Roots beginners guide allotment guide
Growing your own food is one of the most rewarding skills to learn, not only will you start to understand where produce comes from and how much better it tastes compared to shop bought, but you’ll also reap the mental and physical benefits of being outside and connecting with the land.
Whether you’re starting out on an allotment or if you’re scoping out a space at home to grow on, you can just start with 1 or 2 meters squared of ground and get a feeling for it.
Before you start ask yourself a couple of questions:
Most importantly, what fruit and vegetables do you like eating?
How big is the growing space you’ve managed to acquire?
getting started no-dig style
Setting up your growing space for no dig growing is super simple, quick and easy. The benefits of no dig are higher yields and less weeding, watering. Because we are not disturbing the soil and feeding the microbes, it creates a much more symbiotic growing relationship with the natural world. All you need to get going is:
- Thick brown cardboard (with sellotape removed)
- Compost (4-12 inches put on top of the are covered by cardboard)
You can use lots of different types of compost/growing medium:
- Council green waste
- Ex mushroom compost
- Well rotted animal manure
- Homemade compost
After the initial creation of no dig beds you only need to top up with 1 inch deep of compost per year!
It’s best to grow things that you enjoy the taste of so start sourcing seeds to grow them from scratch or if you have budget you can pop to a garden centre and pick up already established plants that will help you get roots in the ground ASAP.
Top tips:
- Don’t plant seeds more than double their height in depth
- If you have a big growing space, think about soft fruits and perennials that don’t require you to sow seed year after year
- Sow for abundance, if something gets eaten or dies of disease, have back up plants to plug holes in your growing space with
- Water new seedling plants once they are in the ground, every 2-3 days for the first week. Established plants should only require water every 1-2 weeks when practicing no-dig due to good water retention in the soil
Easy to care for soft fruits and perennials
- Strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, red currants, rhubarb
- Kale (Taunton Dean), globe artichoke, perpetual spinach, asparagus
- Sorrell, chives, rosemary, thyme, sage
Easy to grow plants that suffer from minimal pest damage
- Radish, spring onion, lettuce, courgette, beetroot, potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, garlic, parsnips, climbing or dwarf beans, chard
Whilst growing all this amazingly tasty food is right up there, we love encouraging members to grow flowers as well. Power to pollinators!
Here’s a list of super easy flowers that self seed and bloom in abundance:
- Calendula, nasturtium, borage, cornflower,poppies
Pests, weeds and disease
- If you grow on 36 square meters or below then do a weekly weed that should take 30 minutes to help stop you getting overwhelmed
- Sow and plant as many edibles as possible to suppress weed growth with things you can eat, opposed to weeds that will eventually take over
- Practice regular slug and snail hunts to find them hiding under leaves and think twice about wooden borders which create the perfect moist, dark habitat for slugs and snails to live in.
- Make sure you create a netted area if you’re going to try growing brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts) otherwise cabbage white butterflies will eat them to the stem
- Feeding your patch and in turn the soil microbes with seaweed, biochar and homemade compost created from your raw kitchen waste and green plant matter harvested from your growing space
Enjoy your growing journey and embrace the natural world as your creative playground!
Happy growing from the Roots Allotments Team
