Why I now plan!

As a gardener I found it really hard to plan.  On the rare occasions when I did make a plan I found it really difficult to stick to it. In a domestic garden I think that a general plan roughly adhered to is fine however I have found that where the allotment is concerned there has to be more foresight.  In your back garden at home when a plant begins to take over it can usually be taken in hand with some shears or secateurs.  When it comes to gardening to eat when that plant begins to take over it can often mean lost crops. 

On my first allotment back in 2007 I didn’t go in with a plan, wet behind the ears and armed with 50 packets of seeds just went for it but there were consequences.  My row of carrots was simply out drunk by the adjacent row broccoli which were spaced 6ins apart.  Although my mixed lettuce did ok despite the entire packet being in a 6 foot row my 2500 iceberg lettuce seeds didn’t have the same luck.  Almost everything was abused 6 by a highly obnoxious pumpkin plants and there is never a need for 30 runner bean plants.  2007 was a pretty damp year but there was still enough sunshine to drag those plants out of the ground kicking an screaming.  By the end of the year I has a compost heap as tall as me.  Don’t get me wrong we ate like royalty but organisation was zero and the waste was an insult to allotmenteer everywhere.  In my defence I had no guidance, my internet connection was bobbins, I had no grandad or family member to show me the ropes and when the other guys on the allotments realised what I’d done it was already too late. 

This was a steep learning curve for me and if your reading this because your about to become an allotment gardeners let it be a lesson for you. 

Fast forward a year and it was time to make a plan.  Set in stone a proper manifesto for the coming year.  The only problem was that I still didn’t have a clue where to start.  Then one morning I walked into work to see a trestle table strewn with books.  On that table was a book dedicated to growing your own fruit and veg.  I hastily purchased the book and briefly skipped through it.  It looked good so I bought another.  One for at home and one for the shed.  Now I began to realise that I was in a position to have lots of separate vegetable beds and there were several categories of veg I could put in them.  My planning then developed a simple but effective flow.  My 6 bets were Peas, beans and legumes, Onions, Potato’s, Brassicas, salad & other.  The bed marked other consisted of my sweetcorn, courgette, marrow and squash.

With my plan in place it was a simple task of preparing the soil for the season which was pretty easy as I had no idea there was such a thing as a winter crops and ordering and organising my seeds. 

Deciding what to grow take research.  You need to ask the question what will grow and then ask other gardeners to see what variety’s grow well.  Once you’ve decided its time to buy your seeds.  This is something I love to do, I like to shop for a bargain and love seeing the collection of seeds build up.  Once all my seeds arrive I get some paper bags and write the name of each bed on the bag.  Once that’s done I sort the seeds accordingly.

With the seeds sorted I ensure that I took my time, ensured the correct distance between rows, didn’t sow too many seeds, built sturdy structures for my climbers.  It all paid off.  2008 was an epic year for me, other than the loss to a few tomato plants in the greenhouse everything I grew, grew well and from then on planning became an essential part of my allotment year.