I’ve repotted the blackcurrant cuttings I took back in the summer and have had a 50% success rate.
All I did was put prunings in a big pot of compost and left them in a shady corner of the garden.
I took 14 and 7 have took so I now have 7 blackcurrant cuttings to pass on to people on my allotment site!

Why you should have an allotment: reasons why allotmenting is so popular.

The immediate benefit is being able to grow your own food. This is very appealing to people, especially as inflation has pushed the price of food up. You can grow and harvest food and get it on your plate in a really short time. This means you can enjoy the freshest vegetables ever. You will find that home grown new potatoes are just amazing, and that home grown tomatoes are the best in the world.
You can also grow organically which adds an extra premium value to the food you grow.
As you get more experience you’ll learn what to grow so you always have something to eat from your plot.

You can save money by growing your own fruit and vegetables too. Soft fruit is easy to grow and is very expensive to buy so makes an ideal thing to get on your allotment. A few raspberry canes will provide you with plenty of fresh fruit. Careful planting with cloches can extend the season at either end too enabling you to grow more than you’d think.

You help the environment by cutting down the food miles your food travels. Try not to use the car to drive to the allotment though. Get a push bike if it’s too far to walk.

You can recycle your vegetable peelings too in a useful way. Making your own compost is a great idea and so easy to do.
It’s a bit of space where you can find peace. Many people love the social aspect of being a plot holder, but it’s easy to go and get absorbed in the digging or weeding on the plot and enjoy the tranquillity.

You’ll see tons of wildlife. Even if your plot is in a town you’ll spot lots of wildlife. There are foxes that visit our allotment and whilst the cubs bouncing on plants are a nuisance they’re very cute to watch. You’ll see butterflies and bees and all sorts of insects. You can encourage them with a small pond on your plot too. You’ll appreciate the important job bees do in pollinating our fruit and vegetables too – so remember to grow a few flowers especially for them.

An allotment is great exercise. The regular activity even if it’s not strenuous is good for you. If you have low fitness levels then you can do things at your own pace and get fitter and healthier. It’s great being outside too in the sunshine soaking up vitamin D.
Think of an allotment as a gym. Some people pay £30 plus a month to have access to the facilities at a gym. An allotment can be a full body workout – just remember to warm up and stretch your muscles gently before digging, and don’t overdo it! It is best not to dig loads the first time as you’ll really suffer the next day.
In summer there’s more weeding to do, and hopefully the weather is better during the summer months.

Allotments are often social places. Some have busy social calendars and some don’t, but most gardeners will be happy to chat about plants and their plot. You’ll almost always find someone with advice for you if you get stuck. You can take friends with you if they want to get stuck in to some serious digging too.

It’s a relaxing hobby that is great for you. Being outside, gently exercising, growing good food has to be one of the more chilled out hobbies available. It can be lots of fun growing things, although frustrating battling the slugs and weeds sometimes but if you stick at it the rewards taste delicious!

So get your name on the local waiting list at the nearest allotment to you. Go and see them fairly often too – offer to get stuck in helping anyone who needs a hand.

The Potato Council website has a database of all potato varieties.

Try freecycle or ask your neighbours!

Our allotment site recently put out a flier asking for old garden equipment or plants and within half an hour we’d had one lady come and offer us pond plants and within a couple of hours we’d had the offer of a pond liner that we so wanted!

I’ve given away bluebells via freecycle and other plants from my garden.
It’s always worth a look on your local freecycle.

There’s also sites like Seed Swappers that enable you to swap seeds. There’s also garden swap shop

Got foxes in the garden or on the allotment?

You can pay someone to trap and remove the fox – or you can try a free method that entails you collecting pee and then using it on the areas the fox uses. Ideally, this article says, use the pee from a male under 30.

How can you tell if you have foxes? You might hear them as they are very noisy sometimes at night. You might see them during the day sometimes but dusk you might see them scurrying about on the streets.
In summer we had the cubs playing on the allotment. They were timid but would stand and watch you until you moved a bit too close and then they would disappear away.

If you feed your cats or dogs outside then you might notice the foxes appearing to scavange any food that’s left.

This news story is worth a look –
Biggest fox shot – it’s a massive fox been caught = 38lbs!

Growing potatoes in different ways

Container potatoes – lots of bags available, or solid built containers,
or even old tyres.
Top up soil or compost as the leaves grow. Water regularly and heavily.

Earth up – requires dug beds in ground. Earth soil up around stems as
they grow to protect them from the frost and ensure the potatoes don’t
get light on them and turn them green. Put on as much muck as you can.

Mulch method – don’t dig the bed, but put mulch layer of newspaper
down first. Put potatoes on and cover up with compost or soil. Cover with more
soil or manure as they grow.
Some people like to put the potato in the ground a few inches and then heap
materials on top. Straw can be used as a mulch but will maybe require more watering
than you’d like.

Potatoes are often seen as a good first crop on new land. They don’t
have magic powers about clearing weeds but the traditional earthing up process
helps eliminate many weeds. The addition of lots of manure also helps break
down the soil. I have found that growing potatoes in this way can transform
soil but it is still hard work!

Why sow in straight lines?

• Easier to identify the weeds
• Allows easier hoeing between rows
• Watering easier
• Get water to soil easier
• More air between plants
• Easier access to weeding as you can avoid standing on plants
• Plants need space to grow so easier to get them all space
• They look nice

When deciding what tree to plant, consider things you can’t easily get in the shops. I love damson jam and can occaisionally get them at the local greengrocers for a short period in September. But I want to grow my own.

I will be buying one very soon!

Thompson & Morgan have this one! I will be ordering this week! They will delivery them by the middle of April!

Damson Plum ‘Merryweather’ – 1 feathered maiden £22.99
A medium sized Damson plum with good resistance to silver leaf disease.
Damson ‘Merryweather’ produces heavy crops of large, yellow fleshed fruits for picking in late August.
The blue skinned plums have a juicy, acidic flavour which is ideal for making delicious flavoured preserves.
Grafted onto a semi-dwarfing rootstock, to produce a compact, productive tree. Damson ‘Merryweather’ is self-fertile and therefore does not require a pollination companion. Height and spread: 2.5m (8’). Rootstock: St. Julien A.

It’s beautiful sunshine today so have been on my allotment again.
I have a new compost bin! I was given some big pallets and my partner has created a massive compost bin for me. It might look a big huge but I suspect I’ll fill it. Today we started to insulate the walls to help the bin heat up. We’d saved old bubble wrap for this.
I have dug a trench too and filled it with some of the manure from the heap that arrived at the weekend.
I’ve also removed the rocket stems that had been left from the end of the previous season and put them in … my new compost bin!

I was first told about tomato grafting by the oldest allotmenter on my old allotment site. Norman told me he’d been grafting tomatoes for years after a friend showed him how. His friend worked at a commercial tomato growing site where it’s done to increase yield!

It’s not just tomatoes that can be grafted – they’ve been doing it for years with fruit trees too but also now you can buy these grafted veg plants:
Suttons Seeds have:

Vegetable Grafted Plant Taster Pack £9.95
Pack contains 3 grafted pot ready plants (1 of each variety):Sweet Pepper F1 Magno – A first-rate, strong-growing variety that ripens from green to orange, shows good resistance to cracking and skin blemishes, and tastes superb! Cucumber Quatro – A first-class cucumber producing crisp,tasty fruits of 9-11cm in length. Plants are vigorous, and ideal for growing under glass or outdoors, in soil or containers.Tomato Conchita – A superb large cherry tomato with fine flavour. Gives huge crops on trusses bearing as many as 20 fruits.Grafted ‘Turbo’ vegetable plants! For your best ever crops! We’ve taken the best varieties available and grafted them onto an extremely vigorous-growing root stocks. Commerical crops have been grown in this way for a while and have been shown to:Be more vigorous, producing larger plants. Have greater resistance to pests and diseases. Have less susceptibility to nutritional disorders. Perform well with less heat in your greenhouse. Yield top quality fruit earlier and over a longer period compared to normal plants.Our trials have shown that grafted plants are incredibly healthy and give rise to larger, strong-growing plants giving earlier, heavier crops. They’ll perform well outside but are particularly recommended for greenhouse growing, where they will fulfill their full potential and allow you to get plants off to an early start in spring without paying a fortune on heating your greenhouse.Kitchen Garden Magazine have recommended our grafted veg plant to their readers!. Pack of 3 Grafted Pot Ready Plants (1 of each variety). Full growing instructions included.. . . .