Account of my 2012 Allotment Failings, Misjudgements and Lessons Learned

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OK I have to get a few things into print to ram some lessons learned into my head several times so I know for the future. Will be useful for others too. Better I make the mistakes. My head is full of excuses which I could use but I’m not going to. Perhaps a little permitted excuse can be that 2012 has been the first year of cropping at the allotment so there was no way of knowing what to expect from the soil and location. Not much good trying to judge from other plots as most are either abandoned or look like they are. Acquired in August 2011, all I got done last summer and autumn on the allotment was the clearing and double digging in preparation for this year.

It might surprise some people that I get anything wrong. It might surprise people even more so that I admit it. Well! to be honest I do not get very much wrong and what I do get wrong are hardly massive big blunders but here are the few things which didn’t go to plan or were overtaken by events. I had the same bad weather as everyone else in that I had continual rain from the second week of April until the middle of May with one fine day, a Sunday in late April when I knocked together the frame. Then after a brief fine spell in the second half of May it was back to wet for most of June. It is honest to say the allotment could not be worked or even walked on for most of that period. I did walk on the ground one day in April to do some planting when very wet and I wish I hadn’t because I compacted the soil so much the structure is damaged even now.

I am not using the wet spring as an excuse like most other people are because I got round the problem by potting plants on into bigger pots and sowing what would have been direct drilled seeds into modules. The wet weather didn’t prevent the plants from growing, far from it! It was getting onto the ground that was the problem. I adapted and overcome. No!! the failings are not weather related but a combination of growing too much for the size of allotment and at times biting off more than I could chew when the rush was on to catch up once the ground did dry out. I have been 3 steps behind and never even one step in front this year. Very few crops got planted out at the optimum time and very often were in pots for a week or two longer than they should have been. The Runner Beans spring to mind for being desperately late getting planted out and so do the Tomatoes because I was 2 months late getting the new tunnel up. My planting out was taking too long and the tunnel area needed levelling and firming. The Tunnel erection got put back and put back. It really was put up just in time and not a day too soon. So why the failing on that one? The failing was the assumption that we were going to have a spring like the last one and time would be on my side. Never assume anything as far as the weather is concerned. Time was never on my side this year. Only now am I feeling the winding down time is about to commence.

Other failings have been a life long gardening failing of mine of taking a chance, a gamble by leaving crops unprotected from birds, cats, foxes amongst others and hoping the birds and the rest wont touch them. It would have been an added task to fit in to rig up netting and I took the gamble. The Earliest Cauli’s and Cabbage were pecked to the ground by pidgeons and never recovered. The pidgeons were not so keen on the Brussels Sprouts and Calabrese and they got only moderately pecked and didn’t suffer too much. Cats and Foxes and the rest have not been a problem unless we include insects but that is another story further down.

Similarly, eventually I might learn that to grow really excellent Chrysanthemums it is not possible to do so without giving them covers to keep the rain off. Yes I have grown really excellent Chrysanthemums this year and far better than I expected up until yesterday when we had a thunder and lighting storm with heavy rain and hail. The blooms don’t look so excellent today I can confirm. Is it laziness or lack of time or lack of energy or lack of funds to blame because I know damn well it is essential to cover them and yet I didn’t. Some are still in bud or just partly open and they are OK.

Another failing is me imagining the allotment is twice as big as it actually is and therefore ending up with lots of plants but with no room at the allotment to put them out.

I also skimped on the insecticide spray when spraying the caterpillars rather than go and buy some more and now I have brassicas full of holes and hundreds of healthy looking caterpillars everywhere. Not devestated crops and they will still crop alright but they would look a whole lot better without holes all over them, and still I am going to have to go and buy some more insecticide spray so it would have been sensible to have done sooner rather than later.

There haven’t been any other failing which spring to mind right now but I will add any more over time. True to say most things have exceeded expectations and for a first year from a wild over grown plot things have done very well and I don’t mind blowing my own trumpet and saying it is all down to me and only me. I never have help on the allotment. I don’t want help. I allow my Dad to come over to do picking of Sweet Peas and Runner Beans but strictly no gardening. I believe too many cooks spoil the broth on an allotment. An allotment has to be a one man show or one woman show to avoid a fiasco. The more people who get involved the more a fiasco it becomes.

Failed crops have been Onion Sets (too late planting them), Leeks (too late planting them out from seedbed) Swedes (devoured by Flea Beetles) Early Caulis and Cabbage (chomped by Pidgeons) Bush Tomatoes (collapsed to mush from late Blight), Potatoes also went down with late Blight but too late to matter.

Feel tired at this time of year from it all and a little subdued, even depressed. I always do at the end of summer. Being a Nurseryman I am much happier working with the children and babies in Spring and not so happy working with the old dying folk in Autumn if I can put it that way. I am more like a Nursery Nurse or a Midwife, not a Funeral Director so the clearing and the slinging of the dying onto the compost heap is not me.

Will add more failings if any more come to mind. The sucesses post will follow in the near future. I thought it noble of me to do the failings post first.

• 18 Sep, 2012
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