My allotments

In July 2005 I was made redundant. My salary wasn't high by any average standard, but I was comfortable and suddenly it ended. I was unemployed for 4 and half months and during that period, I applied for umpteen jobs - with a mortgage and bills to pay, any job was better than no job. In the current climate I would be mortified if I was made redundant now as it was not easy getting a job then, but eventually got a job in a junior position. I never was good at budgeting, but even I knew that after all the bills were paid, I only had £100 a month to live off. This had to pay not only for the food and groceries, petrol, prescription charges, vet fees, car insurance, MOT, car service ... the list goes on. Not surprisingly I could not live on what I was earning.

I had always considered getting an allotment but was a bit put off by how to go about it. Needs must - surely growing my own fruit and vegetables would save money and put food on the table? So by early February 2006 I started to look into it and was told there were a couple of sites near where I lived. As one was next to a sewage works, I plumped for the other site. I invited my friends along who were also interested, and to cut a long story short, we chose a plot.

From the start I was aware we had very different views of how to go about it and I thought it best if the plot was divided into 2 and we each did our own thing. It's as well because I prefer to have set raised beds, and my friends opted for rotavating the entire plot.

2006 was a hot year and all my summer fruiting vegetables were fantastic. I was lucky to have such a good year, but that luck was partly because of my choice of vegetables - due to an injury from day one, I was unable to get down to the plot until late April so I had sown things like marrow, tomatoes, peppers, sweetcorn, pumpkin and some oregano (also sorrel but decided I didn't like it) and they just got planted out with a bit of compost and growmore. I was able to plant some King Edwards (from a bag of supermarket spuds that had gone green & started to sprout - just the one time, since then I've only planted certified seed potatoe) and someone gave me some onion sets but they didn't amount to much because I was too late in planting. My friends however, soon found out that there was serious clubroot and white onion rot on the plot and they were devastated when more than half their crop had to be binned. I felt awful for them and also guilty for my paltry effort being a success.

2007 proved to be the worst year - the rain caused a lot of problems particularly blight which affected potatoes and tomatoes. Once again, and by mistake (I thought they were main crop), I had opted for 1st and 2nd early potatoes and these were fine. My friends had another bad year. We both got onion rot in the overwintering Japanese onions (it had been a mild winter and I think many people got it), and one lot of swede got clubroot but the resistant variety was fine.

Strangely enough my friends had been hinting in early spring that year that they had been considering pulling out. At first it was just a hint, then it steadily grew into the inevitable. I didn't want them to leave because of one bad year, but I understood their reasons that the 2 most popular vegetables they enjoyed could not be grown on the plot as these diseases are very persistent over a number of years (at least 7 for onions if not more, and at least 20 years for clubroot) I began to visualise having the entire plot to myself when they suddenly announced at the end of May that they would definitely keep the plot. It came as a blow to me - in my mind's eye I had already expanded and suddenly had it taken away. Silly really, I know.

I decided to give the council a call and yes, 4 plots were still available. I shot round that evening but it was clear they were the worst plots available (not quite, one was pretty reasonable but way too big for me - easily twice the size of the shared plot combined!) I opted for the next best which had a shed in need of repair. After my friends helped to strim, I tried watering glyphosate but the weather was against me all the time. In the end I covered with thick black plastic and abandoned the plot until Christmas.

After I had ensured the half plot was cleared and prepared with purple sprouting broccolli, overwintering onions and broadbeans, I moved down to the big plot and began to dig over the beds, steadily making several raised beds using the composted grass cuttings from the strimming and well rotted manure that I had been unaware of until then! It felt like a race against time throughout late winter and spring, but I managed to plant out squash, marrow, courgette, cucumber, celeriac, tomatoes (2 varieties), sweetcorn, peppers, chillis, peas, broadbeans, sweetpeas and mangetout, and made a makeshift raised bed for Jerusalem artichokes.

Apart from the broadbeans (slugs were the main reason, but I let them go anyway because I'd had a good harvest from the overwintered crop on the half plot) and blight to tomatoes, it was a fantastic harvest this year. I pour over the photos and even I can't believe how well I managed to drag that plot from a wilderness to a productive one.

That and the good harvest of broadbeans, potatoes, some cabbage, perpetual spinach, turnip, beetroot, a couple of bulb fennel, asparagus and the Japanese onions, I felt it had been a fairly decent year. My disaster however, included ravaged swede from cabbage white caterpillars, onion rot in over 75% of the summer onions (Sturon & Red Baron), cauliflower that I'd left too late to plant, brussels were in the same boat may not be that productive this winter, cabbages eaten by slugs (my fault - the big plot took so much of my time that the half plot got minimal effort) and celery that didn't seem to be doing much. Currently there are leeks, some cabbage, swede, kale, parsnips and carrots still in the ground.

It's a sad time of the year, seeing everything dying back or destroyed by the heavy frost in mid-October, but just as busy. Next year I have so many new vegetables to try out and I'm determined to keep on top of the harvesting and storing them for later use.