.
Both
Food from your garden and allotment (Reader's Digest)
- Billed as all you need to grow, cook and preserve your own fruit and vegetables, this is a very comprehensive compendium of fruit, herbs and vegetables. It is excellent on how to grow and care for your plants and for this rigour we can forgive it's brevity on how to cook the produce – besides other books cover this more extensively and with better credentials. What it does have is an excellent section on preserving fruit and vegetables with a good variety of recipes. It goes into the difference between pickles, relishes and chutneys and even has a section on making wines – my own personal new area of focus. NB suggests a 3 bed rotation system)
Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook – Kathryn Hawkins
- Recipes ordered by course rather than vegetable
- One Swiss chard recipe – Swiss chard with sweet spice
- 4 courgette recipes (with eggs and chorizo, summer veg and pesto meatball pasta bake, tagine of chicken and autumnal vegetables, and muffins)
Cooking
Delia – The Frugal Cook
Delia – Kitchen Garden
- How to grow the plants (with advice by Gay Search) and some recipes by Delia
The Cook's Scrapbook (Reader's Digest)
- A return to traditional recipes organised like a cook's notebook with wisdom on seasonality, growing tips and a strong section on preserving and game
The Great Allotment Cookbook (GAIA)
- Comprehensive and laid out by season – courgettes here are classified in Autumn despite me enjoying the onset of our glut in mid July
Tender – Nigel Slater
- Very comprehensive and inspirational cook book devoted to vegetables – I can't wait until his fruit volume comes out (though it will frustrate me as I don't have all those lovely fruit yet).
- Excellent on Potatoes and Courgettes – chard recipes are limited
Using the Plot – Paul Merrett (noticed it has been renamed to 'The Allotment Chef' in paperback version)
- A humorous book written by a chef taken with the passion to be self sufficient. Pleasing to see that others have similar challenges when starting out and definitely reliable on the recipe front – very good on variations on the crushed potato theme
The Ration Book diet – Mike Brown, Carol Harris, CJ Jackson
- Going right back to basics – the original driver to get Britain growing and self sufficient. Based on newly discovered science about nutritional values and a desire to reduce dangerous importing of food from the colonies, the British government encouraged the home front to a) waste less b) grow more themselves and c) cook more healthily.
- This actually is now mirrored in our desire to not over-cook vegetables, to move to a more vegetable based diet rather than eating red meat, to grow food organically (though mechanisation, fertilisers and pesticides meant that women found the arduous job of farming easier and more productive) and to eat locally and seasonally
- Good recipe for Nettle soup and nettle champ
Perfect preserves – Hilaire Walden
- Good for using up gluts through jams and chutneys
A Greener Life - Clarissa Dickinson Wright, Johnny Scott
- Old school skills includes a section on preserves and foraging (possibly more useful than spinning and butchering)
Gardening
Allotment Gardening – Kevin Forbes
- Pocket sized and hard backed – should survive the rigours of the plot well
Your organic allotmenteer – Ian Spence, Pauline Pears
- Sensible approach and comprehensive without being preachy
- Four bed rotation system recommended (potatoes put with squashes & tomatoes)
- Good on green manure
Alan Titchmarsh How to Garden series – Vegetables and herbs
Dr Hessyan series
– Very good, reasonably-priced specialised books on vegetables and fruit. Also with compact pocket editions.
Top tip:
Prepare the ground well, water in and follow spacing guidelines. Don't avoid thinning seedlings out - it's a false economy. Be patient (or at least, sow fast growing plants next to slower growing plants.) If you can't grow seedlings at home because of space or you can't be bothered - cheat and buy plug plants. Label sowings unless you have an amazing memory.
25.07.10
Sowing seems to be some form of magic or alchemy. From such tiny things, amazing plants appear and grow. You create drills and water them on a wet and cold day in spring, drop seeds in at the right spacing. And then wait. And wait.
Then, once you've almost forgotten what you sowed (a learning for next time is a more rigorous labelling system – marking variety & sowing date) a tiny shoot pops up. This is an important time and you need to water them, keep them weed free and generally cosset them. Sometimes it is tough to recognise them from weeds and in some instances they are so tiny it is best to wait till they grow up a bit so that you can spot the difference and thin them properly.
Another learning is to believe the books when they say not to sow things all at once otherwise you will end up with a glut. Successional planting allows for you to plan ahead and spread the harvest. Some plants, such as Swiss Chard, just keep on giving and you don't need many of them to get a good crop from them. Others, such as french beans, need more plants to get a really good continuous crop in sufficient amounts.
Of course, some seeds, such as radish and salads appear (and grow) faster than others and they are perfect to sow along with slower maturing plants but it's worth keeping an eye out that the other plants don't start to need more room or overshadow the seedlings.
Finally, think ahead to when gaps will start appearing. Having harvested the early potatoes, I have a cleared space that is begging for plants while in another area my courgettes are squashed (pardon the pun) in too close. If I had prepared some french beans, sweetcorn and more squash then I could have planted things up there. As it is I think I may have left it too late and will have to concentrate on beetroot, salad and radishes.
Before....
And after.....
Top tip:
Experiment with fast growing plants. Keep records of when things are planted and when they start to crop.
21.07.10
It seems it depends. On what? On the variety, the vegetable and the time of year.
Some packets promise salads within 3 weeks and radishes in weeks and I tried to put this to the test – admittedly during a fairly brutal heatwave but it's all in the name of science.
I can see signs of some radishes, runner beans and salads that have appeared within 2 weeks of sowing – how long they will take to mature we will have to wait and see. There are also some beetroot seedlings but I suspect they will take longer.
I also bought at Hampton court flower show a Russian lemon cucumber that promised to be ready in 50 days so that's the end of August – we will have to wait and see.
Beetroot seedlings
Top tip:
Take time out from all the work to talk to your neighbours - you never know what you might learn. Besides, it's just nice to get to know new people.
20.07.10
Having an allotment is more than just growing food for yourself, it is about connecting with a variety of people in your area. Much like your family, you cannot choose your allotment neighbours but you are united by a common interest and it is in your interest to get along with them as it makes life much more pleasant. Whether it is advice, help with the watering or free plants there are great benefits of building relationships with your fellow allotmenteers.
Within just four months I have received spinach, peppers, curly kale, Spanish onion plants, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes, a fabulous metal rod for holding my hose, help with carrying scaffolding boards and eaten some wonderful broad beans, spring greens and cima di rapa (a fast growing sprouting broccoli type of plant). These last 4 days we have had winds of over 45km per hour and my immediate neighbour has kindly helped piece together my runner bean framework. I've also had a convivial drink and a chat with a few others along the way.
This generosity of spirit spreads around – some seeds here, tomato plants there or the offer of a building job is offered in return. Even non-allotmenteers start to benefit as the gluts become so great that the freezer and belly is full of chard, tomato or courgette.
My Spanish onion courtesy of a fellow allotmenteer
Top tip:
Keep a record of what you are harvesting and when so that you can plan for gluts. Balance the flavour and satisfaction of growing your own with the cost of buying it in - if it doesn't taste better or save you money, it's not really worth giving it limited space.
26.06.10
I have been harvesting cut and come again salads and chard for some time now and had may first sweet and juicy birthday strawberry (in early June) but things are speeding up now. I have been lifting the first of the potatoes since the 14th June but today I got 1.73kg and I feel this is just the beginning.
Slightly anal, I know but I have been keeping an excel record of the main crops by weight and date harvested. Between 26th June and 10th July I harvested 2.75kg of mangetout. Thinking that the plants were spent (and some were very yellow) I cleared half but left the healthiest plants to see what would happen. By the 20th July there was a new crop and I'll keep you posted on the total haul.
Courgettes are notoriously prolific and my heart sank when I read that one plant produced enough for a family of four until September as I had planted at least 6 plants. The first proper lot of courgettes arrived on the 7th July and by 24th July I had harvested 7.77kg of courgettes (and that doesn't include an enormous marrow that I missed). I have had to become pretty inventive in finding new recipes to cope with this and am on the look out for a third freezer to accommodate the loot.
Radishes, a plant normally so easy to grow they give it to children, have more or less failed me but I am persevering. Carrots were pretty when pulled but slow to germinate and so cheap in shops I am not sure if I want to repeat them next year.
When wandering around the allotment it is hard to avoid plot envy – one plot's sweetcorn are magnificent and has grown a turnip enormous enough to make Baldrick proud (it must be all that water), anothr neighbour has inherited an amazing collection of fruit and one green fingered allotmenteer has raised infamously hard to grow cauliflower with impressively large heads. My Chinese neighbour has a perfectly neat plot (I must do better next time) and one of theTurkish ladies has built little earth walls around her plants which seems like a good idea to adopt in later years.
One other plot has not fared as well - most of the plot is left fallow and the gooseberry bushes are groaning under the weight of soon to be wasted fruit. For a greedy person like me that has aspirations for a fruit zone this frustrates the hell out of me – I wonder if I can wangle another plot?
Just a small sample of the courgette glut.
Top tip:
Keep an eye on the weather report but don't rely on it. Protect plants if frosts are predicted and keep watering in dry weather.
10.03.10
Never have I been so interested in the weather. Something that formerly only governed what I was going to wear, if we could entertain outside and if I could get a tan now was going to affect what I needed to do on the plot. It was going to dictate how easy it was going to be to prepare the ground, if it was the right time to sow, if things needed protection or watering and how quickly they needed harvesting (and how much there would be to harvest). It also meant that I found a positive side to formerly hated weather like rain – it just meant that it was good for the plants and I could delay an in depth watering session.
Every month I will be keeping a record of the weather courtesy of the Met Office so that year on year I will be able to build up a picture of seasonal changes and not be surprised when we get frosts. This year has been very dry and sunny even after the late frosts and cold weather that delayed a lot of planting out and sowing – there are even threats of water bans.
31.03.10
March – a month of two halves, weather wise.
The first two weeks were generally dry and fine, although it was rather cold with some night frosts. The second half saw more changeable weather with rain at times
Mostly fine and dry until mid-month, with some overnight frosts, then becoming more changeable with wind and rain at times. The monthly mean temperatures were close to the 1971-2000 normals across almost all areas. Rainfall was somewhat below average in most places. Sunshine totals were generally somewhat above average.
30.04.10
April – where were the showers?
The first week was unsettled but after this high pressure over or close to the UK brought plenty of dry and fine weather until the last few days. Daily maximum temperatures were above average and reached 20 °C in places on several days. However, daily minimum temperatures were close to normal with some frosts. Overall, April was a dry month, with less than 50% of the monthly average rainfall recorded in many areas and only about 30% of average in parts of northern England and East Anglia.
Provisionally, it ranks thirteenth driest in a 100-year series, but was not as dry as April 2007. This does not bode well for a hosepipe ban and we can only hope the wet summers of the last two years will insulate us. The dry weather has hit particularly hard in the south where totals were over 150% of normal locally. Provisionally, it ranks fifth sunniest in a series from 1929, similar to April 1990 but not as sunny as April 2007.
31.05.10
May – showing the truth behind the saying never cast a clout before May is out
For all us blasé Southerners May was a bit of a shock – after an extremely cold winter we thought we had seen the last of the cold, especially as April was so nice. Halfway through the month, though, the frosts hit – damaging some vegetable plants and delaying planting out of tender seedlings.
The first half of May saw cool weather, with a mainly northerly or north-easterly airstream. After a showery first few days, there was plenty of fine weather but with some overnight frosts. Temperatures recovered during the second half of the month, with a very warm spell from 20th to 24th. Overall, mean temperatures were normal or slightly below the 1971–2000 normal, by about 1.0 °C in parts of south-east England. May was a dry month in all areas, with less than 50% of the average rainfall recorded in parts of central southern England. Provisionally, it ranks tenth driest in a 100-year series, and is the driest May since 1991. Sunshine totals were up to 10% above normal.
Top tip:
Get to grips with what you have before starting on new projects. Don't get lured in by seed packets - think about sharing or swapping with friends.
14.04.10
One of the dangers of being greedy is that, by the very nature of greed, you want it all. You refuse to relinquish the opportunity to grow even one plant and want to try them all – raspberries (summer and autumn fruiting), rhubarb, blackberries, you covet your neighbours tayberries and loganberries, you want plums, strawberries and a ballerina apple tree. And that's just the fruit.
In blind denial of the actual size of your plot, your plans verge on the grandiose and you start to have ambitions that would make the Eden Project seem paltry in comparison. This gets even worse when faced with such a harmless thing as a seed catalogue (or website). It is all the easier to pop these little packets of promises into you shopping basket and not take into account the fact that each packet is more than enough to keep you in peas/ salad/ beetroot (delete as appropriate) for the next two years so why you need 3 of them is anyone's guess.
My particular weakness is for a bargain. There is nothing I like more than browsing the pound shops for garden related goodies. You soon find out that the old adage of 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' works in reverse in a poundshop – focus too much on how much you are saving and you lose sight of the fact that many items at £1 still add up to many pounds. I have gone mad at the pound shop on many occasions: netting (both pea and anti bird – not sure of the difference), battery operated lights for the inside of my lock up, seeds, fertilisers, watering cans, garden ties, canes, hose heads and trowels that bend or snap (a less successful purchase among many good ones). One word of caution it is worth bearing in mind when not only the quality and whether you really need it but also check if you can get it cheaper at a mainstream shop – sometimes £1 for an item isn't such a good deal if it is 89p in Sainsbury's.
Among these delusions of grandeur, it is important to develop a sense of proportion and ask yourself which will I need most of? Chard is long lasting and a cut and come again crop so, unless you let it bolt, you won't need too many packets of seed as you will get more than enough to last throughout the growing season. Equally, my husband hates beetroot and despite trying to cook it in a variety of ways he won't budge on that so it would be crazy for me to sow too many of them as i can't eat that many all alone.
A word of warning to the congenitally greedy – it might be tempting to ignore recommendations to thin seedlings but that would be a false economy. I chose not to thin radishes and ended up with many woody sticks rather than swollen, ripe, pink radishes. What started out as a desire to grow more resulted in the waste of all the plants.
Finally, it is always very tempting to buy ready grown pots from nurseries but do consider your return on investment. A single Borlotti bean plant won't generate enough beans for a meal but will create enough beans to multiply next year's crop (perhaps I should have harvested them more often and they would have created more beans). A ready grown plant of tomatoes with fruit already formed looks inviting until you work out that it only has enough fruit to fill a punnet but costs three times as much as a punnet in the shops. Once you factor in your time and effort that tomato plant stop being so appealing.
B&Q bought Borlotti beans waiting to be recycled into seeds for next year.
Top tip:
Have a plan but stay flexible. consider the essentials such as access to water and which way the garden is facing. Leave space for courgettes and squashes to grow - more space than you thought was necessary.
24.07.10
“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” - M. C. Escher
“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” - Stephen Sondheim
I have to admit I like creating something out of nothing. I like imposing structure where previously there was disorder. I also love a plan. After reading vast amounts of books and websites, I drew up a plan. To scale.
In my favour, I wasn’t as anal a fellow new allotmenteer who was seeing marking in each individual plant on an incredibly detailed plan of his plot. I just created zones of planting and winged it from there.
I took into account which direction most of the allotment faced (South), where there were hard structures already that would be hard to move (water butt, wall and wooden posts formerly used for runner beans), I also started creating zones. I decided I would turn the former runner bean area into my fruit cage (or actually fruit area until I get around to doing cage things to it) where fruit can grow permanently. I highlighted an area for compost that had access but that wasn’t in a prime area – this will move again a little next year as it takes up too much space.
I made a list of all the fruit and vegetables I like and that I would like to try to grow. I then grouped them by type. Books differ on what is and isn’t in these groups (and how many groups there are) but roughly speaking there are the brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, sprouts and such like), legumes (peas and beans), roots (carrots, swede, beetroot, onions, garlic etc) and everything else (tomatoes, squash, courgette, sweetcorn, potatoes, peppers). In fact there is also a final group of permanent vegetables and fruit such as asparagus, rhubarb, currants, strawberries and raspberries.
Once you have these crops it is advised to rotate them every year to avoid build up of disease and to avoid the same crops over using certain minerals in the soil.
Some of the features I liked about my allotment also meant that I had to sacrifice some growing space - access to compost, the water butt and a path that was installed to reach it. There is also an arcane rule about how far away from the wall I am allowed to plant in case it creates damp. This means that I am in process of finding new ways to fit in more plants. I am reclaiming an area around the corner and starting to use wasted space under climbers and between slow growing plants like cabbages.
Other unspoken rules that I have been made aware of and had to allow for are that you should keep bushy plants away from paths and you shouldn’t grow tall things where they will cast shadow – a neighbour got into big trouble for growing Jerusalem artichokes and letting them get out of control.
Overall I have underestimated the space some crops will need and despite following packet instructions my courgettes are so close together now it is almost impossible to bury among the leaves to reach the little green fingers. The suspected summer squash (Patty Pan) is making a break for Kent through the brassicas (cue much head shaking from a neighbour who holds brassicas very dear to his heart).
The current layout of the allotment (or lottie as some afficianados call theirs) is based on a pre-agricultural revolution style: a patchwork of crops fitted in where the will took me and in-filling when something has been harvested. While this is attractive I do admire the more uniform rows and neat zones of other plots. They also have the advantage of allowing easier hoeing without fear of cutting an emergent plant off in its prime.
Top tip:
Take things slowly and don't overtax your back. Use a fork rather than a spade - it's lighter. Avoid compacting your freshly dug earth by creating pathways. Consider raised beds or a no dig system to reduce work later. Potatoes are an efficient way of breaking up soil and bringing nutrients to the surface.
27.03.10
One month on and I have finished digging over the whole plot.
I was told to take it easy and that I wouldn’t have the plot ready in first year and to just plant potatoes as they are great at clearing plots of weeds and breaking up the soil but I am greedy and impatient so was determined to get it finished in time for a proper April sowing of a wide variety of vegetables. Luckily I have time on my hands to devote to this and the threat or promise of any possible future full time job has made me want to make the most of the time I do have available now.
On average I did 3 hours every day of digging. I calculate it has taken around 75 hours to prepare the ground and clear the plot of weeds. I do hope that with regular harvesting and work I won’t have to do this every year. I'm sure all the work is very healthy and my arms definitely look more toned but my back also complained a fair amount. I can sympathise with the wartime cartoons of men bent over double after their efforts to Dig for Victory. At least I don't then have to go to work on top of it.
I am planning on building raised beds in the future to cut down on the amount that I walk on the growing areas – this should make digging much easier. My neighbour spotted me hopping like a mountain goat (or a flatlands goat) from one part of the plot to another and was horrified at the amount of damage I might be doing to the quality of the soil. He insisted I get some scaffolding boards to initially create permanent pathways and eventually, in the autumn, create these raised beds.
Top tip:
When moving onto your new plot, stop to say hello to your neighbours - it will make life easier in the long run.
10.03.10
It turns out that there is no typical allotment owner (not that we own our plots – we merely rent it and tend it until we can't cope any more or get bored or move on). The view of plot holders as gnarled old men isn't entirely true – I would say that 40% of the plots on my allotment are tended to by women. Half of those are Turkish and do weird and wonderful things with grape leaves and courgette flowers – mainly stuff them (from my understanding a mix of rice, onions, pine nuts, mince, spices, lemon and mint).
True, there is a mix of traditionalist and experimental approaches – one guy makes pies for an old school butchers and used to be a boxer while we also have a long haired organic fan who is doing away with compost bins as such and starting an open trench system (I think - must look it up). My immediate neighbour used to be a tanner in Ireland and concentrates his growing efforts on mainly onions, cabbages, turnips and potatoes. Granted he has branched out to sweetcorn and a couple of tomato plants but he is the king of stew vegetables and there is very little about potatoes that he doesn't know. It seems to be that as long as you can grow well and keep your plot tidy, anything goes.
We are a pretty international lot with a couple of West Indian allotmenteers, 3 plots (at least) being tended to by a Turkish contingent and one Chinese guy . This Chinese man has an enviably neat plot and is growing some fascinating things including enormous marrows, climbing melons (I think but they look long so they might be cucumbers) and unidentifiable but tasty plants. He doesn't really speak any English so it's even harder to pick up tips from him than it is from the Turkish ladies.
There are also a few younger people tackling a plot but, as they work, they are seen less regularly and are examples of what you can grow without putting in herculean efforts and time.
Most people take the time to stop and chat to anyone else that happens to be on the allotment and you can always pick up some tips, gossip or recipes while you're weeding.
Top tip:
Be patient but do check in with the council regularly when on the waiting list to see how far up you are. Things to consider when offered a plot are size, access (paths or not), storage, existing structures that can be used, condition (weedy and what sort of weeds - brambles, couch grass and Japanese knotweed are awful while bindweed and annuals are manageable), electricity (lucky you!), water, facilities (our allotments are apparently the only ones in Lewisham with a flushing toilet - very useful) and soil type (acidity and structure - clay/ sandy/ loamy). You can't get a perfect plot but you can be prepared. Through that preparation and research you can make it as perfect as possible.
02.03.10
The call came out of the blue and was as welcome as winning the lottery.
I had put my name on the Lewisham waiting list for an allotment almost 6 years ago just after having moved into our house. This had to be done by fax as there was no online system at the time – I had selected 3 top choices mainly based on the fact they were near my house and that their conversion rate for number of plots and number of people already on the waiting list seemed marginally better than other plots around Lewisham. I didn’t note at the time that there were no water facilities which would have been a problem especially with the amazing summer we have had. Thankfully by the time I moved up the list they had installed some water butts around the allotment connected to the mains.
I met with the allotment secretary who offered me the choice of two plots – one slightly smaller than the other but with the advantage of a water butt on the land and a wall bordering it while the larger plot needed more clearing as it had been left unworked for longer. Assured that the smaller plot would produce more than enough for a couple, I chose that one (but worried that I had made a mistake as both my husband and I are very greedy and I definitely work on the basis that bigger must be better).
Mine all mine....
It may not look like much but I love it.
And this is the plot after 25 days of digging.
Job done (well only just begun actually)
