This video is about our allotment related sustainability efforts.  These are directed primarily at reducing our: fresh water use, carbon footprint, consumption of single use plastic and exposure to toxins.  We are also trying to build top soil, encourage beneficial birds and insects, increase our food quality, save money and have a lot of fun.  Some of the money we save will be used to buy carbon off-sets for the things we can’t change on our own (we recognise the problems with carbon offsets, but it’s the only tool we have).

Allotment Inputs and Outputs

Our main inputs to the allotment are waste products: various manures, leaves, wood chips, seaweed (from the beach and purchased too) and – my favorite – spent mushroom compost.  We also recycle allotment waste into compost, but that’s not an input.  Of course seeds are an important sustainability input , but they’re not the subject of this video.

Ideally the only imput we’d need, other than waste products, would be the sun and the rain.  Unfortunately though we live in one of the dryest places in the country and as a result we don’t get anywhere near enough rain to achieve anywhere near optimum harvest levels, we accept that, but we do like to achieve good harvest levels so we add tap water too.  Fortunately that tap water has a hugely positive impact on the overall sustainability of our efforts, it’s not a negative input (see later).

We also add a lot of personal effort and we do it with care and love.  That’s important because we are not reckless with our efforts: we don’t over-work, over-water, use inorganic fertilisers or pesticides and we try hard to nurture the ecology of the soil and the broader environment.

Finally we get the outputs and for Debbie, Jennie, Jon, Robin and I that’s a lot of fun and companionship as well as improved health from the physical activity, the fresh air and the high quality food.  Also if we do it right – and we do – each year the amount of soil increases, the soil quality improves and the ecology of the allotment gets richer.

Most important from a sustainability standpoint is that we grow a lot of food, so lets dig into that.

Growing a lot of food

Our primary objective is to be self-sufficient in vegetables all year round and seasonal fruit, that’s the original purpose of an allotment of course.  We also extend the season for fruit by dehydrating, freezing and making preserves.  The process of dehydrating and freezing is – so far as is practical – fuelled by our solar panels.

There are several ways to look at how much we harvest, but my favourites are to look at the value, about £10,000 and the number of meals, about 10,000 too.  I get those figures by counting the number of the 2 litre containers that we fill, about 4,000 a year, during 100+ harvests, plus bulk harvests of fruit, potatoes, beets etc.  That’s a lot of harvests and a lot of packaging that we eliminate.  The containers get used well over a hundred times and then eventually get fully recycled.

Debbie, Jennie, Jon, Robin and I eat about half of this food: the rest gets gifted to friends, family and fellow allotmenteers.  Gifting is important for several reasons.

Why gift so much food?

While it’s possible to be self-sufficient without growing a surplus, it’s extrordinarily difficult.  In February for example we have just enough – wonderful – lettuce and then two months later we have much too much and no summer crops to replace it with, so it’s gift or compost.  Similarly in September we are overflowing with kale but by February we are just scraping by.  Finally it’s essential to grow too much to offset the risk of failures: last year for example we lost a third of our spring salad beds to mildew, half of our Christmas potatoes to blight, all of our August sowing to contaminated compost and probably half of our brassicas to cabbage root fly.

Resiliance to the ravages of pests and disease and the cycle of sufficiency and surplus applies to almost everything that we grow and we grow 250 varieties of fruit and veg each year.  Storing the surplus is only a partial solution and often involves destroying what makes the food so wonderful in the first place.  A dehydrated apple for example, or a frozen cauliflower or carrot is no substitute for the glory of the same food fresh from the plot.  So whereever possible we eat fresh and we grow enough to ensure a very rich and diverse diet all through the year, if we are lucky the result is surplus.

A lot of people we know compost their surplus, but we are fortunate that we have so many wonderful people to share that surplus with, a community of passionate fruit and veg lovers who relish fresh ‘organic’ food as much as we do.  Friends and family who return the gift of veg in a myriad of ways: the smile on their faces, their improved health, the money they save and spend on their kids, their own surpluses they sometimes gift back to us, the free drinks they buy us, or the restaurant meals, the help on the allotment and the glow that comes from doing a good deed.

It turns out though that a surplus takes on a whole new aspect when examined from a sustainability perspective.  Growing our own food requires about 80% of the inputs to the allotment.  The surplus has a much lower – 20% – marginal cost of input (water, manures, plastic etc) but it delivers 50% of the sustainability benefits (water savings, reduced carbon footprint) so it’s a vital part of our sustainability efforts!

Sometimes on a lovely sunny day I think that I’d like to grow even more food, and it would certainly be possible, and good for the planet, but there are a few constraints:  the most important is that achieving optimal yields requires more effort than I have the energy for given the limited time I’m able to work (due to health constraints) and more water than is available (due to the councils cost constraints) so we stick with doing just what’s needed to be self-sufficient, it’s a reasonable balance.

So the bottom line is that growing enough food to be self-suffient means you will have a surplus, it’s just the nature of things.  The trick is to make the best use of the surplus to maximise sustainability and good in the world.

Toxin free food

Organic is a problematic label to attach to allotment grown food.  We don’t know what happened on our plots before we arrived, or if we do, we’d rather not think about it.  We don’t source organic horse manure and I don’t think it’s possible to buy truly organic spent mushroom compost.  We can’t practically comply with a myriad of other regulations required to attach the official organic designation.

What we can say though is that herbicides, pesticides and inorganic fertilisers don’t go anywhere near our food, except in very specific circumstances (we spray apple trees twice for Codling Moth for example).  That contrasts sharply with most commercially grown fruit and veg that can be sprayed dozens of times in it’s life.

Taking these steps doesn’t just benefit the food directly, because many inorganic fertilisers and insecticides and herbicides damage the life of the soil, they disrupt critical natural cycles or throw processes out of balance.  Ultimately an unhealthy soil doesn’t grow optimally healthy plants.

The bottom line is that we take most, if not all, of the practical steps to reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals on, or in, our food.

Water sustainability

We capture as much rainfall as we can, but we also depend on tap water for the allotment in spring and summer.  It’s natural to focus on the tap water usage as an input, a sustainability problem to be reduced, but that would be a mistake.

The way that we grow food on the allotment is massively more water efficient than commercial food production, that we would oherwise depend on, for a whole host of reasons. Some of the most important are detailed below:

1. Our soil quality is much higher, it holds much more water because it’s mulched and rich in organic matter
2. We grow much more intensively, sometimes harvesting more than an order of magnitude more food per square meter than land-rich, labour-poor, farmers
3. We plant much more carefully, pre-watering holes to encourage deep rooting of young plants and then by carefully direct watering when establishing the plants to further encourage deep roots
4. When watering established plants we use all manner of tricks to try and direct water to the root zone
5. We water by hand and with careful attention to how dry the soil is: so just enough water, in the right place and at the right time of day
6. We harvest in a cut and come again fashion, a little each week, for many months, which yields vastly more than harvesting once and then waiting months for another crop to grow
7. We try to eat the whole plant, for example: we eat the sprouts, the sprout leaves and the sprout florrets, we eat the beetroot leaves and roots, we eat the radish leaves and roots
8. We never leave the soil bare, when one harvest finishes, another – module grown – plant takes it’s place, even over winter. Winter rain doesn’t just flow into the sea, first it nourishes all of the plants on our plots.
9. We capture rain from every structure
10. All food is washed on the allotment using tap water, that water is then used to water the plot, no soil leaves the allotment (lugging all of that tap water to the plot for 6 months of the year is a major headache though)

Many of these techniques are wholly impractical for the commecial grower, but pracical for small scale, labour rich allotmenteers.  The end result is that for every litre of water that we use on the allotment, we save 40 litres of water that would have to be used by a commercial grower.  That’s incredible and it makes efforts to try and reduce water usage on the allotment still further counter-productive. Although if we were squandering water on the allotment using sprinklers all day long it would be a different story.

To make this more concrete, in order to grow the quality and quantity of food that we grow a commercial grower would use 1,318 cubic metres of water according to data from waterfootprint.org, which provides water usage/kg for fruit, vegetables and roots. What we grow is skewed towards leafy greens, which are the most water hungry commercial crops, so this figure is likely to be conservative.

In order to grow our 10,000 meals of fruit and veg we only use 33 cubic meters of tap water across the three allotments in a typical year, that’s just 2.5% of what a commercial grower would use.   It’s worth noting that small scale organic market gardeners using drip irrigation have similar levels of water efficiency to us, unfortunately a tiny fraction of food is available from these growers.

That 33 cubic metres has a value of about £33, but it enables a harvest value of £10,000 there’s no better financial or sustainability investment on the planet!  Fortunately as a country we’ve generally moved beyond our own selfish interests now and are taking our global sustainability responsibilities seriously, we do the same.

It’s also worth noting that although we might be more efficient in water usage than the typical allotment, we are almost certainly less efficient than the best.  On average though allotments will always be much more water efficient than commercial growers and so they are always a big sustainability win.  Managing and watering an allotment as described in this post is to be celebrated, not avoided!

Plastic usage

Commercial – supermarket – food uses an incredible amount of single use, non-recycleable packing, much of it plastic with a little cardboard.  We on the other hand use only reusable (BPA free) plastic containers and, to date, we have had very few of them break, we estimate that they are good for hundreds of uses, after which – because they are a high quality plastic – they are fully recycled.

Food Miles

Look around any supermarket fruit and vegetable section and you will  be amazed to see that almost all of the food has travelled half way around the world.  Worse yet, take a look at a local farm shop and you will be stunned to see that surprisingly little of it has been grown on the farm or sourced from local farms, it’s foreign too.  In contrast all of the vegetables and seasonal food that we eat is grown on the allotment and eaten by people who live within 3 miles of it.  In addition, aside from a few miles in the car – to lug washing water to the allotment – most travel is by foot or bike.  Fruit and veg deliveries are either on foot or take advantage of journeys that would be taken anyway.   The bottom line is that our 10,000 meals have almost zero associated food miles.

It’s also worth taking a look at the miles travelled by our inputs.  Manures, wood chips and spent mushroom compost all come from local farms or gardens, less than 10 miles away and are delivered in bulk once or twice a year.  The actual food miles are included in the following section on carbon footprint.

Carbon Footprint of the allotment

As already mentioned the carbon footprint associated with the allotment plots is very low.  The inputs are almost all locally sourced waste products, the packaging is reused hundreds of times and completely recycled, the polytunnel steel frame will last for 20+ years and be fully recycled.  That leaves only the plastic for the polytunnel, cold-frames and module trays and other miscellaneous items that I confidently estimate at less than and average of 0.1 tons of co2/year.

Now we get onto the good stuff.

The chart shows the co2 for different types of diet.  We feed between 10 and 30 people depending on the time of year and they are a mix of: average, no-beef, vegetarian and vegan.  I’ve taken the average as vegetarian and the average number of people that we feed as 15.  From the chart I can see that a typical vegetarian’s co2 footprint for fruit and vegetables is 0.5 tons and we feed an average of 15 people, so if they ate commercially grown fruit and veg it would have a carbon footprint of 7.5 tons of co2.

All the veg and seasonal fruit that Debbie and I eat is from the allotment (and we eat a lot of fruit and veg) but the other 13 people don’t exclusively eat allotment fruit and veg, so accounting for that I calculate that the carbon free food that we grow for them reduces their carbon footprint by at least 3.38 tons of co2.  We need to reduce that by 0.1 tons, because that’s what the allotment’s plastic etc creates, which gives us 3.28 tons saved/year.

That’s not that much of a saving unfortunately, taking a single international flight would release that much co2.  Fortunately, Debbie and I don’t fly, so it’s actually quite a big deal for us, in fact it’s enough to offset the co2 footprint of the rest of the food that we buy.  That means all of our food is carbon zero with 0.28 cubic metres of co2 to spare!  That 0.28 tons conveniently covers the carbon footprint of the allotment specific transport.

So the bottom line is that thanks to the allotments all of the food that we consume is carbon neutral.

Financial self-sufficiency

We are most definitely not self-sufficient in food.  Although we grow all of our own vegetables and seasonal fruit, we buy a lot of fruit out of season and we also buy oats, oils, nuts, dairy, flour, meat and much more.  Our eggs are gifted to us by friends who have back yard hens and our lamb and beef comes from animals raised on marginal land, but we still have to buy it.

However the allotment saves us about £5,000 off our (Steve, Debbie, Jen, Jon and Robin) food bill each year and that saving easily covers all of the other food we buy and allows us to afford mostly organic.  We also gift another £5,000 to friends and family and that – if we were to sell it to them – would also cover our entire food bill with lots to spare.  So in value terms, but not monetary terms, we are financially self-sufficient in food.

The carbon footprint in the rest of our lives

Our current carbon footprint is already below the governments target for 2020, way below.  To improve things still further we buy renewable electricity and 10% renewable gas (the rest of the gas is offset).

We don’t fly, we turn the thermostat down, we line-dry our clothes, we use solar panels to fuel our dehydrator, fridges and freezer and we walk and cycle a lot.  However we still have a carbon footprint of about 6 tons.  The money we save on food from the allotment in a single week in spring means that we are in the fortunate position to be able to buy carbon offsets to cover this 6 tons and the carbon footprints of our children and their partners.

We understand that offsets are problematic, but most of that problem comes from people – for example – continuing to fly and using offsets, but not lifestsyle change, to make up for it.  In our case we have done everything that makes financial sense to reduce our carbon footprint.  Everything else requires new innovations or changes in government policy/regulations etc, we can’t directly affect these which leaves offsets as the only other option open to us, so we’ve taken it.

Summary

With a little effort (about 16 hours a week) and 250 sq metres of growing space, it’s possible to be self-sufficient in veg and seasonal fruit and to offset the total carbon footprint of all of the food we eat.  It’s also possible to save a lot of money, enough money in fact to buy all of our other food, if we decided to sell your surplus (not allowed as we have an council owned allotment) but also not desirable because it’s much better for us to gift it.

It’s also possible to save a huge amount of water.  Not all of that water saving will be in this country of course, but a lot of it will and it’s worth remembering that sustainability is a global problem and many of the counties where our food is grown have much less fresh water than we do, which makes this even more important.

As a spin off benefit while growing all this wonderful food: you can make top soil (a rapidly diminishing resource), improve the ecology of your environment, keep fit and have a lot of fun.

We try hard to grow the most food we can.  We take seriously how privilliged and lucky we are to have allotments and the positive impact we can have on global warming and sustanability in general as a result.  The more food we grow, the more water we save, the lower our carbon footprint, the less plastic used, the less food miles travelled, the healthier the community.  Of course the more food we grow, the more fun we have too, so it’s a win-win.

Fortunately we are not alone in this quest.  The town council and the allotment committee are equally committed to sustainability and our allotment site is full of passionate growers!

Finally bear in mind that this ‘analysis’ isn’t some government funded project undertaken by a team of economists and statasticians, published in a peer reviewed jounrnal.  It’s just a bit of fun, done one morning in a coffee shop, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

It’s been a bit of a wait for some suitable weather, but today we finally got to plant out the onions!  It’s an important day, because this single day’s planting will provide our complete daily supply for most of the year.

I like to grow all of my onions from seed for a few reasons:

1. It’s cheaper
2. It’s easy to sow more than I need and then just use any spares for spring onions
3. It’s easy to divert my spring onions to main crop onions (Sturon and Lila)
4. I can grow the onions in small clumps of 2 – 4 onions/shallots (depending on variety).  This gives me a lovely mix of sizes.  A few large onions, loads of medium sized onions for storage and a few dozen small ones for pickling.
5. They don’t go to seed
6. It’s more satisfying

I also find that growing multiple onions in a small – 40 cell – modules allows me to plant a little earlier, because the plug holds together.

The video also covers the progress on my spring lettuces, sown in February, to be harvested in May, June and July.  These have been grown on under fleece and I’ve removed the fleece now.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

This video marks the third anniversary of my first ever harvest off the allotments.  I’ve come a long way, in fact today is also the day that I harvested £2,000 worth of veg so far this year, which is a huge upgrade on previous years and proves once and for all that it’s possible to be easily self-sufficient in veg (almost all of it fresh) right through winter.  Truly miraculous abundance!

The video also catches the allotment at it’s messiest as I try and get the very last harvests off the over-wintered plants, all well past their best, while giving the spring planted veg time to take over.  I think the transition will be successful, we won’d have any shortages, but we will lurch from huge surpluses to just enough for a few weeks.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £1975 of fruit and veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £458 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £245 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is a bit higher than last week, it can’t continue though because a lot of the winter veg is ending this week and the spring veg is not all ready to take it’s place.  We had 37 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

We picked: calabrese, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, romanesco leaves, calabrese leaves, red cabbage leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, mizuna, giant red mustard, chard, spring onions, celery, salad rocket, sorrel, leeks, pea shoots, lots of bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.

How many people are we feeding?

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine and Sally) about 20 people and the water still isn’t on and we have very hot weather, so we have to reduce harvest levels next week and so sadly this will be the last delivery to Sally, I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers.

What we’ve bought this week
Nothing

Videos published
I published three short videos:

Living a Sustainable Allotment Life

Planting multi-sown onions/shallots and uncovering the spring lettuce

April Allotment Tour – Miraculous Abundance

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

I’ve planted the two main allium beds:  Main crop onions (Sturon, Red barron, Lila, Alisa Craig) and Shallots (Zebrune).  I’ve interplanted the onion bed with lettuce (Mood Red).

I’ve pulled one of the chard beds and replaced it with Golden Beetroot and one of the lettuce beds and replaced it with Bolthardy Beetroot.

I’ve planted a row of Alderman Peas

Finally I pulled a bed of winter radish, that has been an amazing source of smoothie leaves all winter/spring and replaced it with Amazon spinach, for baby leaves.

I’ve potted on

1. The outdoor – blight resistant – tomatoes
2. The indoor tomatoes
3. The indoor peppers

First harvests of the year

Nothing

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears
2. Winter squash

Last harvests of the year

We’ve now run out of last years Broccolini, but this years plants are very close.  The Lambs lettuce is now finished too.

What’s left in store

Potatoes – 1/2 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 1 big box
Onions – 1/3 large box
Shallots – 1/3 large box
Beets – 2 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

Allotment reserves (Steve) : 1900 litres, down by 700 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 250 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 300 litres
Home reserves : 650 litres

It’s been very dry for a couple of over three weeks and it’s now also very warm,  we are burning through water at an alarming rate.  Fortunately we have a little rain forecast next week and we might get the water switched on.

What have we processed for preserving

Three jars of tomato passata mix, made from tomatoes gifted to us my people we gift food too.

Highlights

I’ve cleared all of the over-wintered kalettes from the back garden, these beds are now resting for a few weeks while I clear any weeds that emerge and let any cabbage aphid die.

We are still harvesting a huge amount.  We have an incredible amount of blossom on the fruit trees and the broad beans have more flowers than I’ve ever seen before.  We have fairly well developed peas on our early plants and lots of flowers on our successions.

Everyone is raving about the quality of the new potatoes, definitely worth the effort!

Thanks to longer days we are now able to harvest in the evenings, which is cooler and we can also enjoy a day out.

I’ve planted the first batch of main crop potatoes, hidden away behind the blueberries in the fruit garden at home.

Frosts should have finished now!

Lowlights

Most of last years brassicas have finished now and need pulling out.  I think I have two weeks of supply left in the polytunnel.  I’m confident now that we will have continuity of supply, but I’m pleased we grow a surplus usually because I think we will have just enough for us and a few friends.

Some of the winter brassicas now have cabbage aphid AND white fly, so we will have to pull them up quickly, to try and avoid them spreading to this year’s plants.

The allotment water has not been switched on but we’ve heard that it might go on this weekend!  We are used to it being switched on in early April, so the lack of information on this makes it very difficult to plan.

Lack of rain and tap water makes planting out all of the new seedlings something of a lottery.

Allotment Finances
We’ve harvested a total of £2205 of fruit and veg this year
We’ve spent a total of £482 this year, mostly one time investments

What we’ve harvested and eaten
We harvested a total of £170 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is quite a reduction from last week as we head into the hungry gap.  We had 37 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

We picked: calabrese, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, red cabbage leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, giant red mustard, chard, spring onions, celery, salad rocket, sorrel, leeks, pea shoots, lots of bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.

How many people are we feeding?

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 20 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens!

What we’ve bought this week
Compost for potato tubs and a few seeds

Videos published
I published one short video: The worst thing about growing veg over winter

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

We’ve had very wet and stormy weather this week, so I’ve deferred a lot of the planting, but I did pop in a bed of kales, in place of pea shoots and planted  carrots and potatoes.

I’ve potted on

Nothing

First harvests of the year

1. Swift new potatoes
2. Asparagus

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears
2. Winter squash

Last harvests of the year

1. Pea shoots
2. winter radish

What’s left in store

Potatoes – 1/2 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 1/2 big box – the quality is quite low now though so we will soon switch to fresh
Onions – 1/3 large box
Shallots – 1/3 large box
Beets – 1.5 big boxes
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

Allotment reserves (Steve) : 2300 litres, down by 300 litres
Allotment reserves (Jennie): 400 litres
Allotment reserves (Debbie): 300 litres
Home reserves : 650 litres

The tap water has now been switched on and we’ve had a spell of average rainfall, so the beds are all reasonably well hydrated again!

What have we processed for preserving

Nothing

Highlights

The allotment water is on!

The weather at the start of the week was excellent, so I took the opportunity to rest for a bit and got a lot of tidying up done in the garden at home, the garage and the allotments.

I’ve harvested asparagus for the first time!

I’ve taken the covers off most of the beds, so that they can take advantage of the rain this week, that has laid down about an inch of water, the equivalent of a cubic metre on my newly un-covered growing areas, and about 6 cubic metres across the three allotments!

I’ve cleared all of the over-wintered brassica’s now, except those in the polytunnel which are still quite good quality.  They will supplement the spring planted beds for another week.

We are still harvesting a huge amount.

Everyone is raving about the quality of the new potatoes, definitely worth the effort, we’ve now got Swift available as well as Charlotte!

Frosts should have finished now!

Lowlights

The delay in having the water switched on meant not being able to keep many of the beds hydrated, hence spinach and chard went to seed early, wasting probably £50 of harvests.  I think I’ve saved everything else by bringing a lot of water from home.

The broad beans got quite a battering in the high winds, but they should recover ok

Lots of jobs are piling up this week and next, making it a busy time.  I’ve spent the last three weeks on antibiotics and have been weak and tired a lot of the time, so it’s not been the best timing!  I’ve been getting plenty of help though.

We are now in the hungry gap, that time of year when traditionally there’s not been much to harvest.  I’ve gradually been working to make the hungry gap a bit more abundant for us and that’s important because we are self-sufficient in veg.  I’ve a series of videos that cover the hungry gap, if you want to know more:

This video takes a look at a typical Monday harvest, but also covers what we are expecting to have available soon, to see us through the the hungry gap, mid-April to June.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

April is my busiest month, huge harvests, lots of sowing, but even more planting and lots of beds to clear and recondition ready for May planting, so it’s quite a relief to get to May.  I have dozens of seed trays full of healthy plants now and many of the March and April sowings are in the ground.  The main challenge has been clearing all of the brassica and green manure beds!

A lot of my sowing decisions are driven by having enough space to germinate and pot on seeds/seedlings and as we start May that’s definitely the case.  The little greenhouse and seedling bench in the polytunnel are full as are all of the window sills.  Within two weeks though a lot of space will have been cleared and I will be focused on harvesting again.

In fact from now on the allotments become very relaxed as we potter around, watering, planting and harvesting, with no real work to do until late September/October when we transition everything over for winter veg.

In this video I show you the progress of my March and April sowings which are doing very well.  The peppers are all doing well, the early tomatoes seem to have been worth the effort and the main tomato sowing destined for the polytunnel has all germinated well.  The early courgettes and cucumbers are planted or potted too.  The early brassicas are in the ground and succession sowings are growing strong.

In the video I also spend a few minutes on the computer to show you the databases that I’m using to capture all of my knowledge about the 250+ varieties of fruit and veg that I grow and also the details of what I’m sowing.

Before we get to the video though you might like to check out my latest tour, which shows everything that’s growing.

You might also like to see some of my March harvest highlights you can check out the following video:

So finally we get to the video for April sowing and growing.

This video shows several databases that I’m using to manage my allotment this year.If you would like to find out more about these databases please take a look at the following video, and it’s associated description:

If you want to get a copy of the tools that I demonstrate in this video please click on this link and create an account.  Once you have an account then click on this link to browse all of my databases, if you want, you can take a copy of the databases to use for yourself.

If you want to download any of the following views to a spreadsheet you can clock ‘download CSV’ to get your own private copy, or use the web based database I’m using by watching the video above.

When looking at these databases please bear in mind that they are live views onto rapidly evolving data. The content and design is being constantly improved. If you want to look at snapshots and/or take your own copies, please look at the video above and it’s associated description.

Here’s a complete read-only view of the sowing log and varieities database with all of my data:

Here’s a read-only view of everything that I sowed in April:

Here’s a view of everything I’m planning to sow in May:

For completeness here’s a view of my sowing database with all the details!

Watch out for the next video showing what I’m sowing in June!

It’s time to plant out the main crop brassicas.  I already have plenty of over-wintered plants in the ground, as welll as my early kales, so we have plenty to eat for now.  It’s time though to put in the brassicas that will feed us from Autumn until Spring.  Although some recommend planting sprouts in July,  I’ve often struggled to get them to establish in the heat, so I’ve chosen instead for May planting, with the added bonus of longer stalks and hence more sprouts, the same holds true for the kalettes.

I’ve also planted a range of shorter lived plants, red cabbage, broccolini, calabrese as well as some winter kales.

Finally I’m planning to take the nets off fairly early, in a few months time.  I’m doing this because on balance I seem to have more success when I have easy access to the plants, to keep them tidy, harvest from them regularly, inspect them for pests and treat the pests, rather than just cover them in nets and hope for the best.  I will spray with Bacillus Thuringiensis (a natural soil bacteria) once I take the nets off, to control for caterpillars.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

Allotment Finances

We’ve harvested a total of £2408 of fruit and veg this year.
We’ve spent a total of £672 this year, mostly one time investments.  This week we spent almost as much as we harvested!

What we’ve harvested and eaten

We harvested a total of £193 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. I’m very pleased that we are able to maintain such a good harvest rate as we enter the hungry gap.  We had 35 meals with ingredients from the allotment.

We picked: carrots, green garlic, calabrese, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, giant red mustard, chard, spring onions, celery, salad rocket, sorrel, leeks, pea shoots, broad bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.

People are we feeding

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 20 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens!

What we’ve bought this week

It’s been an expensive week: I had to buy a new wheel barrow, a new axel/wheel for the old one, 3 ton of spent mushroom compost, multi-purpose compost and a few seeds.

Videos I’ve published

I published three videos:

What we are harvesting today and into the hungry gap

Planting brassicas: ground prep, making frames, choosing nets

What I’m Sowing and Growing in May

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

I’ve finally planted all of the potatoes in their pots.  The decision to use only pots has opened up a lot of land on the allotment and in theory allowed me to improve quality and yield, but it’s hard work, by comparison with just popping them in the ground, it will be interesting to see what I decide to do next year!  I’ve also moved the old – repaired – barrow from my allotment to the back garden, because that’s the best way to harvest from pots – tip them into the barrow.

The big planting job of the week has been the brassicas for autumn/winter harvest: sprouts, kalettes, red cabbage, calabrese and winter kale.  For a variety of reasons I’ve used a fine mesh that I will be removing in about three months time.  In previous years I’ve found nets only moderately effective, but I’ve found having full access to the plants, to watch them for signs of problems, to keep them tidy and to harvest regularly to be just as good as nets (also spraying with BT as needed) as well as giving the predators access to the pests.

I’ve also planted the last of the Alderman peas, these should keep us going until the beans take over.

Finally I’ve planted all of the polytunnel tomatoes, sweet corn, trumbocino  and the last of the cucumbers.

What I’ve potted on

I’ve potted on the Aztec broccoli, calabrese, Graffiti caulifower, golden purselane. I should have potted on the outside tomatoes, maybe today!

First harvests of the year

1. Carrots
2. Green garlic

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears
2. Winter squash

Last harvests

1. Last years celery (this year’s celery will be ready by the end of the month)
2. Last years kale (this year’s kale is ready now)

What’s left in store

Potatoes – 1/2 medium sized bags
Garlic – a few bulbs
Carrots – 1/2 big box – the quality is quite low now though so we will soon switch to fresh
Onions – 1/3 large box
Shallots – 1/3 large box
Beets – 1 big box
Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

I’m not tracking water now that the taps are on.
Allotment reserves (Steve) :
Allotment reserves (Jennie):
Allotment reserves (Debbie):
Home reserves :

What have we processed for preserving

We often get tomatoes as gifts and these sometimes accumulate, so Debbie made up another batch of passata.

Highlights

We’ve harvested our first carrots!!  This is a major achievement for me: fresh, sweet, crisp young carrots before we run out of carrots in the store.  Becoming self -sufficient in carrots all year round was one of the few remaining objectives.

The polytunnel is back under control, most of the over-wintered veg is out and the tomatoes are in.  Managing the polytunnel in spring is definitely something I can improve on next year.  Doing that means doing a better job of growing late/early brassicas for spring outside and more lettuce outside too.  This will allow me to optimise the polytunnel beds for something that they are uniquely suited to.  See what a mess it was below!

Jennie’s plot is all cleared, composted and mulched.  The bean frames are up the beds are mostly planted.

I’ve been reflecting on the future of the allotments.  This has been initiated by two events: the joy with which the super early calabrese, cauliflowers, carrots, potatoes and asparagus have been greeted and the huge harvests we have had over winter and spring. I’ve now reached the point where ever bigger harvests isn’t that motivating (it’s just more work), self-sufficiency has been achieved, so what’s next?

I’ve decided on three areas of focus:

1. growing an ever richer diet, one that’s tuned to the tastes of Jennie and her family, Tessa and her family and Debbie and I.   So that’s early/late treats, lots of trees/berries and some less productive, but very healthly/tasty crops.
2. Growing even earlier and later.
3. Reducing my workload with more perennial crops and less watering.

We’ve eaten our first home grown tomatoes of the year, the plants were cuttings from tomatoes that we harvested in January and are very unhealthy.  They have just been discarded and left outside because they have greenfly and mildew on the leaves, but amazingly the tomatoes ripened and were very tangy and nice (definitely an opportunity for next year there).

We are still harvesting a huge amount.

Lowlights

I’ve had to rest a bit more than usual due to inflamed tendons in the ankle area, this is most likely caused by the two courses of antibiotics that I’ve taken over the last month.  Antibiotics and tendon inflammation don’t automatically seem to be associated, but apparently this is an increasingly common side effect and needs to be managed carefully.

My indoor tomatoes are not thriving, I moved them to the allotment too early and it’s not really warm enough for them.  I need to fix that next year.  By contrast the outdoor tomatoes, planted a month later and kept at home are bigger and healthier!

Carrot germination in one of my undercover frames has been rubbish, or they’ve been eaten by slugs.  I think I will be re-purposing that frame anyway, scrapping the carrots and planting sweet potatoes there.

I’ve had to resow my outdoor cucumbers, only one germinated: maybe cheap – end of season – seeds from Wilko’s were not the best idea.

This is a short video with some hints and tips on how to construct a quick and easy bean frame.  It seems simple of course, but when we walk around the allotments it’s amazing to see the variations in the design that people use, some to great effect, but most not.  Too many bean frames end up in an unruly pile after the first summer gales.

Controversially we like to use cable ties (black ones last better) for our frames, because they are quick, strong and easy to disassemble.  They are plastic of course, but they don’t end up contaminating the soil.  They have a carbon footprint too, but then so does string/wire and it’s minuscule by comparison with the overall reductions in greenhouse gases that the allotment delivers.  If you want to see more about our allotment sustainability analysis check out this blog post/video, we include cable ties in the analysis.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

Although I decided not to plant my tomatoes early, because I don’t have  very good space to grow them on and because I dislike potting them on, I still ended up having to plant them out in the polytunnel beds early.  In fact they are almost exactly the same sized plants that I planted last year – so I learned nothing.   Well maybe that’s not quite true, I learned a few things and that’s what you will find in this video.

I show how I prepared the ground for planting, how I plant, mulch, feed and water the plants.  How much space I’m leaving between them and what else is going into the polytunnel beds.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

In this video I talk about my updated allotment objectives and plans for the year.

I’ve basically met my challenges for this year:
– Increase my March/April harvests – Nearly quadrupled
– Harvest a huge amount of food – on target for £10,000/year
– Cover my costs for the year – achieved by mid April

So I need some new challenges and this is my working list:

1. Reduce workload
2. Reduce watering
3. Reduce overall harvest volume, but increase richness of diet throughout the year, especially winter and spring
4. Manage the big transitions better (Winter to Summer and Summer to Winter) I’ve done fine with Winter to Spring and Summer to Autumn

In addition I want to:

1. Eliminate almost all containers in summer
2. Do more interplanting and do it better
3. Plant more perennial fruit and
4. Turn more space over to lower yielding plants

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview:

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here:

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

If you received this via email click here to get all of the images and videos!

Allotment Finances

We’ve harvested a total of £2,585 of fruit and veg this year.
We’ve spent a total of £672 this year, mostly one time investments.

What we’ve harvested and eaten

We harvested a total of £175 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. I’m very pleased that we are able to maintain such a good harvest rate as we enter the hungry gap.  We had 32 meals with ingredients from the allotment, a bit low because Debbie and Jennie have been ill with tonsillitis.

We picked: carrots, green garlic, calabrese, cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, giant red mustard, chard, spring onions, salad rocket, sorrel, broad bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: carrots, potatoes, onions, shallots, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.

People are we feeding

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 20 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens!

What we’ve bought this week

1. Nothing

I’ve published three videos

Building quick, strong and easy bean frames

Planting tomatoes in the polytunnel, using halos and mulching (sorry about the audio levels!)

New plan/objectives for the allotments in 2019

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

1. The peppers and chillis.  half of these have gone under polythene low tunnels and the rest have gone in front of the tomatoes in the polytunnel.  These are inter-planted with spring onions and French marigolds
2. The first of the golden purselane beds (one more to plant when space becomes free) these have gone in a cold-frame with the lid on
3. The first of the New Zealand spinach beds (two more to plant, when space becomes free) these have gone in a cold-frame with the lid on
4. A small bed of Lobjoits lettuce and Red Salad Bowl lettuce, inter-planted with spring onions

What I’ve potted on

The outdoor tomatoes:

1. Outdoor (bush) Legend Tomato
2. Outdoor (bush) Losetto Tomato
3. Outdoor (cordon) Amish Paste Tomato
4. Outdoor (cordon) Crimson Crush Tomato
5. Tumbling Tom Red and Yellow

First harvests of the year

1. Carrots – May week 1
2. Green garlic – May week 1
3. Cauliflower – May week 2

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears – March
2. Winter squash – March
3. Carrots – May week 2

Last harvests

1. Celery – May week 1
2. Last years kale – May week 1

What’s left in store

1. Potatoes – 1/3 medium sized bags
2. Garlic – a few bulbs
3. Onions – 1/3 large box
4. Shallots – 1/3 large box
5. Beets – 1 big box
6. Dried Apples – 1 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

I’m not tracking water now that the taps are on:

1. Allotment reserves (Steve) :
2. Allotment reserves (Jennie):
3. Allotment reserves (Debbie):
4. Home reserves :

What have we processed for preserving

1. Nothing

Highlights

1. We’ve harvested our first cauliflower of the year and I’m well on with summer planting now, all that remains are the runner/French beans, the outdoor squash and the outdoor sweetcorn.  I’m in no rush because I have all of these under-cover already.
2. The tomatoes which were struggling in pots are now growing very well in the polytunnel beds, I’m hoping the peppers will pick up too!
3. I’ve continued my habit of sowing the beans in the open ground, rather than transplant them, partly because they do so well without root disturbance, partly to save compost, partly because it’s easy and finally because I have early beans in the polytunnel anyway.
4. The first of the main-crop carrots have germinated well.  These are the ones we will eat fresh from the ground in late summer/autumn.  Our beds for storage will be planted towards the end of the month.  Germinating carrots is always a struggle!
5. The cucumbers and gherkins that failed to germinate a few weeks ago have been re-sown and have all germinated.  The cucumelons that seemed to have failed are now growing away nicely – I’m pleased I waited!
6. This is perhaps my favourite time of year: everything is growing wonderfully, the strawberries and cherries are not far away, pest pressure is low, most of the sowing and planting is finished, nights are still cool – so watering is easy – and the weather is great.  The allotments now take a back seat to other pleasures!
7. I applied my first batch of nematodes to the alliums and carrot beds, in the rain!
8. I’ve assembled the new barrow and fitted a new wheel to the old one, so I now have a barrow for the back garden.  I’m going to need it too, now that I have all of those potato tubs to harvest.

Lowlights

1. I’ve had to rest a bit more than usual due to inflamed tendons in the ankle area, this is most likely caused by the two courses of antibiotics that I’ve taken over the last month. Antibiotics and tendon inflammation don’t automatically seem to be associated, but apparently this is an increasingly common side effect and needs to be managed carefully.
2. We had another frost, which used to be unheard of in May, but we had one last year at about the same time.  fortunately all my strawberries are in raised beds and so they seem to have been spared.
3. The nematodes come in two packs, the second one to be used 14 days after the first, fortunately I purchased via Amazon, so replacements are on their way.

This is my favourite time of year.  Most of the work has been done, so it’s all pottering and harvesting until September.  In this video I take you on a quick tour of the summer planting and the plants that will be coming into harvest in early summer.  Then we do a few highlights from today’s harvest.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

I’m almost there, fully planted that is, a fantastic milestone that I’ve worked hard towards for the last few weeks and I now have only the tomatoes and cucumbers to do.  I always have new successions to plant of course, but that’s an hour a week.

I love this time of year, the allotment work is only one or two hours a day, leaving loads of time for other activities or relaxing with a good book!

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

This video introduces a new update to my garden/allotment planning tools, designed for managing small scale fruit and veg production for fun.  I’ve created the tools myself, using a web based database application called Airtable.  Airtable also has applications for smartphones and tablets, with some limitations!  It’s these apps on my phone that really make it worthwhile, because I have constant access to all of my data down on the allotment and can make immediate updates as they happen!

Airtable is free to use with some limitations, but what’s really cool about it is it allows me to share my databases with you, for free too.  You can just browse my databases, or take copies of them.  You can use a copy of my data as a start point or just to play with, or you can can start with an empty copy and add your own, or some combination of the two.

Even better you can start with my database, with all of it’s quirks, and then customise it to your hearts content, deleting columns, adding new ones, changing names etc.  See below for details of how to do all of this!

My ‘amazing’ and free garden/allotment planning tools

So you’ve watched the video and want to get started?  If you want to get a copy of the tools that I demonstrate in this video please click on this link and create an account:
https://airtable.com/invite/r/WzGlQnBX

If you just want to browse the tools without creating an account click on this link:
https://airtable.com/universe/creator/usr9tY4KaKvgGM1um/steves-seaside-allotment

but then if you change your mind and you do want to take a copy of the databases to use for yourself, click this link : https://airtable.com/invite/r/WzGlQnBX

If you want me to do a video showing you all of the details of how the database works under the hood, let me know.

This is an update to an earlier video, that might still be worth watching http://steves.seasidelife.com/2019/01/22/my-free-allotment-planning-tools-for-2019/

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

If you received this via email click here to get all of the images and videos!

Allotment Finances

We’ve harvested a total of £2,780 of fruit and veg this year.
We’ve spent a total of £672 this year, mostly one time investments.

What we’ve harvested and eaten

We harvested a total of £195 worth of veg this week, excluding everything from the store. This is inching up a bit, but we won’t see any significant increases until the fruit kicks in and we start to do some bulk harvests of alliums.  We had 25 meals with ingredients from the allotment, a bit low because Debbie has been away on holiday all week.

We picked: strawberries, tomatoes, carrots, green garlic, calabrese, cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, sprout leaves, calabrese leaves, radish, radish leaves, lots of types of kale, cabbage, true spinach, perpetual spinach, giant red mustard, chard, spring onions, salad rocket, sorrel, mixed herbs, rhubarb, broad beans, peas, broad bean tops, new potatoes and loads of lettuce. We also raided the store for: potatoes, onions, shallots, red beetroot, golden beetroot and dried apples.  Bold items are new.

People are we feeding

We are stable for now at eight families (Us, Elena, Jennie, Tony, Diane, Anne, Chris, Christine) about 20 people and I’m also sharing any extra surplus with fellow allotmenteers and Diane’s chickens!

What we’ve bought this week

1. Nothing

However Gerry from https://www.growseed.co.uk/ kindly sent me a big box of free seeds and some sweet potato slips to try out.  I’ve added them to my varieties database, which you can see the list here: https://airtable.com/shrtVsTqYiAI0VIXh/tbllaCmnrTxhjvzSD?blocks=hide

I’ve published three videos

Summer planting and spring harvest highlights

Planting Squash and Sowing Beans

My ‘amazing’ and free garden/allotment planning tools :- updated!

What I’ve sown

What I’ve planted

1. I’ve planted the Crown Price squash.  These either needed potting on or planting and I took the lazy option, risking planting a little earlier than ideal.  I did put them under fleece (for a few days) and this was probably a mistake as the leaves that touched the fleece were scorched by the sun.  The rest of the plants look fine though now I’ve taken the fleece off.
2. I’d originally intended to plant only Crown Prince squash this year, but in the end I also put in three butternut squash (Metro) down the centre of the bed.  The plants look very sickly, so I’m pleased that I have more than enough Crown Prince to replace them if needed.
3. I’ve also popped in two courgette plants.  We had four last year and that was too many, two probably isn’t enough but we will probably squeeze another plant in somewhere.
4. I also planted the second, of three, Trumboccinos this one also went into the polytunnel, the final one will do outside somewhere, we like these more than courgettes.
5. I’ve also taken the lazy approach with the beans, planting runners and French directly in the ground.  I do however have early plants growing well under-cover so we won’t lack for my tardiness.
6. I’ve also planted five Maraton calabrese, four Graffiti cauliflowers and in one of the cold-frames (lids off now) the back of the cold-frame has been reserved for outdoor cucumbers in June
7. I’ve planted quite a lot in the kitchen garden beds at home: kalettes, sprouts, kales, carrots, chard and soon golden beetroot and tomatoes, all the basics
8. I pulled out the perpetual spinach bed (gone to seed) and replaced with mixed lettuces and a lot of spring onions
9. Finally I’ve planted 70 sweet corn (which will eventually be 75 plants), these are planted in clusters of four (two seeds per station) in the squash bed.  We have quite a few plants to go in too and lots growing on in pots in the polytunnel, so a nice succession.

What I’ve potted on

I’ve got a lot of spare brassicas that were all looking quite sickly due to neglect.  I decided that I would take pity on them and pot them on and bring them home where they can get some more TLC.  I’ve no idea where they will be planted – if at all – but it’s always nice to have spares.  I have:

1. Rubine purple sprouts
2. Brendan sprouts
3. Fillibasket sprouts
4. Reflex curly kale
5. Dazzling Blue kale
6. Calabrese
7. Kalletes

First harvests of the year

1. Carrots – May week 1
2. Green garlic – May week 1
3. Cauliflower – May week 2
4. Peas – May week 3
5. Strawberries – May week 3

What we’ve run out of in store

1. Dried pears – March
2. Winter squash – March
3. Carrots – May week 2
4. Garlic – May week 3 (we have picked left and green garlic to harvest)

Last harvests

1. Celery – May week 1
2. Last years kale – May week 1
3. Perpetual spinach – May week 3

What’s left in store

1. Potatoes – 1/3 medium sized bags
2. Onions – 1/3 large box
3. Shallots – 1/3 large box
4. Beets – 1 big box
5. Dried Apples – 1/2 big cool bag

Water Reserves and Rainfall

I’m not tracking water now that the taps are on:

1. Allotment reserves (Steve) :
2. Allotment reserves (Jennie):
3. Allotment reserves (Debbie):
4. Home reserves :

What have we processed for preserving

1. Nothing

Highlights

A particular mention needs to go to the super early tomatoes, which we are continuing to harvest every week.  We stumbled on a technique for growing these (without lights or a heated growing space) totally by accident, but I’m not publishing it yet because I need to refine/duplicate it next year!

1. My main carrot bed has been thinned and protected with enviromesh, it’s also been watered with nematodes, so fingers crossed!  We have a lot of issues with carrot fly on the allotments.
2. My first NZ spinach and golden purselane beds (under a cold-frame top in the photo above) are really thriving, the purselane will take it’s first light harvest next week, really enhancing the salad mixes.
3. All but the outdoor tomatoes, cucumbers, cucamelons and the second beds of NZ spinach and golden purselane are planted now.  I have plenty of tomatoes, so I will try some out next week, but hold reserves until June.
4. I’ve continued my habit of sowing the beans in the open ground, rather than transplant them, partly because they do so well without root disturbance, partly to save compost, partly because it’s easy and finally because I have early beans in the polytunnel anyway.  I did though put 5 plants in too, just enough for us.
5. I applied my second batch of nematodes to the alliums and carrot beds, this application wasn’t strictly needed because I only applied them a week ago, but the supplier sent me a spare back because the first pack was out of date.
6. The kitchen garden beds at home are looking lovely, all of the recent planting have taken and almost all of the potatoes in containers have broken through.

Potatoes hiding behind the blueberries

The kitchen garden beds before planting

Lowlights

1. I Probably planted the squash too early, luckily I have reserves
2. My second sowing of Peppers failed to thrive and my hope that they would turn around when planted in my hoop tunnels hasn’t been justified so far.  Apparently they really like warm soil and so planting in a raised bed – rather than a warm pot – was probably a mistake, we will see!
3. My chard is all going to seed and my new chard beds are months away, I need to think about how I can manage this succession better, but it’s tricky because sowing a new batch earlier will just go to seed too, I need an alternative.

Now that the allotments are sorted for summer, my attention has turned to the back garden, what we think of as the Kitchen Garden.  It’s a lovely space for relaxing and playing with kids, but it’s also a big part of our overall fruit planting and it has a useful range of convenient tomatoes, squash, brassicas, carrots and beetroot.  We tend not to plant salads here because we have so many on the allotments and we only harvest them twice a week (they keep so well).

As a ‘bonus’ I also take a quick look at the pitiful state of our stored food.  We have a few potatoes, shallots, onions, beetroot, dried fruit, pasta sauces, pickles and sweet preserves left.  I don’t think we will run out of much in the store before the allotments provide this years harvest.

For more details see my allotment diary at seasideallotment.com

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

This is just a quick video to introduce some of the books and TV shows that shaped my journey to self-sufficiency, or perhaps self-reliance.   The self-sufficiency dream that started when I was 13 isn’t realistic of course, but we have achieved it in some important, perhaps the most important areas, vegetables and seasonal fruit and through barter arrangements we get eggs and out of season fruit too.

These are some of the books and shows that I mention:

1. The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency by John Seymour
2. The Good Life – TV series
3. Ornamental kitchen garden – Geoff Hamilton
4. The Victorian Kitchen Garden TV series and associated book
5. The New Complete Book of Self Sufficiency
6. River Cottage TV shows
7. Allotment Month By Month
8. Fork to Fork TV by Monty Don
9. The Good Life – Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing
10. Loving and Leaving the Good Life by Helen Nearing
11. The Fat of the Land – John Seymour
12. How to Grow Winter Vegetables – charles dowding

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.

There’s been a lot going on this month so I make no apologies for this fairly long video.  May is an interesting month because from an allotment perspective, it’s the month when all of the winter veg is removed and if we get the timings right most of the preparation for summer is finished, or very near finishing.  June is the month when much of the preparation for winter starts and so the cycle continues.

If you are new to my allotment videos you might find a bit of context useful. We live in the north west of England, in Lytham St Annes, which I believe is the equivalent of USA Zone 8.

We have three allotments in my family, mine (Steve), my wife’s (Debbie) and my middle daughter’s (Jennie). We also have a small kitchen garden at home. They are all managed in an integrated fashion, so don’t expect to see the usual mix of veg on each plot. I do most of the planning and seed starting. We each have our own plots, but we all help each other out.

Jennie’s plot has been designed as a traditional allotment, but we put a lot of focus on minimising the work we do there.  It’s basically a plant and forget it plot, full of garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, brassicas, squash, beans and fruit trees. It’s heavily mulched to reduce weeds and easy to water.

Debbie’s plot is mostly full of perennials, it’s a garden plot.  Again we did a lot of work to keep the weeds down and Debbie’s approach is inspired by the TV programme The Ornamental Kitchen garden.

My plot is all about experimental growing, maxium productivity and year round abundance.  As with all of the other plots I did a lot of work to control the weeds, but it’s a high maintenance plot.  I’m always planting, harvesting, experimenting and generally having a great time.

Collectively the plots deliver an amazing abundance of fruit and veg all year round.  Debbie, Jennie and I are effectively self sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit for much of the year.  During winter we have enough surplus to feed a few more of our friends and during the rest of the year we feed up to 22 people.

This video provides an overview: The Big Picture: How and Why We Live The Allotment Life

I do an update of the allotments, roughly one a week, you can find the tours here.

Our approach to allotment life is to: grow as much as we possibly can, to be self-sufficient in veg all year round and in fruit in season, to give away our huge surplus to friends and family, and to have as much fun as possible.  For more on self sufficiency check out these videos:

Debbie and I spend about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week on the plots (on average) and we keep nudging that down as we eliminate non-productive work: like grass cutting, weeding and watering as much as practical. We are both newbie gardeners, only starting the allotments in 2016.

I’m a bit obsessive about the nutrient density of the veg that we grow and making the plots easy to work because it’s through this allotment lifestyle and food that I’ve overcome a debilitating auto-immune disease.

I’m always aware though that it might not last so I make sure that I don’t work too hard, eat as much organic fruit and veg I can and design the plots so that I can still work them if I flare up again.