HOW TO DESIGN YOUR FIRST ALLOTMENT LAYOUT / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR VERY BEGINNERS

hi guys welcome back to my mini allotment gardening series for beginners in this video I'm going to share with you how to design your first allotment plot my name is Emma and I have had my two allotment plots for 5 years well the one behind me for a year this one here for five I started as a complete novice Gardener had never really grown anything in my life before and everything that I learned was along the way I made every mistake in the book and now I want to share all the knowledge that I've learned with you so that you don't have to make all the same mistakes that I did when I started out so if you've got your first allotment plot or if you've got an allotment plot and you're looking for some extra advice this might be the miniseries for you do subscribe to my channel so designing your first allotment plot now you might find yourself in a fortunate position where you've taken on a new allotment plot and it already does have some kind of structure that you can work with in which case lucky you and that is just absolutely fantastic but unfortunately for a lot of us when we get our first allotment plots they can be an absolute overgrown Jungle which is what both of mine were there was no structure at all and I had to literally cut everything down to ground level clear the entire space and what I was left with was essentially a blank canvas now at first that sounds incredibly exciting and yes I was excited but actually it can be quite daunting as well particularly if you've never planned an entire Garden space yourself before where do you start how do you design it where did the paths go you can feel a little bit lost so this behind me here is my first elopment plot and it was the first plot that I ever designed and the first Garden I ever designed from scratch so I followed a very very box standard simple layout idea I had the main path which runs from the front of the plot all the way to the bottom and I had the raised beds coming off either side in a gridlike pattern and you don't have to use raised beds but this is just an idea of where your growing beds go and where your pathway can go so one end of the plot I've got my shed and at the other end of the plot I've got my compost and then the main path runs from the front to the back it's wide enough to fit a wheelbarrow down so I can take my stuff that I've need to compost all the way down to the compost and then take the wheelbarrow up to the shed again and then I have the little mini Pathways coming off around the beds it's a very very simple simple layout but it works and it's incredibly effective I've obviously got loads of trees in the middle of my two allotment plots and it's something that I just have to work around now a lot of getting an allotment plot is taking what you're given because the waiting lists is so long that you really don't want to pass up the chance to have one I would always recommend that you take whatever allotment plot you are given within reason as long as it's something you think you can manage and I really do think that people can manage a lot more than they think they can I certainly didn't think I would be able to chop down this entire plot and design it from scratch but I did and actually it's made me a lot more motivated and committed to my allotment because of the hard work that I put in at the beginning I'm just I feel so proud of it you know but it may be that your new plot has things like trees on it and it's not the end of the world guys you have to just work around what you've got I've turned the area under my trees into a lovely little Wildlife Area and I feed the birds there have like a hedgehog house and a little Wildlife Pond but also trees are really useful you get lots of uh leaves that come down that you can collect up and make leaf mold with um which is just a great thing to put on your beds and that's obviously free also it provides really good shade so you can grow more shady crops CS that don't like a lot of sunshine and of course it shelters you from the rain as well so you've always got somewhere to run under if it should rain so my second alotment plot which is through here kind of follows a very similar design with the main Pathways and the beds coming off I just think it's such a classic easy way of organizing your space having growing space having a pathway to take the wheelbarrow down and tools I have become a little bit more adventurous with my layout down this end you can see that the beds are a little bit more higgledy piggledy they're different shapes and it just offers a little bit more interest I think to be honest as this is my second plot I did just get a little bit bored with the bug standard pathway down the middle and the grid the grided growing spaces I was just trying to be a little bit more creative I wanted to imagine myself walking around all the beds with things growing up really high a bit like a secret garden and that's where I've just sort of placed the beds I don't think it's the most practical layout though so if you're looking for practicality and to make it super easy definitely go with a more grided like structure but if you're like me and your brain's a little bit all over the place and you want to be more creative then just start whacking the beds around and and trying to make it work and walk around them and just see how it works for you how it makes you [Music] feel it's like I'm going on a little secret Journey you know around my own garden I just love it another big question that I get is how I make Pathways so there's lots of different ways of making Pathways this is the way that's work for me now when I cut back my second elopment plot I found that the ground was covered in ground sheets and instead of picking it all up and chucking it away in the dump I decided to reuse it and I'm a big believer in reusing as much as you can find on your allotment plot so much better than throwing it away and being wasteful so the way that I've made my Pathways is to lay down the ground sheet Peg it down with some metal pegs and then and then top it up with some fresh wood chip wood chip is great because it absorbs all the water it absorbs mud it means that I can come to my alotment in the winter time it doesn't get slippery and I can always top it up again that's just the way that I make my pass you can hear that I am definitely not an expert at designing alotment plots but I think part of the fun of it is to get stuck in be creative and just give it a go I think part of the beauty of an allotment plot is that it's a garden and it's not permanent so try not to put things in that are going to be too permanent obviously your shed is going to be a pretty permanent structure and any greenhouse and poly tunnel but you can still move them about so don't panic too much just have fun with it and be creative in terms of bigger structures like sheds try to put them on the outside of your allotment plot where they're not going to cost Shadow over your plot or any of your neighbors also if you're thinking of placing in bigger items like archways like I've got over here this is actually not an archway it's a an old poly tunnel frame that I'm using as an archway as it's such a big structure I really did have to plan it so I put the poly tunnel structure in first and then I made the beds around it and the pathways around [Music] it I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea of how to structure the layout of your first allotment plot if in doubt keep things incredibly simple remember that you don't have to put in anything permanent everything could be pulled up again and moved about so don't get too worried about it and you don't have to use raised beds you can just use growing beds so just dig directly into the earth work with what you've got as well so anything that you dig up on your allotment plot see if you can recycle it reuse it and if you do have things like trees growing don't see it as a bad thing just work around it and just use what you've got hope this video has helped if it has share with a friend leave me a comment below leaving your tips and advice for anybody looking to design their first allotment plot and don't forget to subscribe to my channel I will see you next Sunday for another allotment gardening for very beginners video see you next time guys bye