Allotment clearing, tours and planning

We are planning for next year. Several people have talked to us about the ‘seven-crop’ system and it makes a lot of sense. Basically you just grow seven key crops that you know you’ll eat.

Hmmm … except we already have nine raised beds, which would just become nine weedbeds, if we didn’t keep them full of something.

Perhaps we need to buy a lot of weed suppressant and just cover up a lot of the plot? Ugly idea but a functional solution. At least it would kill off our thistle army.

Anyway, we’ve decided we didn’t grow enough peas, that we want more potatoes (or a greater variety of potatoes) and that next year we will plant our garden area, so we actually have somewhere to sit down. But that’s as far as we’ve got.

In the interim, we have a series of allotment tours happening next weekend, in both Brighton and Hove (we're Hove, actually) but at present we are very short of takers. You can book here: Allotment tour - it’s free! And we have a fantastic shop selling seeds and tools and so forth.

And that raised a question in my mind. We are constantly being told that there are people wanting to grow their own etc, and our waiting list is VERY long for a plot, so why aren’t people clamouring to come on a tour?

Any answers? I wondered if it was because it’s an outdoor thing and the weather might not be good … but perhaps it’s some kind of communication gap between the allotment and the general public. I really don’t understand – I thought people would be chewing our arms off for a tour, and I wish I could find out why we aren’t getting much take-up.

Labels: allotment crops, allotment-tour, allotment-weeds