Early Days at the Allotment

Some photos from the very early days of the plot, taken in April 2023.

We’ve just moved in and the place looks incredibly bare. There are a few plants growing at home and we’ll bring them over here once they’re large enough to plant out and the last frost has gone, which will hopefully be very soon.

For now, and in the first picture below, we have second early maris peer potatoes in the four green bags in the middle-left. We used the two wooden boxes next to the potatoes to transport the plants on the grass in the bottom right, which are the sweet peas you can see in the photos further down the page.

In the image below, in the bed that draws your eye, we’ve planted garlic, sweet peas and dwarf broad beans. There are a couple of rows of each and the sweet peas will eventually grow up the netting attached to the A-frame structure we built from five bamboo canes.

Here’s the same bed from another angle. And in this one, along the left hand side of our plot and leading up to the water butt, there’s a strawberry bed. We started this last year with a few strawberries we brought from our garden. Once the fruiting season was over, we had a lot of runners to use for new plants.

Earlier in the year, we laid some manure down to revitalise the bed.