I think I need to clean my camera lens with something – everything’s looking a little foggy…
Anyway, after 2011 being a bit of a haphazard approach to allotmenteering, our watchword this year is ‘Organisation’.
This is our plot.
I accept that even without the fogging, it’s not particularly clear. So here is an outlined picture.
Corner A is rounded, reclaimed by the path, That’s our compost bin at B, next to which are our 8 brussel sprouts and one giant cabbage that was sold as the ninth brussel sprout. The rest of the BC line has some old courgette plants, a few small cabbages that weren’t masquerading as brussel sprouts and the remnants of potatoes. The half of the plot that looks like dead weeds along the A-D side is, unsurprisingly, dead weeds; the field of poppies and pot marigolds happily romping away there all this year have been uprooted and will become mulch. The Milk Bottle var. one pint, semi-skimmed has been an excellent crop this year.
And so yesterday, one girl went to dig. Went to dig a meadow.
It looks like I did more than I actually did – all I did was edge the new beds and chuck lumps into the middle. I didn’t dig the middle – I have lumbar back pain at the moment (and lifelong), as does Dad, so we’re switching to a no dig system. The idea is we chuck organic material on it, cover it up over winter, and then keep chucking organic material on it. I want edging to the beds so we have some chance of not walking on them, but edging is expensive and I haven’t yet found a recycled alternative.
There is a plan to this madness. I have a GrowVeg.com account, which is a nifty and cheap bit of online software for planning veg gardens. And this is the plan (click for full size):
Optimistic. It’s a five bed rotation system, a permanent bed and a “stuff” area for tool storage, baby plants etc.
Yellow: Potatoes/tomato family
Blue: Legumes (beans and peas) plus sweetcorn because Birdseye puts them together too.
Green: Brassicas and curcurbits (aka cabbage family and squash family)
Purple: Alliums (onion, leek, garlic, spring onions)
Orange: Root veg (carrots, parsnips and beets)
Red: permanent (soft fruits like raspberries, strawberries, and asparagus)
The top edge of the plan borders the neighbouring plot so it made sense to have structures and permanent plants there. I went for a five year rotation as we really like alliums and root veg. I mean, really like. The ordinary four bed rotation with root veg and alliums in one bed wasn’t going to cut it. We could have cut out the potatoes and toms as potatoes are cheap in the shops and toms got blight this year, but I’m gonna give the toms one more try. Joe Swift said he grew chillis in an allotment so that’s an option to – they can share the shelter I provide the toms, so it may be chillis and toms rather than potatoes in the yellow bed.
Today I took what was a tray full of baby strawberries I’d grown from seed (with a lot of help from Mum on the watering front) and repotted them mostly to one a pot. There is rather a range in size from the megabush in the bottom left and the 5p sized plants in the top right pot (there are four plants in there). These seeds took ages to germinate and evidently were then rather sporadic! These babies will be coddled over winter and planted out when the allotment beds warm up in spring.
To Do list is to continue to prep the beds and cover them up, and plant garlic. That’s it – everything else can wait til spring.
