Allotment year one - pacing yourself

I'm reading a book called The Half Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz, which is published by the RHS, and while it's full of good ideas, there's one that I feel faintly nervous about them promulgating so widely. It's the suggestion that in the first year, or first few years, you should leave 2/3rds of your new plot fallow while you get on with cultivating the final third.

Hmmm...

Nice idea but ... as Ms Leendertz goes on to point out, this can cause consternation in your neighbours who don't want weed seeds and creeping perennials spreading from your unworked section to their hard-cultivated plot, and can actually break the terms of your rent, because there are quite a few allotment sites that require you to keep more that 33% in cultivation at any one time!

Having said that, it is important with a new plot, whether allotment or vegetable patch in the garden, to pace yourself. You WILL get gluts, even if that seems unimaginable now, and you WON'T have allowed for how much time it takes to harvest, process and store glut vegetables. You WILL find some weed, pest or problem that takes up much more time than you planned - for us it's the perennial weeds, for a neighbour it's a constant battle with a fox that digs up her seedlings (on purpose, she says).

So fallow doesn't have to be fallow. Potatoes, for example, can be planted until June, they break up the soil (so you've got lovely soil to plant in next year) and keep weeds down (because their leaf cover and deep roots don't give perennials a chance to get a good grip), and even if you get only a small harvest from late plantings, it looks like you're keeping the plot in cultivation.

Labels: allotment-cultivation, fallow-allotment, new-allotment

Taking on a new allotment

If you’re lucky enough to be offered an allotment (and most people I know are still waiting … still waiting ….) it will come in one of three forms:

Brand new – these are rare, but increasingly local authorities are recognising the value of creating new allotment sites – here you’ll have to contend with whatever was on the land before, builder’s rubble, industrial waste or grass.

Fallow – a lot of plots haven’t been worked very much (or at all!) in recent years, either because the allotment holder hasn’t been up to it, or because (as is often the case) they’ve agreed to pay their rent by direct debit and while the money’s been going out regularly, the plot-holder hasn’t! It’s amazing how often an allotment holder will just ‘forget’ about their plot and not visit it for years. On fallow land you’re going to have a problem with perennial weeds that will have got a good hold, and you may find that neighbours have been using bits of your plot as annexes to their own, which can cause friction if they’ve taken over ‘your’ raspberry canes or compost bin …

Well-worked – if you’re lucky, you’ll get a plot that has been lovingly looked after by its previous allotment holder. There can still be issues to deal with though. Perhaps the previous plot holder wasn’t organic and you are. Perhaps he or she had strong preferences permanent plants like gooseberries or asparagus which you detest and complain when you dig up their prized crops (yes, your former plot holder is usually around somewhere, watching critically from the allotment of their crony and criticising your every move). Above all, you need to know if they’ve been using a crop rotation system and to fit in with it.

The standard system is potatoes into heavily manured soil, legumes (podded plants) into the same bed a year later, brassicas (cabbage family plants) into the same bed the year after that. Then you either let the bed lie fallow, or plant a green manure, or go back to potatoes again! If you break the system you will probably find that the soil is too exhausted to grow potatoes, or doesn’t have enough nitrogen (given by legumes) for brassicas.

Labels: allotment-crop-rotation, fallow-allotment, new-allotment