Allotment Diaries: growing an eco-friendly plot

I like to think of gardening as a competitive sport, Woman versus Weeds, trying to find the best way of growing food and flowers without "cheating" - using weedkiller, peat or poisons - and that makes it more fun than frustrating, Most of the time, anyway!

So, every season I'll be adding a garden & allotment update to this Journal. Hopefully, I'll be celebrating successes but also sharing mistakes and mishaps. I've had a small garden for five years and an allotment for four, so I'm very much a learner still. Many of you will be doing some, maybe all, of these approaches already, but it has been useful to reflect on what I do now and how else I could improve our eco-credentials.

And as soon as I started writing this post, I realised you could write a book about some of these concepts... and people have! So I'll try to keep it short here (spoiler, I failed), focussing on saving water, managing pests and making organic feed - and let you delve into the detail with the experts. I've added some of my favourite books at the end.

1. Save water

   This Spring, the topic on most gardener's minds is the lack of rain (maybe this climate change thing IS real!). Keeping seedlings and young plants from frazzling has been challenging - and not always successful.

   
   

   I've used manure to mulch all the allotment beds, straw around the dahlias and strawberries, and chipped bark in the garden. This should help prevent water evaporating from the soil, as well as providing insulation from frost and nourishment as the worms work it into the soil.

   

   A mulch of straw around strawberry plants

   For seedlings and young plants I've been watering with a can rather than a hose so I can direct the water where its needed (also I don't have the right hose attachment at the allotment - there have been a lot of trips to the dip tank!) It's best to water in the morning if you can so the water is absorbed before the sun evaporates it, which is fine for the garden but realistically I can only get to the allotment in the evenings.

   
   

   Every year I curse myself for not having a water butt so this year I'm going to make one from an old dustbin using a conversion kit (ie a tap) and install it at the far end of the plot, furthest from the dip tank, where the water table is lower and the ground drier.

   
   

2. Conquering pests

   That's a bit optimistic... manage pests enough so some plants survive?! Everything we see as "pests" are beneficial to our ecosystem so pest-management is more about diverting them away from prized plants and towards an alternative.

   
   

   Again there are whole books dedicated to this topic but here are my go-to solutions:

   • For slugs, I use a combination of physical barriers, salt and picking them off. Hostas are in raised pots so it's harder for slugs to reach them. Tender youngsters (sweet peas, sunflowers) are planted out in the used compostable coffee cups that they're potted in, so there's a lip protecting the base. In wet weather, I sprinkle salt around them and on the edges of the raised bed. Don't use your best maldon sea salt flakes, just the cheapest table salt you can find. I thought this tactic might make the soil too salty (?) but in the wet spring we had last year, it seemed to get washed away without contaminating the plants . I've also unravelled a copper scouring pad and circled some new plants with it so we'll see how that works this year. If it ever rains. I've not even seen a slug yet.

   
   

   

   Sweet pea seedling planted out inside compostable coffee cups

   • I've got a new Peony on the allotment and it's covered in ants, I'm not sure if they'll do any damage but I'd rather not risk it so I've sprinkled ground cinnamon around the soil at the base of the plant and on the buds in the hope it will deter them. 24 hour update: no ants :)

   • 

     Ground cinnamon around a young Peony plant

   • I don't mesh against butterflies or carrot fly. I overplant brassicas so we have way too many and caterpillars are welcome to a few - so far they haven't eaten an entire crop. And as we never seem to get very many carrots germinating so carrot fly hasn't been a big problem, but I companion plant leeks in between rows of carrots as the onion-y smell is supposed to mask the carrot smell that attracts them.

     
     

3. Homemade feed

   This is one to crack on with asap, and I usually remember far too late in the season, but nettle feed is a great homemade way to nourish your plants - organic and completely free. You need to collect quite a lot of young nettles before they flower (wear gloves and long sleeves!), crush them, cover them in water in a bucket, pop a lid on and brew for about 3 weeks. It will absolutely stink. To use it, dilute 1 in 10 with water. You can keep topping up the water and it will last all summer.

   

   Now is the perfect time to pick young nettles

   I also make compost from kitchen scraps, pet hair, wood ash, bit of cardboard and used coffee grounds from the shop. We have a black 'darlek' compost bin in the garden and it makes beautiful, rich compost. The allotment bin is made from pallets and doesn't get as much attention - it's mainly dead plants, cardboard and bindweed - so it's better used as a mulch layer than to plant into (minus the bindweed. Only joking, there's always some bindweed in it).

   
   

   And remember to rotate crops - this not only helps prevent disease but some plants, like peas and beans, fix nitrogen in the soil proving nourishment for leafy veg planted there afterwards.

So there we have some hard-learned lessons from previous years and commitment to make a water butt and nettle feed this year! But as I said, I'm just a beginner, and definitely not an expert, so here are some of brilliant books that I love and can offer much more in depth advice:

• The Green Gardening Handbook by Nancy Birtwhistle is my go-to reference for dealing with pests, storing produce and making delicious things from them.

• Rewild your Garden by Gardener's World presenter Frances Tophill is a beautifully illustrated guide to working with nature to create a diverse and buzzing garden, covering concepts such as No Dig gardening, pet-friendly spaces and encouraging pollinators.

• What's that Weed? from the RHS contains detailed photographs to help identify 45 common weeds with information about how to control them as well as how they might be useful in your plot.