So, have had the lottie for about 3 months. It's going great guns! Spinach, courgettes (oh, my lord, courgettes! - I know everyone told me, but they really are a riotous force of nature), lettuce, curly cale, broccoli, potatoes. Everything has sprung into action. The green and french beans and the beetroot and the onions and the peas and the leeks have still to mature, but it's exciting watching them flourish and do their thing.
So much so, that I've taken on another one! I've decided that I want to grow fruit too. There's an empty plot next to ours but one row down. Digging has begun and weeding has commenced. And hopefully, by September we'll be in a position to mulch and feed and get ready for next Spring.
But I was a little (a lot!) taken aback tonight. I cooked a plate of produce straight off the lottie - steamed potatoes and curly kale and stir-fried courgettes with chili, and settled down and started to eat with relish. Someone asked me 'Wouldn't that be better with gravy on it?'
I am, literally, speechless. (Well, I'm not, as you're about to find out.)
This is what they said: "Wouldn't that be better with gravy on?"
Really? They were asking, in all seriousness, whether this organic, tended with love and patience, produce - no, not produce, but living plants, magical life - could ever be improved by the addition of a chemical, additive-laden, preservative-riddled, mass-produced, salty, sugary gloup?
I seriously don't know how to respond to that - other than to say - that, right there: THIS is what is the problem is. This is why so many people work at jobs they hate and get into debt to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't even know, much less like. Because when it comes down to it THIS is never good enough, is it?
Take something sublimely gorgeous and natural and add to it. Make a blue rose. Persuade a teenage girl that she'd look better if she fixed her teeth, wore make-up, dyed her hair, Mow the grass to make a lawn.
It's never enough, it would seem. We always want more. Bigger, better, brighter. And in the end it all comes down to one question:
Wouldn't that be better with gravy on?
It's been a few weeks since I updated this blog; but only because for quite a while nothing much happened. Lots of green things were poking their way through the cloddy earth, but being such an absolute novice, I had no idea if they were what I planted or what was already in the earth and are termed 'weeds'. So I had to wait to see what came up.
And then 'whooooosh'.. the spinach and the potatoes particularly did their thing in a very fecund way:
We've now planted out most of the space on the allotment, with about 1/8th left for some later planting of broccoli etc.
So we now have: Potatoes (2 lots), onions (2 lots), some very feeble broccoli and courgettes, green beans that seem to be in stasis, lettuce under a polytunnel, I lonely beetroot, carrots, spinach, I fledgling raspberry bush, sweetcorn, peas, and one possibly-majestic-looking sunflower!
So, now I know that whilst my fingers may not be green, they're not totally imbued with uselessness when it comes to creating the conditions for things to grow i.e. stick a seed in the ground that's been cleared of weeds, water it. That seems to be basically it!
Harvested the first handful of spinach tonight - it looks a lot larger, and tougher, than the supermarket stuff - we'll see what it tastes like tonight.
What has amazed me is how little (so far!) work the lottie has taken. There was initial digging over, but it's only really been a few hours a week. And still we'll go up there, do a bit of weeding and a bit of watering and a bit of planting out, and then stand around sort of at a loss for what else we can do. Gaze into the distance for a bit, enjoy the view, have a chat to other lottie-ers and then wend home because... well... there's nothing else to do.
I've also managed to cut down the time it takes me to walk to there, from about 1/2 hour to 20 minutes; if I keep finding shorter cuts, I'll be getting there before I've set out!
It's a pleasant walk, past a much-closer-to-home allotment site (3-4 year waiting list!), through a housing estate, down a couple of country lanes, past the Scientology centre that never seems to have anyone around (although a man standing by the gate and who said 'evening' last night was the first person that I've ever seen in and around the very large house and other assorted out-buildings), past a meandering stream, across a field and there the lottie site is!
So, I get to enjoy a late evening stroll and very soon, hope to be walking back with a basket full of fresh produce to put on the dinner table.....
More, later.
As well as growing vegetables and, I hope, fruit, on the allotment without the use of pesticides, I have also decided to spend as little money as possible.
To that end we have been fortunate to be given many items. And we have been wily enough to salvage other unwanted items from the dumping ground at the allotment site.
To date, these items are:
Gardening books (particularly related to growing veg, fruit and herbs), gardening tools, a watering can, a large bottle with spraying attachment. All from a friend whose father had died and whose house needed to be cleared.
A large 'box' which was previously an outside dog kennel, that our neighbours had put on their front lawn labelled 'free to collector' and which we adapted to use as a tool shed.
Various pots; both plastic and terracotta that were being offered on of the most brilliant and useful sites that I know of: Freecycle - http://www.freecycle.org/.
And finally, various bits of wood, fencing and discarded items which we 'found' in the dumping ground at the entrance to the allotment site. These include the raised bed border that we have planted the carrots in.
A small plastic greenhouse, like this one, that we keep at home for growing on seedlings until they're ready to go in the allotment - given to us by husband's work colleague:
This means that the costs we have incurred to date are:
Rent of plot for one year: £27.50
Soil Sieve: £4.99
Bean poles: £5
Seeds: App £15
Tomato and pepper plants: £4
1 x small plastic greenhouse used at home: £8
1 x medium plastic greenhouse for toms and peppers: £8
Seeding compost: £10
Organic slug stuff: £4
Seed trays: £5
Total Cost to date: £64.50.
And this is as much as I intend to spend this year. I'm going to see how little we can spend. Otherwise it defeats part of the object of growing your own if you end up spending more on producing the stuff than you would on buying it from supermarkets, or farmer's markets and shops.
I eat a veggie diet, and my husband and eldest son also eat a lot of veg and fruit (the youngest son ain't so keen, and our daughter no longer lives at home) so I spend quite a lot of our weekly food bill on veg and fruit, probably somewhere in the region of £30 to £40 (between £1820 and £2080 a year!). I'm not going to be able to grow all that we'll eat, but I'm hoping to get somewhere in the region of at least half by the time the growing season gets underway; since I won't be able to grow things like bananas and apples, these will still need to be bought. There are also some items that I use a lot, such as peppers, which I may not be able to grow to keep up with the demand.
So, it will be interesting to see how little we can spend and what kind of impact it has on our weekly and yearly food expenditure.
Of course, the point is not to just reduce costs, but to also produce fresh, organic, nutrient-rich food.
It's also a challenge to see if we can do it and to see what obstacles occur and how we can overcome them and become seasoned allotment growers.
Heeeeere goes!
The first shoots have appeared. I'm pretty sure that they're spinach, since they're growing in the bit of the lottie where I planted spinach seeds; although they could be weeds - but since they're the only signs of life, then it seems likely that the spinach is growing just exactly where we planted it. Just like that. They're growing. Magic. It truly is.
Mind you, that's the only thing that's growing. The same time that we planted spinach, we also planted potatoes, carrots, onions and broccoli. Either we planted them incorrectly, too early or they ain't gonna grow - the magic won't happen. We'll see.
The beans, however, are growing - at home, in one of those small plastic greenhouses. The beans were popped into potting compost and a couple of weeks later little green points nudged through the soil and then grew at quite a rate until they were about 3 inches or so. These have now been transplanted to their spot alongside canes on the allotment, and we'll see what happens.
I'm itching to put in sweetcorn (I have a modest ambition; which is to eat sweetcorn just picked, as I'm told it's worlds away from the shop-bought stuff) and courgettes, but I have a sneaking feeling that the last frost and the cold weather isn't over yet, so I'm holding off. Being a generally impatient person, it's difficult at times not to bung everything in straight away in the hopes of seeing immediate abundance. But I've learnt enough over the past 51 years to realise that rushing things doesn't always pays dividends. It's difficult though, after the initial excitement and activity of digging and rotavating and turning and weeding and planting, to just stand there looking at a patch of brown clumpy soil believing that it will be sprouting with vegetables. Aside from the spinach shoots it doesn't look like anything's ever going to grow and I have to fight the temptation to lift up the top layer of soil to see if anything's happening underneath.
So now, all I can do is watch and wait, and keep nurturing the lettuce seedlings in the greenhouse and watering the tomatoes and peppers that sit alongside and hope that the sun shines and the frosts are finished and that the magic will happen with the other seeds as it is with the spinach.
.. there was a patch of land measuring 10m x 4m. Well, actually, no. In the very beginning there was a patch of land half that size.
This is how it happened. About a year ago (June 2012) following 6 months of eating a veggie diet and realising that veg and fruit is EXPENSIVE, I put my name down for a local allotment. Or, so I thought...
There are two allotment sites in the town where I live, and I had heard that it's difficult to get a plot. For no reason at all, I suddenly remembered in the middle of the night at the end of March 2013 that I'd signed up to the waiting list for an allotment. I did a search of the contact for allotments in my local town and found an email address. I also found a link to another local allotment site that indicated that there were plots available. Suspecting that the information might be out of date, I emailed... and the next morning at about 9.30 a.m. received an answer. To the effect that... unfortunately, there was no record of me on the waiting list, but that there were indeed several plots available on this site and I could certainly rent one of them. Just like that! No waiting, no list, no negotiation. All I had to do was sign the agreement, send off my cheque for £13.50 (yes... only £13.50!) and we could start straight away. This was for a half-plot which, because I had little gardening experience, I was advised would be a good way to start.
The next weekend we eagerly drove down to the allotment site and found our half-plot. As we had a look round a seasoned allotmenter introduced himself and, on hearing that we had a half-plot, advised us that we'd be better off going for a full plot as most people that started with a half-plot quickly found that they had run out of space to grow all that they wanted. Furthermore, there was a plot right next to his, that had been well-maintained and on which he knew what had been grown. Long story, short - phoned the allotment lady at the council and asked if we could rent that plot instead; paperwork was sent out, extra cheque for another princely sum of £13.50 was sent off and we were the proud and slightly nervous 'owners' of Plot 86.
When you see a plot of land 10m x 4m it looks both very small and very large at the same time! Small because you doubt that you can grow all you need on such a compact plot of land, and large because you realise that the whole thing has to be dug over ,maintained, weeded, planted, weeded, maintained, watered, weeded......
And so began our foray into growing our own veg and fruit, into a new world of digging and mulching, sieving and rotovating, seeding and sowing and total confusion about what to put in, where and at what time.
What follows is our experience of renting an allotment and, by trial and error, with advice and the expertise of the other excellent allotmenters, our adventure of raising veg from seed in a plot of sodden, clay, earth on a sloping site in Sussex.
I hope you enjoy the story and would love it if you were able to learn from our experience and to also contribute your ideas/views/experience via the comments facilty below.
Here we go ......
