Lady Mary Allotments & Cardiff Organic Gardeners

Managing an Allotment - It Needn't Be Hard Work!

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If your new plot looks a wilderness there's no need to be alarmed. Not even if the next door plot is immaculate - your new neighbour has probably been there for the last ten years, and maybe uses herbicides and pesticides as well.

Admire, but don't be jealous. You can have organic crops from your plot in amongst weeds, and you won't be eating food covered in chemical residues. 

You'll get there, but it will take time. If the vegetation is really tall, it's best to cut it down manually, a scythe or slasher is the best option. Or, perhaps someone with a strimmer will cut your plot for you. Use this cut vegetation, to start of your compost heap.

But, if you have bindweed, couch grass or creeping thistle, don't dig it in or rotovate - every cut piece of root makes a new plant, so you will just make the problem 10 times worse. The roots will need to be dug out as part of the normal pattern of cultivation and is much easier if the plants are weakened first. A good approach is to cover the ground with something that excludes light - Black plastic, mulch-matting or the heavy cardboard that you can get by opening out the big brown boxes that supermarkets have their goods delivered in. Covering for 6 months will weaken weeds - The roots become exhausted searching for light and are much easier to gather up and remove.

Plan your plot. Refer to the pages on this site about Raised Bed Method and Making Compost. Or well-rotted stable or farmyard manure is a wonderful option.

Choose some crops to grow. Dig over and remove weed roots from a small area of your plot - in an afternoon you should end up with an area of a couple of square metres. - enough to start being productive. Aim to bring a days weed-removal into use every month, but remember not to overdo it - now that fewer people do heavy jobs we tend to have less robust backs. If you follow the Raised Bed Method  then you can plan the areas that you clear to fit in with your future plot layout. 

Learn to live with your weeds. As long as they don't swamp out everything, they can be tolerated. 

Beneficial crops are those that don't require a lot of effort - they can withstand some neglect, they will survive and crop for you. For salad leaves, choose things like rocket, corn salad (Lambs lettuce), land cress, sorrel, they can be sown or planted once, and left to seed themselves every year, or are perennial - you end up with a year-round supply of salad leaves after a spring and an autumn sowing and seeding rotation - an  August/September sowing of seeds gives a winter crop with no effort.

Get Nature to cover the ground for you. Mustard is a good ground clearer. Farmers use it to clear ground that hasn't been cultivated for some time, sow at twice the normal recommended rate - it gives off root exudations that discourage many of those creeping weeds and also rids the soil of some pests too!

Crops that grow quickly early in the spring are a good bet - broad beans will get very tall, peas will scramble up some old chicken wire supported on poles. Sow the seed at home and then plant them out as strong seedlings better able to withstand the conditions of your only recently acquired plot – a transplant has a good chance of survival. Potatoes are very good in ground that you have had covered through the spring weed flush-uncover in May and plant out Maincrop potatoes (even in June), the traditional culitvation method will weaken weeds and make the roots easier to remove.

Cabbages/broccoli again can be started in pots and transplanted out, under a cloche of chicken wire to protect them from pigeons. French/runner beans for the summer do best on ground that you've had covered for a season, and again, they can  be started at home and transplanted.

Slugs will hide in piles of weeds you leave lying around - gather them up and put them on the compost heap - except Couch Grass, Bindweed and Thistles (see Making Compost on what to do with them.) Watch for slugs out and about on your evening visits- squash them on sight. (More help with Pests & Diseases and Slugs.) 

Don't try and get the whole plot into cultivation in one go - you just can't. But you can enjoy your own tasty crops.