Today I finally took the plunge and jumped at the chance of having my very own allotment!

My tiny garden provides me with tomatoes and salad throughout most of the year but I don’t have enough space to grow ALL the things. And though I very much enjoy community gardening at the Transition Town Tooting Garden I’ve come to the conclusion over the last few months that I need more space to grow what I want and a chance to experiment with things on my own.

Sustainable Merton have just brought around 70 smaller than usual plots back into cultivation at a site about 10 mins walk from home and I was lucky enough to secure one of those today!

Naturally I grabbed my camera, tape measure and scampered down there straight away to see what I have.  This is what the plot looks like:

The plot is roughly squarish (7m x 5.5m). The site is well set up, each plot provided with a black plastic compost bin and watering can and every other plot has a galvanised water tank (which they share with their neighbour).  So it is one of the best set up sites I’ve seen.  There’s also a communal wooden shed (which you can see in the top right of the pc) for sheltering on rainy days and a recently installed lockable metal stool storage shed.

As you can see from the photo above the plots have been recently rotivated so there’s minimal weed coverage — though the far left edge of the photo above does show that my plot has a few low growing brambles I don’t think the rotivator managed to get to! (see below).

This is looking from the main path into my allotment and down the site. As you can see that little bank of brambles is going to require some attention.  I figure the way to maintain my interest in this long term is not to try and do everything on day one and to get something in the ground as soon as possible so I can be excited to come back and check how things are growing.

Onwards and upwards!