Our First Full Year On The Plot
10 min read - Too Long?
Eventually I want to be able to be self sufficient, at least in the majority of the food we eat at home. I realise the council can take away the ability to grow any time they want, we know that process has already started.
I also have an inkling that’s why the idea of “fungus” “infecting” people is being pushed around so much. They’ll likely say that growing needs to be left to the “professionals” and that hobby growers can’t be trusted.
They will shut down allotments the same as they do poultry farms, and instead of using “bird flu” as the reason, it will be some kind of “fungal” outbreak from an allotment. Call me mad but just keep watching…
It will all be nonsense of course, and not quite as black and white as I’ve described but the outcome will be that you won’t be growing. Virus Mania is a great book to read on the “bird flu” scam.
If you’re confused as to why each of these posts begins this way a good place to start is to have a look into what United Nations Agenda 2030/Sustainable development is really all about.
A book called Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21 is a good place to start. There’s no shortcut to finding out what’s really going on and why, and a certain amount of effort is required on your part.
Anyway…
Preparing for the Second Year
We quickly decided how to lay out our plot for the second year. Four foot wide beds the full length of the plot, each bed is then split into three sections, with paths two foot wide for walking on. It’s worked well.
We also started a spreadsheet (yeah yeah, I know) to plan what’s going where. It’s a bit tragic but it does help (especially when we got two more plots the following year) as I want to try and follow a rotation.
I’d started reading a few books here and there, and was given some popular allotment books by friends and family. I’d also found a couple of YouTube channels that were really helpful that have since pissed me off.
The first year the ground was like concrete, the 40 degree heat didn’t help but the soil was hard and dry and clearly hadn’t had much manure put into it over the years, so I’d got it into my head that I wanted to double dig it.
I don’t know if you’ve tried it before but it’s a lot of effort. You dig down two “spits”, lay manure down in the trench, then dig the next bit of earth over what you’ve just dug and keep going until you’re dead.
"I'm going to demonise double digging because it's a shitload of work, dries out your soil so much it can crack later on, and doesn't seem to make much difference to your plants. At least it didn't for me. I'll never do it again."
It puts lots of air into the soil and lets your roots get right down and has good drainage but of course it’s being demonised by the climate cult as it “releases carbon” into the atmosphere which is nonsense of obviously.
I’m going to demonise double digging because it’s a shitload of work, dries out your soil so much it can crack later on, and doesn’t seem to make much difference to your plants. At least it didn’t for me. I’ll never do it again.
My back has only just recovered!!!
Deciding What To Grow
We wanted to grow a bit of everything, apart from potatoes as we weren’t really eating them at the time, and on such a small plot they do take up quite a bit of room. Sweet potatoes were too advanced for us.
In the end we decided to grow squash, courgettes, tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, celery, broccoli, cabbages, sweetcorn, chard, radishes, beetroot and we started germinating certain seeds in February in our windowsill.
Eventually we ran out of room on the windowsill as we live in a flat and only have the one sill. So we bought an upright mini greenhouse (often called a “Grow Zone”) and tied it up against the allotment fence.
Planting Out
It’s difficult to remember now when we started planting out in 2022. We usually go away for a week in Norfolk in early May, and I remember it being warm enough to get some things out early.
We’d also ran into the problem of being too eager to get seeds in earlier in the year, and ended up with our courgettes and squashes being too big to keep in pots, so they had to go out early anyway.
Going on holiday was our first experience of worrying about plants whilst being away. It actually puts the dampeners on your break, especially when you’re not sure the person left to look after them is going to do it!
It turned out they didn’t water them properly to the point that we nearly lost all of our courgettes. We take a break now after the growing season, especially as the end of this year went Hollywood regarding plots we have.
Our tomatoes, initially, were a disaster too. We thought they looked good as they were tall, so we got them outside at which point they turned silver and died in the space of a few hours.
Another plot owner saved us with some lovely short, stubby, hardened off Ailsa Craigs. It’s one of those moments now that we look back and wonder what on earth we were thinking.
"Going on holiday was our first experience of worrying about plants whilst being away."
A Worsening Sky
Like it or not, these have been going on much longer than most of us will ever realise (and also that some want to even acknowledge) but seemed to be getting worse and worse year on year.
It’s beyond frustrating to be working on the plot, and be able to see through the milky haze, that the sky should be a beautiful clear blue. Once you know they’re there it’s hard not to keep looking. It’s very depressing.
They still didn’t come up in conversation for a couple of years (I’ll get to that later) but as I’ve been on the plot we’re now having weeks of texture less grey skies at a time, a clear day, then weeks of the same.
It’s beyond comprehension what affect these must be having, and yet I’m still unsure as to what the purpose of them as actually is, and what they actually do. I’ll upset “truther” and skeptic alike if I told you just yet.
I listen to old Alan Watt podcasts (amongst others) whilst I’m on the plot. Whilst I’ve learned most of what I know through him, I have to be careful, especially when the sky is this bad not to allow myself not to get too low.
We still have to be very careful and to continue to live our lives, as well as keeping an eye on what’s going on around us and making sure we’re not fooled by ANY of it. We are here to live, no matter how hard it’s becoming.
Harvesting
When you’re new to growing (and at still under a year’s worth of experience, we were still definitely new to it all) you’re pleased with whatever you end up managing to eat.
It’s easy to take things for granted but there are few things more satisfying than planting an actual seed and slowly watching it turn into this huge plant with fruits hanging off it, that eventually end up in your stomach.
In my view we’re all farmers by default and our main source of nutrition is through fruit and vegetables. They are the delivery mechanism for all that we need but I’m not here to preach about eating meat.
Because I only decided to start writing this journal in 2025 it’s hard to remember how well we actually did. I know it was obviously better than our first year, and I have to jog my memory through the photos we took.
We did well for everything and obviously we harvested much more over the year than the photos on this page but as the plot was so small we soon realised that it wasn’t big enough to be able to grow a lot of food on.
Looking back it was more a period of good experience for what was to come at the end of the year. Without this second year what was to follow would have been too much for us.
We really did go from beginners to getting pretty good at being organised enough to grow quite a lot of food. We still don’t know what we’re doing but we’re getting better at it…
I hope if you’ve read about our first year on the allotment article as well as this one, and have managed to stay awake enough that the following two years become a more interesting. They certainly did for us.
Lessons Learned
- Going away when you have an allotment is difficult.
- If you can cover your crops with netting then cover them.
- As with most things, you learn more from getting things wrong.
Our second year stood us in good stead for the coming two years. Without a full year on our first plot what was to come would have been too much for us.
The sky seemed to be being sprayed more and more.
We did really well, better than the first year but we realised that one small half plot wasn’t going to be enough to grow anywhere near what we wanted to.
Suggested Reading
double diggingchemtrailsalan watt