Summer 2019 - The Allotment

Just as a refresher:

We got the allotment 10 years ago. It looked like this.

We spent years, and years, trying different things. The council had rotavated it before we got it, which chopped up all the weeds, and we struggled to overcome the clay, which sucked up any and all organic matter that we added to it.

After about 8 years, we tried woodchip. Thick woodchip mulches, but this didn't work.  It probably would have had we just left it to rot down but we wanted to get some growing out of it and it was allowing weeds and pests to overwinter and nothing really grew properly.

So just over a year ago we were going to give it up. And put a little polytunnel in at home for tomatoes. When I had a thought - what would I do if I inherited this plot at a school...and I would cover it with weed fabric, and bring in raised beds.

And then I discovered Pallet Collars.

We took a week off work.

Flattened the whole allotment, by raking out all the woodchip.

Then laid weed fabric [30m x 8m plot, £99 for the fabric].

I bought pallet collars. 27 at first. 

I grew over the winter of 2018; I had overwintering onions, spinach, lettuce, coriander and to be honest, we were eating very well through the whole of last winter.

This spring and summer has been bountiful. We've had the best potatoes ever, no slug damage. We've had salads, radishes, tomatoes, more carrots, squashes, garlic, broad beans, french beans - dwarf and climbing, onions, Kohl Rabi, kale [so much kale that I was bunching loads each week like a bunch of flowers, and leaving it at the end of the plot for the chickens down the road], I've got Yard Long Beans to grow, I've got parsnips growing now for winter, we've had strawberries, black, red and white currants, i've put tomatos from armpits into a one collar deep bed and they have gone mad, I've got amazing beetroot and even the later beetroot that was sown is bulking up, so much so that the last batch I sowed, Dobbie's Purple has grown so fast that i can use the best specimens for seed saving for next year.

We've had more crops out of these beds, since last September, then we have probably had out of the ground in the last 5 years.

So, I bought some more, and more and now i am probably at capacity for what we can eat.

So now I feel I am back on an even keel, I am going to try and go back to blogging about growing in these raised beds. They are awesome.