Allotment Diary

For months and months i have planned to get our first year on the allotment documented, a plethora of things have got in the way, including the allotment!
So finally i have a day to get started. We got our allotment in November 2013, it had not been worked for a long time, and was terribly grown over with grass and weed.
Due to the weather and work we struggled to get a good start, but did get in our paths and our salvaged pallet collars.

So we went from a field to a field looking like the Somme! We paddled around there for weeks! the Mister putting paths in and a compost pile that had been accumulated over at least a decade, this though filled the majority of our raised beds.

The start of our flagged path, we rescued a lot of the flags from the area we live in, then went to a reclamation yard for some that had been sourced locally, it was important that as much as we could we got from round and about, even if we paid a small price for some of them.

The Mister put the path leading down the middle of the plot just for ease, we decided just to have one main path, some pathways made of reclaimed bricks, and some walkways made of rescued pallets, which meant that when we needed to weed, we could just move them and not lose much space.
The intention was to put the bricks between the raised beds, as these would be more of a permanent item.

The pallet walkways are so easy to put together and for ease are the best form of getting place to place and lifting as you go.

This photo fills me with dread!! After a week of in May just as the ground should have been ready for planting, I got ill with a chest infection so couldn’t go up to the plot. When we did go up, the onion beds and almost everything else had been taken over by weeds. It took the best part of 2 weeks, every day up there for 4 or 5 hours at a time to get the ground back to how it should be, free for the crops to grow.
This photo is after hours and hours of backbreaking work.

The beans, and raspberries all were under seige!

We got there!

Come June/July we had such a fantastic sense of achievement, when we saw our first crops growing and producing.


Lots and lots and lots of strawberries, such good croppers. This continue until October.

Our first crop of onions was like magic! my best crop for me of 2014, we use so many onions in our house, so this was our most useful grow.

Best onions in the world, sweet tasting, fresh!

One of our other brills sucesses were raspberries, we bought the canes (2nd year) from Aldi and planted them out in the Feb of 2014, amazingly for us, we must have had around 15 lbs of fruit from them, every day when we went up to the plot to work, we worked and then collected, as a jam maker it was so great to use my own produce for my makes.

As a first year went, we put hundreds of hours in to our plot, it was very much something we did together, which to be honest was the very best part of the adventure.
We continued to harvest until late October, we have had the best onions, cucumbers, yellow courgettes, so many strawberries that they were hard to keep up with.
I have hurt from top to toe and back again, found odd ways to weed to save my body from hell,! spend time with my other half, and tried the best courgette fritters !

We still have a tonne of work to do, part of our plot is stil all hard grass, so that is a priority as it is land we need for crops.

This is our plot a year after we started digging and growing, our winter crops ready to pick were savoy cabbages, kale and herbs, still well worth a trip up to pick and plot again for this year.