I recapped our allotment in this post a couple weeks back and used the following illustration to show the layout of our first plot.

To show all the changes that we’ve made this year so far and our plans for all the plants, I created a new illustration for 2018. You can see it below.

So the first big changes up from last year, are the greenhouse and a second plot! Richard is so incredibly proud of the greenhouse. It took a while to build, but mostly because we were doing it in winter and there’s only so much time you want to spend freezing your butt off outside painting pallets. The frame was built out of pallets that Richard got from his work, and for so long it looked like we were building a pen for animals. Then he added some curved plastic pipe for the roof supports, and a shelf made of pallet scraps for starting seeds at the back, and everything got covered in plastic! The thing that took the longest was painting it all with the same stain as the shed (Tudor Black Oak) as pallets have so many nooks and crannies.

We’ve used it to start all our seeds this year, and made use of both the shelf as well as the bare ground to keep large bins full of seed trays. It was great to not have our windowsills full of little trays, like last year. Now that everything has been planted out, it’ll mostly be used to grow all our tomatoes, chilli peppers, and cucamelons.

Outside of the greenhouse, I opted to plant some lupins and salvia because I wanted to fill the space a bit and make it look prettier. On the other side, I moved some forget-me-nots that kept showing up on our plot to make it look nicer. Our allotment neighbour has them, and they keep seeding little plants all over our plot. Since I like free flowers I decided to simply move them, rather than get rid of them.

Besides the greenhouse, we have our shipping boxes-turned-raised beds from last year. We’ve moved them to a slightly different spot because of the greenhouse, but they’re in the same part of the plot. Instead of lettuce greens (which we always forgot to pick) we’re growing all of our herbs in two of the boxes while keeping the third for carrots and radishes like before. Hopefully, the nasturtiums, which are planted around the two herb boxes, will really fill out and spill into the middle… so pretty!

Over by the greenhouse is our shed! I gave it a couple of fresh coats of stain, as it was looking a bit worn after the winter. And of course, we gave it a much larger patio! If you follow along on Instagram, you will have seen the progress on stories. It’s soooo nice to have enough room now to sit with a few friends for a BBQ, which would have been too cramped before. And I can’t stop loving the herringbone brick! We scoured Gumtree to find free bricks in our area and then cleaned the old mortar off them to add to the existing patio._

I also frosted the window to make it look less cluttered (and prevent prying eyes – people’s sheds have been broken into before), and added a window box! Richard’s convinced it’s a bad idea, but it was in my allotment dream to have a pretty window box on the black shed. So far I’ve managed to keep it alive, despite not watering it every day. I specifically chose plants that do well without tons of water.

To further pretty up the space, we have our lavender around the shed (which is so much bigger this year – yay!) and a passion flower climbing up one side. I’m hoping that after this year the lavender will be big enough to sort of make a hedge all the way around the shed, but the back plants were smaller to start, and get less light. Without direct sunlight, they throw out really scraggly long flowers, but I’m hoping that after I prune them back a bit, they won’t flop over so much.

Beside the patio, we have Richard’s beloved sweet peas, in a newly built trellis. Last year we used bamboo, but the weight of the sweet peas caused it to sag too much. So we got some old scrap wood, stained it black (of course), and put green string between them. Hopefully, they’ll get even taller than last year with their added support. I had to redo the string part a couple of times because I first used wire (they didn’t like it), and then it was too far apart for them to grow properly. Hopefully next year we can get it sorted early enough to get super tall sweet peas. We basically want to make a privacy screen out of flowers to create a little private patio area.

The only other things on this side of the plot are our bean trellises. We’ve had some issue with the one corner, where plants seem to suddenly wither and die – we’re not sure if it’s ants creating nests in the roots, or some kind of fungus. Either way, we’ll try the beans somewhere else next year.

The finishing touch for this half of the plot would be to somehow get some solar string lights above the patio, but we’ll see. We don’t spend too much time at the allotment once the sun goes down, so it might be a bit of a waste… but so pretty!

Between the shed side of this plot and the other side, we have a plum tree and an apple tree. Pruned back a fair bit from last year, but still more to go. Hopefully next year they’ll be all nice and open. I also added some solar “light bulbs” amongst the trees which come on around dusk and make it look so pretty! They were only £1 from the pound shop, but work really well.

On to the other half of this plot! I told you these allotment posts would be long! 

The other half of our plot is broken into three sections. On the far side, we have our strawberry patch, rhubarb patch, and a few raspberries and blackberries. Everything there was the same last year, with the exception of the raspberries. They’re all transplants from little raspberries that decided to sprout in the grass between our trees. (Turns out raspberries are pretty much invasive on our plot – they keep popping up all over the place, so we just move them where we want.) Last year we had squash plants there, which we’ve moved to our second plot, as there wasn’t enough room. Our strawberries and rhubarb are much more established this year! We got a crazy amount of strawberries in June, and are hoping for another good crop later in the summer.

On the other side of this half of the plot, we have another bank of raspberry canes. These were moved from the other side of the plot to make way for the greenhouse, and they are much happier here! Hopefully, they’ll root in really well and produce lots next year. We also added a couple yellow and black (!) raspberry plants in amongst the old ones. Beside these is our new composter that Richard built from three pallets (and stained black – of course). Honestly, Richard is so in love with his composter, and I like that we can use it to store and sort bamboo and other wood posts.

In the middle of these sections, we have all our rows of plantings. We changed the way we oriented them from last year because the slope of the hill kept resulting in the lowest plants getting all the water. From the bottom, we have two rows of potatoes, two rows of beets (three kinds), parsnips, onions, and sugar snap peas! Right beside the peas, we have our second plum tree, which we surrounded with dahlia and teddy bear sunflowers. It’ll be like a little burst of pretty flowers in the middle of so many practical things. Well, that is if they start blooming anytime soon

Unfortunately, our first crop of beets and Swiss chard didn’t germinate, and the second got attacked by slugs. We’ve replanted them, and new shoots are emerging, but for now, this section looks all sad and bare. The parsnips did okay though, which was the complete opposite of last year. The snap peas have again been absolutely decimated by birds and slugs. We keep replanting them, but they just get gobbled up before they can get more than an inch or two tall. We maaaay need to buy larger plants soon.

The last thing on this plot, at the far end, are our last three trees – two apples and a cherry. The apples are doing okay – one got a bad aphid infestation and dropped a lot of apples, while the other is great. The cherry, however, keeps dropping all its fruit before it starts to ripen. There’s a pest problem there but I haven’t managed to figure it out yet.

And that’s it! Or, at least, that’s our old plot. I didn’t document the new one this past month simply because it was so overgrown in weeds (argh!) that it was hard to see the plants. As it was left for over a year to completely overgrown with grass and weeds, it’s been hard to tame. We’re almost there now, so I’ll try and document it for July. Already it’s proven quite the courgette/zucchini patch and the squash plants are right behind! Looks like we’re in for a bumper crop this year!

So what about you guys? Do you have a big vegetable garden this year?

So last year we took on our first plot at the allotment (community garden) nearby. It had been left to get a bit overgrown as the previous owner couldn’t take care of it anymore. I talked about what our dreams for the plot were in this first post, as well as what we had done so far in this one. However, that is where my posts stopped! I kept wanting to take photos and post updates but would think “I need to weed first” because I wanted super pretty ‘Instagram-worthy’ pictures. Well, that never seemed to happen, and then our tomatoes all got blighted and I just gave up. I just never thought it looked good enough to document.

Buuut… it’s hard to really show how far we’ve come without first posting some photos from last year. They’re mostly just iPhone photos that I took to send to Richard while he was away, so he could see the progress. I apologize for their lack of quality.

So first up, we need to just remember where we started…

That was how the plot looked when we first signed up for it. It had rows of raspberry canes covering one half of the plot, a few giant woody lavender, a couple of rose bushes, and some fruit trees. Other than that, it was all just grass and weeds – completely overgrown.

We pulled up all the old landscape fabric and rotated the two halves of the plot. Unfortunately, as we learned the hard way, certain weeds etc. just get worse if you rotovate. Richard had broken up and turned the soil on one half by himself, but then while he was doing the second half, the allotment site manager came over and offered to rotovate instead. Turns out they get broken up and churned into the soil – only to pop up later 100 times worse. You can see evidence of that in later photos…

Now, to make things less confusing let’s refer to some diagrams and images – shall we? Last year just after we cleared the site, we drew up some plans of what we wanted to do (this plan was in my post about what we had done so far).

And of course, our plans changed as we went, and by the end of the summer, the actual plot looked like this. Oh, and my diagrams got better

Now, our plot essentially has two sides, broken up by the trees and grass in the middle (as shown in the diagram above). Let’s start by talking about everything that we did on Side A.

the plastic shed base, laid on top of the white weed-covering fabric

So one of the first things that we managed to do was create the patio area and shed. We ended up getting our shed assembled, because Richard was away at the time, and I can’t build it by myself (hard to lift and screw things together, simultaneously). The company delivered it and put it together in about 20 minutes! All I had to do was clear the area, level the ground, and install a base. To that end, I put down one of those plastic shed bases. It was super easy to put together and came with landscape fabric to prevent weeds from growing underneath. We could have gone with a wood base or concrete, but the wood ones are super expensive, and the concrete wasn’t going to work on an allotment.

Once the shed was up, I painted it black with some Tudor Black Oak stain we bought from B&Q, just like my inspiration photos. It probably took about 4 coats to really cover, which took forever with the tiny brush I was using. I also covered the exposed black shed base with some light grey gravel.

Then, I cleared the ground and levelled it as best I could for the patio. I had been dreaming of having a herringbone brick patio since Richard first mentioned having an area for BBQs and tea breaks. Somewhere nice to sit and relax after we’ve been gardening. We changed the orientation of the shed and patio from our first plans but kept it in the same corner of our allotment.

We had been given some free bricks from Richard’s work, and I simply laid them on top of some landscape fabric and filled them around with packed earth to prevent them from shifting. Unfortunately, we never filled in the gaps with sand, which meant that it shifted around a fair bit when walked on. Something we remedied this spring, when we decided to increase the size of the patio!

On the shed side of the allotment (side A), we ended up planting beans, tomatoes, and herbs. Richard was given some shipping crates from his work (not the best wood, but hey – free!) that we turned into raised beds for nasturtiums, lettuce greens, and my cucamelons! I painted them with the black stain that I used on the shed and they looked really nice! Nothing that a little black stain can’t spruce up! I erected some bamboo in between two boxes and rigged up a trellis with some string for the cucamelons to grow up. My original plan was to make a living archway, but the bamboos just weren’t tall enough to walk under.

you can see the boxes in the right photo, along with by cucamelon trellis before it was tied together

bean trellis in the foreground, tomato plants behind, then boxes in the background

The third box we had was used for carrots, as it was the only one deep enough. We had read online that chives prevent carrot flies, so we planted some in each corner of the box, and it seemed to do the trick! None of our carrots suffered from pests all summer. Beside the grass and trees, along the boxes, we added a row of raspberry canes that we salvaged from the plot when we took it over. The only other things that we planted were some sweet peas and lavender around the shed.

Everything was doing really well until our tomatoes caught blight. Almost everyone in our allotment got it and we ended up losing all 12 plants. Juuuust as they all had tomatoes about to ripen We were both so depressed. We had all kinds of tomatoes too, from green zebra ones to giant beefsteaks.

all our lovely tomato plants just as they caught blight

On the other side of the allotment (side B), we planted rows of beets, swiss chard, peas, potatoes, zucchini, and oka. We also had a patch of strawberries, rhubarb, and Jerusalem artichokes, as well as some dahlia and sunflowers. This side of the allotment did really well! The rhubarb was constantly provided, as were the potatoes, zucchini, beets, peas, and Swiss chard. We forgot to harvest the oka and Jerusalem artichokes until it was too late, and the strawberries kept getting eaten by squirrels.

our rhubarb, strawberry patch and the rows of newly sprouted plants

our beets and Swiss chard just as they started coming up

this side of the plot once everything had come up!

The only other things on the plot were our fruit trees. The plums we missed, as we were away when they were ripe, but we got plenty of apples! However, our cherry tree kept dropping all the cherries before they ripened… so something is wrong there. Just not sure what.

And that’s it! That was our allotment last year, and boy has it changed! So far we’ve moved tons around, built a greenhouse, and got a second plot!  If you follow me on Instagram, and especially the stories, you’ll have seen more of this by now. I’m planning on documenting the allotment much more this summer, with a post every month on how things are going. We have big plans this year!

What about you? Any plans for growing your own fruits and vegetables this summer?