Wooden pallet fence

Where we planted our fruit plants on the border of our plot with someone elses, I had put some wooden stakes in to make a sort of division between our plots. However, I wanted to also ensure that the plants wouldn’t grow over into their plot too.

Dad had some wooden pallets from a job that he was working on – they’d been used to deliver the slabs and bricks he was using to work on someones front drive. They were going to be thrown away, so we decided to recycle them.

Sawing them in half gives you a great fence that you can use with wooden stakes. Hold the wooden pallet in the ground, then drive stakes in the middle of them to hold them nice and firmly in place. This fence aligned up nicely with our second compost heap too.

With the spare wood from the pallets, we drove these into our compost heap so that there were no gaps for our dirt and grass to fall out of into our neighbours plot.

Adding a water butt

It’s probably just under 100m to walk to our nearest mains filled water butt on our allotment site. When you have to water quite a few things on your plot, that’s a long way to keep walking, and carrying buckets of water.

On one of the jobs my Dad was working on, there was a water butt that the owners didn’t want anymore, and they kindly said my brother and me could have it for our plot. Dad also had some slabs and bricks from a job that were spare that we could have to.

We carted the whole lot to our plot and I placed the bricks and slabs in one corner of our plot so that the water butt would be off of the ground enough for us to fit a watering can/bucket underneath the tap to fill it. I used a bucket of water to check if it was level, then placed it on top. I then tasked my brother to fill it from the mains filled water butt.

I’ve ordered a hand siphon pump that we can hook up to some spare hosepipe to make filling it easier in future.

Was a little worried about wildlife maybe falling into the water butt and not being able to get out, so we brought a bit of spare garden trellis we had in our garden and put that on top of it and weighed it down with some bricks. Job done.

Keeping the bees happy

My cousin, Holly, who also has an allotment suggested that I plant some lavender on our plot to keep the bees happy – pollination! Nan had a spare bush in her garden that she said we could have, so we dug that up and planted it about half way down our plot near the path, so when people walk past they should get a lovely smell of it.

Planting some fruit, finding chives and mint

We had bought some raspberry, blackberry and gooseberry plants from the garden centre a few weeks back and had them in our back garden until we had cleared some more space on the plot to plant them. The raspberry bush was getting plenty of growth – lots of extra leaves developing on it – was definitely time to get it in the ground!

Decided to put these the other end of the plot, not near a path, because I didn’t want people to be tempted to pick any as they walked past! There wasn’t really any dividing line between our plot and the one behind it, so I put some stakes in for the time being.

Just in front of the stakes, I dug three small holes, evenly apart for the plants to go in. Watered the holes a little, and then slightly squeezed the pots so the plants would just fall out into my hand. Plonked them in the ground and covered with the dirt I’d dug out, and then pushed it down firmly.

To get to the part of the plot where the fruit is now planted, there was still lots of grass and weeds to walk over. And as I was walking over it I got a waft of mint – very strong – and lovely. Looking down, amongst the overground grass was a mass of mint plants and some chives! I dug them out and took off as much dirt around the roots. We had a spare wheel barrow that was of no use to us anymore, so we decided to plant the mint in that because it spreads so much and easily that we didn’t want it to take over any part of the plot. Contained was definitely better. We punched a few holes in the bottom for drainage, and some broken pots in the bottom then put some top soil in the barrow, then planted the mint. The smell is amazing.

With the chives we found in the grass, we dug that up and put it in our raised bed along with the herbs we’d planted, and the other chives we had grown from seed. Wouldn’t have needed to bother with those seeds had we discovered the chives earlier on.

Planting the runner beans

The time has come to plant the runner beans! They were getting a little too large for their peat pots – you could see the roots coming through the pots.

We had seen other people had constructed frames for the beans out of canes. Before starting on this allotment, I’d decided that I wanted to recycle as much as I could, and not buy anything, unless completely necessary.

We’d had a massive clear out of our shed in the garden and had lots of wood spare, and random things like oars from our old dinghy. I sawed the plastic oar ends off so we just had the wooden sticks left. We also had some wooden studding and plenty of garden string.

The studding was easy to cut at one end into a point that could be staked into the ground. Then I tied two of the oars together in the middle to bind them so that they wouldn’t bend. This I would then rest across two of the pieces of studding to tied the string to at the top. We also had a spare washing line pole lying around. This was extendable, so I adjusted it to the correct width, and then this would also be placed across the top of the studding.

Over at the plot using a medium sized sledge hammer, I staked the studding posts into the ground. One at either edge of the plot, and another in the middle. Once it felt solid, I then moved onto fixing the top pieces – this was simple with just a few screws to ensure they didn’t roll off of the top. We then used string to further secure them to the top.

Using some smaller pieces of wood, with grooves sawn into the edges (about 5mm deep), we screwed these to the bottom of the studding stakes so that each of the three had a piece of wood sticking out in the middle. This would allow us to tie string around the entire of the bottom frame, so that we could then tie string for each running bean to grow up. The string would be tied to the string frame, up, around and over the top pole, and then back down to the other side to be tied off. This was the most time consuming part, but once completed, we had a DIY’d runner bean frame.

We could then plant the beans at the bottom of each string. Check out the pictures in the slideshow for some close ups of the simple construction.

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Seed sprouts

The runner beans have been coming along nicely in the greenhouse at home. Mum has been nurturing them with the important things; talking to them daily, oh and watering them too. That’s important too.

The onions are coming up too – a lot slower than the beans, but that’s to be expected.

After a week, we had noticed that one tray of beans weren’t sprouting at all. They’d been treated equally. So it was a bit of a mystery. We opened up the pot and looked at the seeds and it looked as though they were sprouting down rather than up – strange. Not much we could do.

Potatoes

Being a member of the allotment, I’m entitled to use the allotment shop and get discounted products – such as seed, fertiliser etc. It’s not at the same site as my plot, but is only a 2 minute drive away.

We wanted to plant some potatoes so went there and asked the two gentleman who ran the shop what are the easiest to grow and work well for roasts. They suggested the Charlotte and Désirée varieties. They also said cheap fertiliser worked well, and that there was no need to fork out on expensive brands.

Upon returning back to our plot we dug over the ground where we wanted to plant our spuds to loosen it all up. Then, we dug a small trench for the potatoes, placed them in, and then dug the earth from either side of these trenches to cover them. This resulted in us having mounds for the potatoes, with trenches either side.

The plan is, that as the potatoes grow, they’ll start shooting through the soil, and as they do, you take more soil from the trenches to cover the shoots. This gets you the best yield of potatoes.