Spring Anxiety/First Year/How Much to Plant?

[dilettante]

Spring seems to be pretty much on our doorstep here in London, despite a touch of frost this past week. The winter has passed by quickly, and with major seed sowing happening shortly, I've realised how under-prepared I feel (and probably am) for the challenge of my first allotment season.

I've not placed seed orders, though I have made up the baskets on a couple of websites, ready to place the order on Friday, I have a super cheap local source of seed potatoes, and tbh I'm not sure I'm going to get around to the soft fruit this year, aside from hopefully shoving in a few autumn raspberry canes if I can get my hands on some.

My plot is in alright shape, I decided to do no dig, as much as possible, and I just need to crack on with the weeding as soon as the ground stops being boggy. I just wish that would happen sooner rather than later.

My main issue is I don't really know how much of anything to grow. I've found a couple of rough guides online, and I suppose I can go by those, but I don't know if they're accounting for having a surplus I can store, or really how much of anything my family actually eats.

I guess the best thing to do this year is to follow the guides and adjust next year, but I wonder if anybody has any good sources of info on this? I did search the forum, but nothing came up.

[Guest]

Are you intending to be self-sufficient from the word go? Hopefully your answer is no

I have always been happy to have 'gluts' as it just forces me to try different things. Courgette for ex. http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gra...ipes_8456.html or beans http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gra...ans_26962.html .

Also the great thing about allotments is you have people to swap with on your doorstep. We all have strengths and weaknesses, as well as good years and bad.

The main thing is to stay calm and enjoy

[Small pumpkin]

I only have a couple of bits of advice that may or may not be of any help.
1. Calm down, take nice deep breaths . (This gardening/ veggie growing lark is supposed to be relaxing, enjoyable & fun)
2. Make mistakes......... Make lots of them! (I know I have...........and I will make more)

It's not like the day job. It doesn't have to be run with military position.

I told you my advice wouldn't be helpful
I'm sure someone more sensible than me will be along with usable advice soon.

[Jungle Jane]

You could stagger your plantings of first early potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, peas, parsnips, lettuce, brocolli, if you do once a month sowings, you can have a longer supply/won't all be ready at once. I've written a monthly sowing list to make it easier to remember. If you grow too much of something (I grow far too many tomatoes) you can give plants/fruits away which is nice but also you can be really greedy with loading the tomatoes on your plate, which is really beneficial for the vitamin C.

[muddled]

I'm in London too.
Can I just start by saying that winter isn't done yet!
I've lost crops to a sharp frost on the 6th of June before now and I lost a whole colony of bees one February because they also believed spring had sprung during a few glorious days in February!

My advice is to sow more than you think of root veg and brassicas.
Count on the slugs/birds/weather/mice and human error taking the lions share long before harvest.

Then sow more than you think of beans and peas.
They can be stored so easily and used in so many ways that its hard to imagine how you could ever have too many.

I don't know how many you are hoping to feed or how big your allotment is but it is very unlikely that you will provide enough to be self sufficient in the first year anyway. Therefore, I would concentrate on flavour, colour and fun rather than quantity.

My numbers (for a family of four and nowhere near self sufficient) are;
Aliums
150 banana shallots and another fifty bunches of spring onions plus several large clumps of chives.

Potatoes (I don't really bother with maincrop...no room to grow or to store)
30 seed potatoes of charlotte (early new potatoes)
10 seed potatoes of a 'baker' late type (not decided which yet)

Sweetcorn
Normally 24 but this year I'm sowing two in each module and aiming for 48 in the same space.

Brassicas
10 assorted kale plants (I feed a lot to my chickens)
Normally five purple sprouting broc but this year only one has survived the winter...I'll bung some summer broc instead)
Cabbages/little cauliflowers...I'll bung in wherever I find space, aiming for a dozen.
Beetroots....loads, in every little gap, direct sown when I harvest anything.

Parsnips 40
carrots...doing the carrot challenge this year so loads, in buckets as they come available.

summer squash/courgettes
4 plants

winter squash
8 plants


Everything else I don't count because I swap, barter and acquire them through the season.

I'm growing in a half plot and in my garden at home.

[bario1]

Depends on how big your family is, and what you like to eat! Some things can sit in the ground just waiting to be picked when you need them (carrots, beetroot, parsnips, potatoes, kale, leeks), and others will have a very short window where they're at their best (broccoli, caulis, courgettes, beans).
Personally I don't preserve anything, so I don't go in for gluts. Two courgette plants provides more than enough fruit for me and the other half, and we love them... but we don't want them for every meal... and there's no point me growing runner beans because there'll be hundreds of them all at once, and we're really not that keen on them.
Space is also an issue, do you want to dedicate a lot of space to something like spuds or carrots when they're relatively cheap in the shops? I do grow them, but I don't calculate how many i'm going to need for a year, if i run out I'll buy from the shops... I prefer to save more space for small and staggered crops of things like broccoli raab, spinach, pak choi, radishes, sweetcorn etc in the summer, because they are so much nicer home grown and cost a bomb at the supermarket.

The main thing though is to enjoy the challenge, see it as a life's work rather than one season's success or failure. If you're stressing out, you're undoing all the health benefits!

[unclefudgly]

Exciting times ahead! It can be frustrating starting an allotment, there are so many things to do and those far more experienced than me will be able to tell you what to do and when, but I just wanted to say that my greatest pleasure by far has been from owning a polytunnel.
The reason being, that even when all is going to hell outside the tunnel, foxes, birds, weeds, frost, hail stones, more weeds... All is calm and beautiful in the polytunnel.
If there is any way at all for you to organise a cheap one before the end of March I guarantee you will not regret it. Plus you will have somewhere toasty to sit and sow your seed modules when the definitely not spring yet weather of London decides to play nasty.
Good Luck!

[Nannysally99]

Hello, I'm in West London and sitting on my hands. Not sowing anything just yet. Our weather is still far too cold.
Am chitting potatoes - lots of them - ready for the spring

[Gillykat]

I got my first allotment one year ago (February 20th) and can still remember the sheer excitement of having all this lovely space to grow stuff.....and then the panic as I realised I'd never grown so much as a potato in my life and really did not know where to begin!!! I'd only ever grown flowers in the previous 40+ years.

First thing I did was buy a copy of Grow Your Own magazine and browse through that which helped - it was really inspiring seeing how others did stuff. I then found this forum and that was a HUGE help as no question is deemed too silly to ask - we were all beginners once.

I was extremely fortunate to get a plot that had been well looked after and inherited a shed, greenhouse and 30ft polytunnel and my first job was to work out where I wanted beds and what crops I wanted to grow. My local Wilko store was a godsend as they had seeds, equipment, compost and seed potatoes at very reasonable prices. At the end of March there was a bit of a dry spell so I spent a week or two digging beds over bit by bit. No point in killing yourself in trying to do it all in two days I planted a few potatoes and then turned one bed into a flower bed. I started tomato, cucumber & peppers off on my living room window (far too early I now know as the latter two succumbed to the cold and I had to start again!) but with the advice from folks on this forum I got a lovely crop of tomatoes.

Basically, if you're owt like me, there'll be good days, FANTASTIC days and other days when you think ''Dear God, what the h**l have I taken on?'' But persevere and you'll find the rewards far outweigh the hard work - there's nothing so satisfying as having your hands in the soil and growing stuff! I cannot wait to get started this year with seed sowing but, for now, I just have a few potatoes chitting in the greenhouse, young plants in pots and some raspberry & blackcurrrant canes in pots of compost until I work out where my fruit bed is going to be.

Just remember....this allotment will NOT look like something from the Chelsea Flower Show in one year, it's a work in progress and to be enjoyed. Plant LOTS of French Marigolds and Poached Egg Plant (Limnanthes douglasii) to attract the pollinators and don't, as I did, turn your back on the weeds in June as the wee blighters will take over!

Other than that....have fun!

[dilettante]

Thanks everyone. I think I was having a bit of a moment before. I know I can't/won't be self-sufficient from the off, if ever, but my inner bloody stupid perfectionist had been whispering in my ear that all I needed was information and organisation... ignoring reality, as ever.

I do want to just enjoy this experience, and learn as much as I can. There are four of us, and really, aside from he main sort of things like squash, potatoes, carrots and onions, we don't eat vast quantities of anything else, so I can try a bunch of different things and see what works out. I had this mad plan to buy seeds of all different varieties of each veg to protract the harvest period, but probably this year I should just focus on learning how to manage a great big allotment plot and see what happens. There's always next year, of course.

[bario1]

Managing your expectations is as important as managing your plot! Especially as there are so many factors outwith your control (mainly the weather).

Buying early and late varieties of the same veg isn't a bad idea though - I had one plant each of early, mid and late purple sprouting broccoli, both because one plant takes up a fair amount of room for a long time, and three plants producing all at once would be too much for us! Unfortunately one died.

[Gillykat]

...but my inner bloody stupid perfectionist had been whispering in my ear that all I needed was information and organisation...

You sound just like me I'm terrible for planning things will military precision and forgetting to allow for, as bario says, the weather not playing ball My main bit of stress came from the blasted weeds taking over the paths and making the plot look messy but this year I'm putting down proper paths and going to keep on top of the weeds.

All I grew outside last year where potatoes, savoy cabbage, French beans and peas. My outside beetroot germinated but then disappeared, my two pumpkins grew to fist-size then got eaten by slugs and next door's racing pigeons ate my sugar snap peas The stuff in the polytunnel did well though....and my flower beds were gorgeous! If in doubt chuck down a load of Californian Poppies, Nasturtium, French Marigold and Poached Egg Plant seeds for loads of colour and to attract pollinators. Oh, and Sweet Peas...cannot go wrong with those