Planning Your Garden

Planning your garden is something so many people get wrong and with little more than a little thought and checking out your intended vegetables you can not only fill your garden with home grown crops all year round, but you can avoid most of the common mistakes. Begin by mapping your garden and this is as simple as doing a rough drawing and seeing where the sun goes and what time of the day it is there, where the shaded parts of the garden are and what space you have as many people simply use beds to grow some crops.

This is followed by what do you eat as it is an exercise in futility to grow things you don’t eat and once you have decided this you can research varieties and see what can be grown in the shade and what needs full sun and you have the basics of your garden plan sorted out.
Next is what is the cost as often it is cheaper to buy items in rather than grow them so only grow what is cost effective and buy in other things while they are in season and preserve them and learn diversification, particularly if you are on a tight budget and I will explain this.

Many things come in many styles and onions are an example and currently I can get a large commercial bag of brown onions for £3.50 per large 20Kg bag meaning they would likely be uneconomical to grow for people on a tight budget but there are alternatives. Onions also come as spring or salad onions and if you have a salad bar you simply plant more in there and free some garden space up as they come in many varieties and some have a bulb the size of a golf ball and I find they are better in many things such as stir fries or stews where you can throw a whole bulb in. Shallots are small onions which they grow for producing pickled onions and again they are small and can be cut up for certain dishes or simply thrown in whole and in many milder dishes they are better onions with better flavour. If you do looking at buying in quantity then ensure you eat or preserve the produce before it goes off, or buy large quantities for several people and split the bag.
Leeks are a different ball game and while still onions they are grown differently.

Don’t dismiss a space because it isn’t the done thing, many people grow chives in their rose beds as they keep flies such as greenfly and blackfly down and most aphids stay away and they also utilise their flower beds inside their hedges as this is wasted space and the only flowers I personally grow are cauliflowers as you can eat them. Let your neighbours mock and when they can’t get some foods and you have an abundance they want to be your best friend who doesn’t care if you grew it in the hedge bottom, as these are shaded spots they are often a prime location anyway.

If you have a brick wall you can grow things as fans or espaliers which is where you put wires from side to side and train things across them and as I like blackberries and raspberries I grow a hybrid of these called a Loganberry as an espalier and while it takes up little space it is some years old and a prolific cropper. You may choose to fit a batten to the top of the wall and fit canes at an angle for them to have beans trained up or if fruit is your thing it may be raspberries.

If your spouse is handy with a needle and thread they may like to make growing hangers which are a sheet of fabric with pockets all down the front which are screwed to a wall or post and filled with compost and filled with crops which generally trail and are environmentally friendly by recycling old fabrics or clothes. Vertical walls are ideal growing spaces often overlooked and a 6’ wall is another 6’ of growing space and if the wall is brick or masonry it is thermal mass and once the sun goes down it retains this heat and releases it slowly, right into your growing plants.

With all this pulled together you can select your crops in preferred order by being things you use, things which are economical to grow, and things you can harvest and store and when you have your shortlist you can select varieties to maximise your growing times and yields as your summer crops may be put somewhere and once cropped you can put winter crops in.

One of the most important rules is not to run before you can walk as gardening can be time consuming and take your family time and overdoing it by getting an allotment which you cannot hope to work will inevitably put you off gardening which is not to be recommended. Let me explain this simply, many people are basically unfit and this is not a criticism it is a fact and having an allotment is a lot of physical work as you have to winter dig it all by hand, you may have a 20 tonne load of muck delivered so can you move 20 tonnes into your allotment in one day on your own and can you devote the time it needs as there are no half measures here. Is your wife or spouse willing to become involved and can you get any kids interested as a wife or spouse means if you have something happen to you, she can keep it ticking over for several weeks until your return. Basically you work as a team and reap the rewards as a team.

Does your allotment have water? If not you have to lug a lot of this from home to your allotment and you need a lot of heavy containers and possibly a van to carry it and in dry periods many allotments limit the time you can draw tap water, in our local allotments it is 8-9am so can you be at your allotment every day for these times. If you can then with everyone else trying to fill their water butts in this limited time period so often you cannot get on a tap anyway. This gives us collection and the more roof space or area you have, the more water you can collect and now you need to store all this collected water right up until almost drought conditions and is the reason water is so important to gardeners.

I have my own lake and natural springs which feed it and some local allotment holders were having problems getting water and one was a mate and I said leave it until the weekend and I will sort it out, the weekend came and I put the 10,000 litre water carrier onto the tractor and connected the PTO. I drove it to the lake and set the pump to fill the bowser and filled it with 10,000 litres of water and took it to their allotments and reversed up to my mates allotment and shouted and he was surprised and he has 10 X 200 litre IBC containers which were empty and they are stacked one on top of the other and the top one is connected to the bottom one. I put the 4” adaptor on the trailer and connected several 4” pipes and threw them over his hedge and he filled the top ones and waited until they drained into the bottom ones and filled them and then filled his top ones to the brim, 20 minutes and 2000 litres of water, he found every container he had and even the old bath was filled and this was about another 1000 litres and the remaining 7000 litres were fired into the air to fall and literally drench his allotments and the ones either side so they were wet right down into the soil.
Two more trips were done and people were phoning other allotment holders who were also coming up to get a share of the 20,000 litres and every garden was watered and very few crops were lost and during the week I went up with another bowser full and sprayed water into the air to irrigate as many gardens as possible. What would your contingency be?

You also have the routine jobs such as cutting back any hedging and installing or maintaining paths and while vanity may have crept into most areas of life, gardening has been pretty much exempt as most gardeners recycle anyway and building rubbish or hardcore is often used for paths.

Do you have a solid shed? And if not this is a necessity and not just a shed as it needs to be very secure as many allotments are remote and thieves target sheds as easy targets and druggies in particular don’t care what damage they do as long as they can get enough money for their next fix. No shed means taking every tool you may need with you every time you go to your allotment and if you buy a rotovater it is an expensive piece of kit and you need a secure shed to put it, and your other tools in and you need to list and photograph them for insurance purposes, a secure shed means they go to an allotment with an easier shed to brake into. Ideally a brick or block structure is best and while many allotments may allow them to be built, many more may not and demand it is classed as a temporary or portable structure as a wooden garden shed may be and it you can have bricks make it a double course and fill the cavity with concrete and fit a very strong door and remember battery tools are powerful and cheap now.

How is your access, another important consideration as getting heavier items to your allotment may be tricky if you cannot drive to it and if you can drive to it you can unload heavy stuff and fill your car with produce much easier and while the rack may be fine in summer, what’s it like in winter.

One other consideration is your home as many people have greenhouses at home so can you split your time between home and your allotment as you can raise seedlings or plants at home in the greenhouse and if you have a log burner it is much easier to nip down the garden to fuel it up throughout the evening. Plants can be hardened off at home before being taken to an allotment for planting and you can move them a little at a time to pace yourself and the work involved and if this is an option for you then no wood burner at your allotment means no risk of fires either accidently or caused by potential thieves of vandals.

For a beginner I would suggest getting down to learning your craft without the graft and if you can build yourself a salad bar to grow your salad crops and get a 1 tonne builders bag and clean it would be an excellent compromise as you could learn the basics without all the peripherals such as cutting hedges or building sheds for your tools. Having a 1 tonne bag teaches you crop planning and optimising you’re cropping potential and utilising your limited space effectively and if you can add a few containers this increases your yields without all the donkey work and it would be in your garden. If your first year is successful then add a second 1 tonne bag and you can double your crops and see if you like gardening and you can slowly work up to an allotment without the pain. Remember if you are 25 it is easy to clear and dig a large allotment but when you are 50 and with a few accidents or injuries it becomes a lot harder and maybe impossible and if you add infirmity and disability into the mix it becomes a no no for most people.