Small Plot? No Problem!

When you only have a small area to work with, it's really good to keep it in production year-round. And with a bit of cunning, you can easily have two crops a year from most of your beds! (Well, that is the ideal anyway - I'm still learning, and some of my crops do fail. But trial and error is what it's all about.)

I like to grow small quantities of a wide variety of veg, since there are only two of us to feed, so I currently have eight 1.2m x 3.5m beds on my little allotment, on a four-year rotation (2 beds in each rotation group). The four groups are: Onions & Roots, Brassicas & Beets, Legumes, and Three Sisters.

If you want to try it, or just find out more, click on the "Continue reading" link for all the gory details (including a spreadsheet to print out or adapt to your own needs)!

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

It's a Leaves and Shoots week this week (no Lynne Truss jokes, please!), so I've been sowing my autumn and winter salads in the raised beds. Rocket, broccoli raab, chicory Rosso di Treviso and spring onions have gone in so far; next up is the pak choi, when I've cleared out the remains of the lettuce. Hopefully my plug-plant brassicas and leeks for the allotment will turn up this week as well - perfect timing!

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

I went up to the allotment on Tuesday morning, not having been for a few days, and discovered that the pests had been very busy in my absence. Worst hit were the "München Bier" radishes, which I was growing for the seed pods (right). So, no trendy stirfries for me! I pulled all the plants out and squished the offenders underfoot before throwing them in the compost bin.

Luckily the radishes were the first to attract the cabbage white butterflies' attention, so the caterpillars on my cabbages and romanesco weren't so big and voracious. On the other hand the autumn brassicas also had whitefly and a few aphids. I removed what I could, then after work Richard and I went round to our local garden centre and picked up some pyrethrum spray and a big micromesh tunnel, and took them to the allotment to escalate the War on Terror. I try to only use sprays as a last resort, and really I should have netted the plants better to prevent this happening - but it's easy to be wise after the fact.

The other major pest on the allotment is slugs. Not just little keel slugs, but honking great Arion ater, those three-inch-long black fellows. I had to eject one from the heart of one of my red cabbages - the chances of us getting any brassicas this autumn are looking increasingly slim :(

Not to be daunted, however, I have deployed a Slug-X trap baited with diluted dregs of raspberry vodka (no beer in the house, and you can't buy alcohol before 8am, even for slug-killing purposes). I put it a good foot or two from the netted cabbages, so that it lures them away rather than to them. I've also put a ring of fine woodshavings around each plant as a slug barrier - a recent trial in "Grow Your Own" found that bran worked very well, but I couldn't find any in my local Tesco and I didn't want to wait for a trip into town. So, I'm trying out their "Value Small Animal Bedding" as an alternative. Fingers crossed!

Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)

Leaves and Shoots week is drawing to a close, and the weather forecast for the weekend is looking grim, so I worked from home today so that I could fit in a session at the allotment.

At lunchtime I sowed some pots of herbs indoors: lots of coriander; sweet, Greek and Thai basil; plus mint, dill, marjoram, chives and lemon balm. The cats are now shut out of the conservatory until I can work out how to stop them jumping up onto the shelves!

The big job, though, was planting out the plug-plants that arrived yesterday. Two beds had to be forked over and raked flat again, which took longer than I had anticipated. Although the summer's hoeing has kept the annual weeds down, the perennials keep creeping back (the little sods!), so there was a fair bit of bindweed and couch grass roots to get out. It's like painting the Forth Bridge...

Eventually, though, I got to the fun part - planting! One bed now has two rows of 20 Musselburgh leeks; the other has a row of seven PSB and another of eight "Nero di Toscana" kale. Now more careful than ever about pests, I have the brassicas under my two standard net tunnels, and the leeks are surrounded by chickenwire to keep the pigeons off.

The plot's starting to look halfway decent - if we can get the old raspberry canes out this autumn and the perennial bed (asparagus and soft fruit) sorted out, it might finally start looking like a real working allotment instead of a half-abandoned one!

N.B. Today's title is from the old music-hall song made famous by Marie Lloyd, for those of you too young to get the reference :)

Moon phase: Week 3 (waning)

This weekend had a Gallic flavour: harvesting red onions on Saturday and preparing the garlic for storage on Sunday.

The onions are a bit small, but then they did go in late, and red onions in the shops are seldom large. It was also a bit early in the moon cycle for harvesting roots, but with rain forecast for the rest of the week, I didn't really have a choice :( Now they are drying on the slatted shelves in my conservatory, since outdoors is obviously not an option.

On Sunday I decided I was fed up of having a box of garlic "decorating" the living room, so I set about making it into plaits and grappes. However the hardnecks were a bit too stiff for making grappes; either I left them to dry too long, or I'm doing something else wrong! Plaiting the softnecks was fiddly but rather satisfying - just a pity that the softnecks all turned out rather small, so my plaits are miniature ones :)