Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: Heather_S on March 14, 2006, 17:30
-
Hiya!
I thought I should introduce myself since I'm new here :D
I'm a 24 year old housewife living in North London. We have an allotment plot about a 25min walk away. Us lazy city dwellers like to take the bus home from near the allotments :oops: My husband and I try to focus on organic gardening where possible although I guess our homemade compost isn't very organic since we don't buy organic veg.
Before we got our allotment plot, I had a large container veg garden on our little bit of outdoors which is our decked over flat roof bit. Nice and sturdy bit of decking and roof. We have two slimline waterbutts hooked up to the guttering too.
We took over our plot back at the end of June last year. The former plot owner has a half-plot next to ours and he said our plot had been left alone since November the previous year. There were grasses as tall as us everywhere. We've really had to hack everything back but the majority of the plot is now ready for planting (hopefully).
It came with a bed nearly completely enclosed in small rose bushes. I have no clue how to deal with these things since flowers aren't my strong point. They're surrounded with various bulb plantings so it's a pain to dig around them even with a little hand fork. I keep hitting iris bulbs :? There's three large shrubs on that bed too. When we first looked at the plot, I said "I want to cut those down completely" but now I think I've realised I can't. They're far too large to dig up so I have to just try to keep them looking vaguely nice. Lots of variegated hebe too, I think. I'm going to try to grow pumpkins in the middle of this bed because the ground is nice and loose.
On the bright side, we inherited three medium-sized apple trees, a plum tree that provided us with lots of delicious and aromatic red plums, lots of red currant bushes, black currant bushes and a manageable amount of blackberry canes. Also a rather nice tumbler composter which makes shortwork of kitchen scraps and our hamsters' bedding.
Heavy clay soil but not completely clay ... probably 1 1/2 spade-depths of dark clay-y soil before hitting yellowy clay in most of the beds... not too much marestail or bindweed thankfully but heaps and heaps of slugs!
I do lots of cooking and I have an interest in East-Asian cookery so I'm trying out various odd things this year such as red & green varieties of perilla/shiso/beefsteak plant, daikon radish, and japanese burdock (for the roots). I like odd coloured vegetables too so I have a full line up of seed packets for yellow, orange and purple carrots, along with yellow and purple french beans and purple cauliflower.
I have pictures of my allotmenting here (if you go up a level, you can see all the plants I've grown): http://www.stargazy.org/plants/allotment/
-
Hello there,
Nice to hear about your allotment. You sound like you know a thing or two about home grown stuff (unlike me who's just beginning).
All we need now is some nice weather that will allow us to get going!!!
Personally I cant wait to read the posts once planting season starts - I shall be looking out for posts here to give me a hint as to when to plant stuff
-
First time I've come across someone mentioning Shiso on here!
I failed utterly in my attempt to grow it and Daikon - maybe my Japanese wasn't up to reading the pictures on the seed packet!
Any instructions welcome.
BTW - Why not submit your site to my links section? Some good photo's on there and not everyone reads the forums.
Cheers
John
-
I'm not too sure how the daikon will do on our soil. I bought mine from Nicky's Nursery so it came with vague directions on the packet (they seem to package all their own seeds). It's somewhat cryptic to read!
"Sow late winter under cloches to spring onwards for Summer crops. For autumn onwards crops, sow from midsummer on.
Sow 1cm deep. Prefers a deep, loose, moist fertile welldrained soil. "
I'll have to poke around at the beds to figure out which will be the best out of the spaces I've not planned anything for.
I have no clue if I should even bother with the burdock since that information says "deep sandy loam, free draining soil". It's free-draining but I don't think it's anywhere near sandy or loam. I want to use the roots but I've heard it's essentially a hedgerow weed so I'm not sure how concerned I should be about that phrase on the packet.
I think I need to clean up and better label the photos before I submit the website, thanks :)