WHAT TO GROW ON YOUR FIRST ALLOTMENT PLOT / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. So if you've just got your hands on your first allotment plot, this is going to be the mini series for you, allotment gardening for very beginners. My name is Emma, I've had my allotment plot for five years and everything I've learned has been here, on the job, on the go, and now I want to share all of my knowledge with you so that you can really enjoy your allotment plot and hopefully not make a lot of the same mistakes that I did when I first started out. In this video today I'm going to answer one of the most commonly asked questions that I get all the time, which is what should I grow on my new allotment plot? So really simple answer to this question is whatever you want. Do make sure that you do grow what you like to eat so that you don't end up with tons of waste, but also you know, leave some room to experiment with new things. That's part of the fun of an allotment plot, is growing new things, trying new crops, learning where your vegetables come from and how they grow. But I do know what you mean, it can be difficult to know exactly what to grow, when to start, how to plant it, where it all goes, it can be a lot. So the first thing I would recommend is getting yourself some kind of planner. This is my allotment planner, you do not need to buy my planner, you could just buy notebook if you want to, but if you did purchase my planner I do have pages where you can write down all the seeds that you want to sow each month on your allotment plot and stay super organized with it so you know exactly when to sow it, when to harvest it. I even have a section in this planner where you can decide what's going to go in a bed when it's finished harvesting, so for example here I might plant early potatoes in March, I might harvest them at the end of June and then I've got an empty bed, well now I know that I'm going to have courgettes to go in there, I'm going to sow them in May and I'll be able to harvest them in August, so I'll never have an empty bed again. So there's lots of perks to sort of buying a specific gardening planner, or like I said you can just get a notebook and write down a list of everything that you want to grow and eat that year and then start to jot down when you might need to sow it, when you can harvest it, how long it's going to take to grow, all that malarkey, so that's your first thing to do. Now here's another thing to think about, not all vegetable crops are created equal, some are perennial and some are annual, what's the difference? Well it's kind of in the name, so annual means that your crops will die after a year, they literally grow within that season and they die at the end of it, and perennial means that they will keep coming back year after year, so if you are growing something perennial you're not going to be able to put annuals in that spot, you really want to put your perennial plants in somewhere and leave them alone and have room to grow your annuals somewhere else, so that means that you're going to have to plan where those plants go. That's why the design and planning bit of your allotment plot is so so important, you need to get in those perennial plants, you need to know where they're going to go, so that you can plan everything else around it, so this is a blueberry bush, it is a perennial, it means that it will die back and come back every year, hopefully fingers crossed if I don't kill it, and I designed this to go in front of the archway, so you can see that I have a blueberry plant either end of this archway here, so it is quite nice to design your perennial plants, you know you can be quite creative with it and create really nice structure in your allotment plot, so one either side of the archway looks quite pretty, it looks nice, but it's also something that's just going to stay, you know I'm not going to move them about, so I had to think about where they're going to go, but actually I really like the design of it, so you can be really creative and really change the look of your allotment with perennials, and of course something like an apple tree is going to really require good planning, it's great to have fruit trees on your allotment and fruit bushes as well, because they just give you a continuous harvest every year, you don't have to do too much with them, you just clip them back and prune them every so often, and they will just come back year after year without you having to you know sow it and think about it too much, but obviously you do need to think about it straight away in terms of where it's going to go, particularly with something like a whole tree, it's not just about the shade that the tree is going to cast, it's the roots as well, the roots of an apple tree do spread quite far and the ground around it is quite difficult to grow things in, because you don't want to disturb the roots and stuff, so trees, fruit bushes, perennials, you really do need to think about positioning of those things. Of course that doesn't mean that you can't ever move them, fruit bushes can be moved about and so can trees, and the best time to do that is over the autumn winter when they're dormant, which means they're not in active growth, you can just dig them up and move them about, but obviously ideally you don't really want to be doing that, so if I was thinking what am I going to grow on my first allotment plot, the very first thing that I would think about is fruit trees and fruit bushes, and I would get those in, hopefully in the right places so that I don't have to move them about again. So I have a bed that is just dedicated to strawberry plants, and there's a couple of reasons for this, firstly I love strawberries and I just think that every allotment site should have strawberries on them, they give you an abundance of harvest and they're just brilliant, they're just so lovely to grow, but of course secondly they are perennials and they do spread like wildfire, so strawberries in particular I would say dedicate a space to them, and if you like strawberries and you want lots of them, just let them spread about, let them spread their wings and be happy, you know. Of course nothing else will be able to grow in this bed other than the odd bit of borage which suddenly pops up out of nowhere. This bed is just strawberries, so in the design process I had to think about that and make sure that the strawberries went in here, they're going to stay here, they're happy here, leave them alone, you know. Now you can grow different types of annuals at different times of the year, so look on the back of the seed packet and see when you need to sow it and when you need to harvest it. Most of the annuals that I grow at my allotment plot are from seed and I grow them directly into the ground, so I'm always waiting for the soil to warm up and I'm really looking at the back of the seed pack and making sure that I'm not putting them out too early or too late. The thing to remember about vegetable plants is something called crop rotation. It sounds very complicated but I promise you it's not, or maybe it doesn't sound too complicated. You see crop rotation is exactly that. You rotate your crops every year into a different bed, so for example if I'm growing spinach and radish here this year, I'll grow it in a different bed next year and I'll put something else here. If I grew carrots here then maybe I'll put brassicas in the next year. It's just making sure that you don't grow the same crops in the same bed more than once per year. I think there's a couple of reasons why we rotate crops. I think one of them is that it stops the disease from spreading in plants and also keeps a lot of pests away, but I think it's also about replenishing the soil and making sure that lots of different crops go in it. Lots of different crops have lots of different benefits for the soil, so peas contain a lot of nitrogen as do brassicas and they'll put all the goodness into your soil, so it is quite a good idea to rotate crops just for that reason. But it's not something I'm a massive expert in. The only thing I know is to move your crops about every so often and mine seem to do quite well when I do that, so there we go. Another thing to think about when you're deciding what to plant is what kind of structure that plant might need. See I love I love archways. I love growing things up archways. It provides great support for your crops and also I like to rotate what grows up it, so this year I've got nasturtiums and beans and last year I had pumpkins and peas, so you can still rotate crops but it's a great way of like growing more at your allotment as well because you've got like all that vertical space. So archways are great but they are a little bit permanent. When you put an archway in and you've really secured it, you really don't want to be moving it about and taking it down every year. Other structures like this pea structure here is a little bit less permanent, so it's just bamboo canes and some netting and I'll be able to take that down and then rebuild it somewhere else next year. So it's just really important to think about the different structures that your plants might need and also the space that that will require. Flowers are a lovely thing to grow at your allotment plot but they do have a purpose as well, so flowers attract lots of pollinators and we need pollinators in order for our vegetables to develop, so the more flowers that you grow the more pollinators that will come and enjoy all of your crops and then hopefully pollinate all of your vegetables as well. Looking after the wildlife on your allotment plot is really important because we do share these spaces with wildlife, so it's nice to be able to give something back and also it helps your vegetables, so growing flowers is a win-win. You can grow annuals like sunflowers and cornflowers and cosmos but you can also grow perennials as well like dahlias and lots of spring bulbs. I have salvia and lavender in my allotment as well which the bees absolutely go crazy for. Of course sunflowers you can also eat which gives you kind of a double bonus. These are nasturtiums and the bees absolutely love these. Bees go crazy for these flowers but you know what they're actually edible as well, in fact the whole plant is edible. Just a little word of warning if you do sow nasturtiums you only ever need to sow them once because they will spread like wildfire seriously. I have nasturtiums coming up on my allotment every year and I never sow seeds anymore. Beautiful plant but my gosh it just grows! Ultimately it is up to you what you want to grow on your allotment plot and it depends very much on what you like to eat. Like I said at the beginning do try and grow things that you like to eat so you don't end up with tons of waste. Also double check with your allotment committee and make sure that you are allowed to put things like fruit trees and fruit bushes on before you plant them out. Not all allotments allow them but hopefully this gives you a little bit more information to go on and a little bit more to think about when thinking what should I plant out on my allotment plot. And yeah just start whacking stuff in guys that's the ultimate advice I can give you. Just start whacking stuff in and just enjoy the process. I hope this video has helped. I'll be back again next Sunday with another allotment gardening for very beginners. If you have any questions that you are desperate to have answered leave them below and I'll make a video on it. See you next time guys thanks for watching. Bye!