Starting out

Hello and welcome…..

Having recently taken on an allotment knowing very little (or rather nothing) about gardening I figured it might be fun to blog my progress. Both for my own benefit and for the curiosity of anyone who might be interested. I intend to keep up to date on my progress so I guess the best place to start would be at the beginning, which was about two weeks ago.

I had been searching for an allotment for several weeks with little luck. I found the council very unhelpful, or rather totally incompetent. Due to their call routing system it was virtually impossible to ring anyone directly so you had to log a call with the central desk who would then pass it over to the relevant department. From what I can work out the relevant department would then ignore that information. Whilst I can see the merits of such a system, it kind of falls on its ass when no one ever gets back to you? Technically, even though I now have an allotment, they still owe me a phone call from four weeks ago. So much for a 3 day ring back promise. Anyway, I am digressing.

So I eventually found a plot following advice from a very helpful and friendly member of the forums at ‘Grow Your Own’. I popped down the suggested site and met up with a couple of the allotmenteers who where more then happy to show me round and offer me a cuppa. They even told me that they knew that there was a half plot free and they would get a member of the committee to ring me. Up until this point I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it was going to be a matter of years before I got an allotment. Later that evening I received the phone call and I was told that they had one full and two half plots on offer. I excitedly arranged to go and view the potential plots the following evening so that I could get in before anyone else.

The next evening both my wife and I arrived on site to choose our plot. Initially I had anticipated that I would prefer a half plot, but soon succumbed to the temptation of the full plot. Apparently the people I had met on my previous visit where taking bets upon which plot I would take and they where very surprised by my choice of the full one.

As you can imagine, it was a little over grown…

After making my initial attack with a pair of hedge cutters, some of the other guys on the site took pity on me and assisted my clearance efforts with a petrol strimmer. A couple of hours later it looked like this.

Following several lengthy planning sessions with my wife we decided how we would lay the site out. Due to the over hang of the trees at the back and the direction of the sun we opted to position our shed and chickens (future project) towards the back of the plot. From her plans I was then able to calculate where my beds would start. I decided I would have raised(ish) beds, mainly because I like the way they look. The soil seamed pretty good apart from the massive volume of stones. So following a couple of days diggin

g, shifting, sifting and carpentry (by the wife) things are starting to take shape. So far I have planted up two of the beds. The first has some donated cauliflower seedlings in, along with some turnip, radish and broccoli seeds. The second has been sown with carrots and parsnips. I think to begin with my choice of plants in each bed is going to be a little random, but I figured it was best to just get some stuff growing to begin with. Ill be more vigilant next year when I have the plot the way I would like it.

Progress will be slow, but hopefully steady…