Before the allotment

As I said in my previous post I haven't had my allotment long and even before then I enjoyed growing things. I'm essentially a country bumpkin at heart and live on the edge of a large village being able to walk out my door, cross the road and then just walk through fields. About a 5 minute walk from me surrounded by fields are the local allotments which I would often take a wander around and have a look at what was growing and grasped a few ideas for growing stuff in my garden.

I decided to start with a small herb patch. Nothing fancy, just a little bit of soil outside my back door, I bought some seeds which I sowed in pots and left on the windowsill in the kitchen. Then I just dug the soil over when they were big enough and planted them out. Some died and I re-planted...some didn't do anything and so I bought more seeds.


This has been established for a few years now and I have rosemary, peppermint, fennel, oregano, chives, catmint, curry plant, thyme, chives and lemon balm all growing. I then bought some patio planters, filled them with compost and grew some tomatoes.

The space I have is only about 5 foot by 1 foot but as you can see I have manged to get plenty in there and it smells great in the summer!!!!

I also had a little bit of soil on the other side of the garden..( not much as I have my garden mainly for the kids to play in) and I used some of this to grow a few runner beans and they did really well here.
I tried peas too but they weren't as succesful...I think mainly as they trailed onto the path which the kids then ran over! The cabbages that I planted did ok but these are quite a large veg when fully grown and need quite a bit of space so I only ended up withabout 5 decent sized ones and decided not to try these again!!!!


I think my best buy were my window boxes, (I actually put these outside but they would have worked just as well inside). I filled them with compost and then bought a packet of mixed lettuce leaf seeds. This grew really well and saved me a lot of money over the summer as we eat a lot of salads, I had a couple extra tomato plants so not wanting to waste them put those in to and all the plants got on very nicely.. :-). It was great to be able to cut fresh leaf when we wanted to eat it and more just kept growing, and you can't beat picking a tomato and popping it straight in your mouth!

Radishes are a great thing to grow if you have a little space in your flower bed as they don't take up much room and are very hardy...and if you don't have an actual bed try planting a few runner bean seeds at the edge of your path near a fence...It's surprising how well they grow in a little bit of soil although remember to put something up for them to climb on.

Well I hope this has given people with very little space a few ideas and a bit of incentive to try to grow something for themselves!!