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.

Composting

Get a small bin for your kitchen. One with a lid that seals pretty decently.

Put pretty much any biodegradable rubbish in it. Tea bags. Egg shells. Vegetable peelings. Banana skins. You get the idea?

Then whenever you go over your allotment, make a habit of taking the bin and emptying it on your composter.

Seedlings

It’s far too easy to buy stuff for an allotment. Walking around a shop you see so many things you’d like to grow. However, I was strict to myself that I wanted to start small, and expand only once part of the plot was established and ticking along.

I split the plot in two with some more string, so that set a clear first milestone for us to reach.

We bought:

• Runner bean seeds
• Onion seeds
• Chive seeds
• Raspberry bush
• Blackberry bush
• Gooseberry bush
• Thyme
• Rosemary
• Various tomato plants
• Cheap compost

For the seeds, we bought some peat pots. These things are great. We were able to plant the  runner bean seeds in these, and they just grow into the pots, which your then plant into the soil and they decompose. This means you don’t have to disturb the roots when moving them from pot to soil.

Planting the seeds was simple. Fill up the pot half way with compost, add the seed – making sure it’s the right way up – and then place compost on top just below the top of the pot, pressing it down slightly.

My Mum happened to have a lot of old baking trays she didn’t want, so we placed all of the pots inside this to make watering easier, and transporting them around.

For the onion seeds, we simply filled one of these baking trays with compost, then scattered the seeds on top, and then put a thin layer of compost on top of those then pressed slightly down. Same deal with the chives.

We then put them all in our greenhouse at home and watered daily.

First steps

The first thing we did with the plot was mark it out with string. It had wooden stakes at each corner, but it wasn’t too visible. I had some white string and tied it to the first stake and then just looped it around each stake until I was back at the first one, and tied it off again. This would help when it came to digging out the grass and making sure I wasn’t going off-plot into the pathways, or other peoples plots.

The compost that we inherited wasn’t in the corner of the plot, but further into the plot. It seems to make sense to have it in the corner so that it’s out of the way, but obviously still on the plot. It had just been assembled with some nails and canes to hold it in place – not difficult to dismantle and move. We then lifted the raised bed wooden frame and put that alongside the composter – it acts as extra support for it.

We was told by a fellow neighbour that the previous occupant had well fertilised the plot – something that became apparent by the lovely earthy colour of the soil, and the ease at which it was to dig up. Good news.