A 12 x 6 Plot?

[LJB12]

Hi,

I have a young family and am looking to be able to grow our own veg which will be great exercise for me and Daddy, and good education for little boy.

Allotments round here - Berkshire - are impossible to get hold of so I have two choices:

1) A Landshare thing - using a patch at the bottom of someones garden. Its 12 foot by 6 foot and currently grassed over and currently covered in nettles. Free, but working in someone elses garden is a bit strange?
2) A Garden Centre plot - £10 a week for a 90 sqm plot with a greenhouse and a garden shed. £560 a year sounds very steep!
3) Wait for council allotment. There are 40 people on the waiting list at the moment.

My questions are:

1) Is the the 12' by 6' too small to bother about?
2) Anyone got any experiences of Landshare and how it works?
3) Is £560 a year for a Garden Centre plot just a ridiculously large amount of money to pay?
4) What can I grow at this time of year? Shouldn't I just wait til Spring?

Thanks in advance.

LJB ???

[LJB12]

[Digeroo]

Hi LJB12  Welcome to A4A. 

12x6 is quite small but it is amazing just how much you can grow in a small area.  Check out square foot gardening for example.  There is also vertical gardening, which means you use as much height as possible as well.

Nettles are a pain but they are also a good indicator that the soil is good and they are not too difficult to shift.

Working in someone elses garden is perhaps odd but there is a quote from the guy who wrote the wizard of oz books which says 'everything is unusual until you get used to it.'

I think that garden centre price is very high but sometimes needs must.  But it does include the greenhouse and shed and sometimes they seeds etc.

[lincsyokel2]

Holy moly £560 a year, you must be joking. Think how much veg you could buy at he supermarket for that money. That makes it a very expensive hobby.

You could drive to Lincolnshire in a hired 3 ton flat back in summer, fill it with veg from the roadside traders, drive home and still have £300 left in your hand.........    8)#

Its a shame you dont have a flat roof on your house, you could use that. looks like the 12 x 6 plot is your best bet, while you wait for a plot. At least its good practice.  :(

Cheer up, could be worse, in Bolton ,Lancashire, in told  the waiting list for an allotment is 30 years. You have people putting there newborn grandkids names down for one.  What you need is a good flu epidemic this winter to thin the list down and see off a few current plotholders   ;)

[cornykev]

Hi and welcome to the Asylum :P
1)  12x6 is very small, but as said check out square foot gardening, there could be problems using somebodys garden. :-\
2) Grass and weeds no probs just dig deep and pull out ALL the roots
3) £560 or £520   :o  At least Dick Turpin wore a mask
4) I'd wait until next year, you can put a few salad bits in, or winter onions but they will be in the ground too long and will be taking up your soil space, and what sort of weather have we coming up in the next three months.
All the best and get your name down on the list sharpish. 
 ;D ;D ;D

[Bugloss2009]

we have a raised bed at home that's about 12 x 6. We use it for cut and come again salads, spring onions, parsley, and an early crop of radish, beetroot and peas

what I do is have a constant supply of plug grown replacements of the salads, and as soon as one plant is finished in the bed, it's whipped out and the replacement put in. That way the bed is always full and productive over the season

It's quite a small area, so if anything gets too big, or isn't pulling it's weight, it gets binned

[grannyjanny]

Hi LJB12. Do you have any room to grow in pots & you could grow salad in the flower pouches.

[Digeroo]

This website might be of interest

http://www.verticalveg.org.uk/

This guy is trying to grow several hundred pounds worth of veg in a tiny space.

I think he might think you 12x6 is a vast area.

[kypfer]

12x6 is a good size to start with ... raised-bed kits from B&Q are 6x3 ... my sister has four of those and she's grown all her salad requirements for herself and her husband (and some for her student daughter when she's not at college), plus a few beans (climbers take up very little ground space and you can plant in between them), a couple of courgettes and cucumbers (between the beans and sprawling over the edge) and a couple of other bits and pieces, herbs and the like.

If/when you've got the time and the inclination you can move onto a bigger plot, (put yourselves on the waiting list, you can always drop off if you change your mind).

In the meantime, get at least some of it dug over and plant some over-wintering onions, spring onions and broad beans ... there may be other stuff, but I can't think at the moment ... maybe try a late row of radishes.

By digging it over now, when there's no rush and the ground isn't sodden wet, you'll only be dealing with young weeds next spring and you'll already have something growning to look forward to when you get going

Enjoy ... this isn't "supermarket" food ... this is FRESH food  :)

[antipodes]

yes The trick is to grow little of each thing and renew often. Once things start dying off, rip 'em out and quickly put in something else. I wouldn't bother with things like spuds and carrots, but climbing beans take up little space (plant them along one edge), just 2 or 3 tomato plants in summer can give quite a lot of tomatoes, lettuce can be grown between other things and if you just grow steadily 3 or 4, renewing them as you go, you can have salad in very little space. Look at "allaboutliverpool", he even puts up table type arrangements, puts pots on the top and grows lettuce underneath. You could do that, to plant herbs for ex. You can feed well and grow things a little closer together, it's small so weeding will be easy. Put in a cucumber that climbs in summer, 1 or 2 swiss chard gives lots of veg in a small space, a few spring onions and leeks also take up not that much space. And even a squash can run down the edge of a plot and not really be that cumbersome. I have grown a little squash called Hooligan this year. the vine is not very long and the leaves relatively small. and the squash are small and cute.
I would go with the 12x6 bed idea, sounds best to me. Could be a way of making new friends!

[PurpleHeather]

It is a joke to some.##

Fact is, if you want it.........Take it.


It is a hobby plot for those who want to grow for fun at that size

It will cost you more to rent it

The idea of allotments was to give poor people a space to grow supplemental vegetables to enhance their diet.

Now it has got posh. Middle class people want to grow organic vegetales. Without the effort

They get plots and think that they can grow on them organic fruit and vegetables

Then they find out....................It incurs effort..............

The plague of all allotment associations.

[elvis2003]

on the contrary PH,i would welcome some one like the original poster who is obviously very keen,and sensibly weighing up all her options.hardly a hobby plot if thats all that is being offered to her at present,and as previous posters have said,much can be grown in that space! good luck LJB
R x

[LJB12]

Thank you all!

Well I've been enlightened by www.verticalveg.co.uk and I think this will keep my growing urge in check for a while. We have a small garden, mostly gravel (with an old swimming pool hole filled with broken up patio under it - great drainage!! but we do have two very small raised beds that we attempted some square foot gardening in last year (not that successfully). So I'm going to use one of those beds (just filled the other one with winter bedding plants) to do some things - winter salady stuff I suppose, and then the rest is going to be in containers. Have got some flower pouches coming and also have a really large deep planter (about 4 ft deep by 5ft long by 3ft wide) that has a bit of rhubarb in it so I could put some carrots I think in there.

I agree that there has been a renaissance of people wanting to grow their own veg, so my container gardening will help me to decide if its for me (I'm not sure my fingers are that green!) before I take on a plot - should I ever get offered one. I think my name is on the list but the Town Council Clerk hasn't confirmed yet, grrr.

So ... are container gardeners welcome here  :-*

[elvis2003]

100% yes.all gardeners are welcome here,new ones,old ones and even ex gardeners!
good luck with checking your name is on the waiting list,dont be afraid of making a nuisance of yourself till you find out
R x

[lottie lou]

The only downside I can find with growing in containers is trying to keep them watered in the hot weather, however that is academic at the moment.  Good luck with your new garden(s) and welcome to A4A.

[Digeroo]

My fingers are farily green now, but when I started veg growing I was very green behind the ears but my fingers did not match.  I had a book in one hand and the spade in the other.  If at first you don't success try again.  

I started off in a very small garden.  I grew runner beans and courgettes mostly and a few cabbages, lettuce and herbs in the flower beds.  Then branched out into Strawberries and carrots and psb.  I tried to concentrate of crops that yielded the most, tasted the best or saved the most money.  

My main suggestions for success are feed, weed, water.

There are all sorts of ideas for vertical vegetable growing including growing carrots and salad stuff in drain sections mounted on walls.  

I hope you will stick around on A4A.

[chriscross1966]

I'd say to take the 12x6, especially if you are new to veg....partly cos I understand where purpleheather is coming from....  Growing veg on a fullsize allotment is hard physical labour.... doing it organically more so.... showing your kids where veg comes from and having some fun and it not costing the earth, your wallet or your lumbar discs is easily achieved on a small plot. If it's got a south wall then all the better, but it won't provide lots of food.... grow the stuff that crops decently and you'll be able to go a summer where something on the dinnerplate is homegrown most evenings.... my bet is it will probably be green beans... give a row of Cobra F1 some support and the occasional watering in dry weather and they'll provide you with an epic harvest over the year.... otherwise things I reccomend are the spring onion Ishikura, the beetroots renova and boltardy, a couple of tubs of potatoes (find a GC that sells seed spuds loose) grown at the north end of the plot, look at the courgette "Black Forest" too... it climbs, maybe a ridge cucmber like Marketmore (I can send you a few seeds), if you can get there easily everyday for half an hour then there's a  lot of salads that can be grown small and fast,... it'll be fun and the kids will learn loads (and on a 12x6 it will be kept to small fun doses of learning too)...


Try to keep a succession of plants ready to go in by sowing seeds into modules at home... also Hurst Greenshaft peas.... once the kids taste them raw, they'll never reach a saucepan... sweeter than most strawberries....try not to accidentally feed them a peamoth caterpillar though... they don't taste that bad but the wriggling sensation in your mouth is disconcerting unless you're into Korean cuisine and that chopped live octopus soup thing.....

[GrannieAnnie]

I had an allotment once when our children were little but I didn't have the necessary time to work it well. It fizzled.
Starting off small and doing it well while learning the ins and outs of a couple crops has much to recommend it.
Enjoy!

[lincsyokel2]

Theres a cut off point with allotments where its too big to dig with a fork, unless you have unlimited spare time and you're a masochist. 12x6 is fork diggable. i have 17 poles and i need a Rotavator otherwise id never do it. Whats more, ive upgraded the engine from 2.5 hp, through various levels till ive got a brand new 6.5 hp engine on it, i consider this the minimum size power unit thats sufficient to do the job in reasonable time. Ive always said the rotavators dont make it any easier, they just allow you to do much more for the same effort.

[Karen Atkinson]

Some people on our site who grow in raised beds and have half a plot can't have very much more than this and they do extremely well.

[Morris]

I agree with all the others to start small and see how you get on.  A well-cared for small plot can be far more satisfying than an overwhelming large one.

On the other hand, although the rent for the garden centre one is steep, how much it is worth it to you?  As a hobby/source of pleasure, compared to things like the gym, eating out, handbags etc!  Will you lose that opportunity by not going for it now?  The greenhouse is useful and they are expensive to buy.  Is there water easily accessible? You would expect excellent amenities for that price.

Nettles are no trouble to dig out with a fork (in a small-ish area) as their roots are shallow and lift easily.  Just make sure you get out every tiny bit.  And as has been said they are supposed to indicate fertile soil.

Get your name down for the allotments asap as well.

I am in N Hampshire so not too far from you!  Good luck with it all.