Introducing the Allotment Garden
The Allotment Garden
I've always been fascinated by Allotment gardens. On holiday in Britain I've peeped over their fences when travelling on trains or walking around the streets. I love the long strips of garden and the rows of plants and vegetables. I've called my latest garden project the Allotment garden in memory.
2013 - the Pines Come Down
In 2013 huge pine trees down the boundary of my garden were felled, opening up a long, narrow, and potentially gardenable area. The soil was impoverished, but I started building little discrete rectangles of garden, edged with big logs, with little walk-in paths.
I added compost, manure, top-soil, and whatever else I could find. I chopped up old forget-me-nots and added rotting pea-straw. And without even planning to I started calling it my Allotment Garden.
You can see what I started with from this photograph below, taken during the first clean-up. Everything was started by a severe wind storm, in which many of the pines crashed down. Now there's so much sunshine and daylight - the shade of the pine plantation made gardening here impossible. Yippee! I love making something good out of something bad.
My New Garden
There's a recently dug section dedicated to roses (including a gang of Graham Thomases), where a line of rugosas forms a boundary mini-hedge. I've planted Crepuscule and Cornelia roses upon some rope swags, plus a rather vigorous bright pink rambler, name unknown, intentions rather too obvious. Oops!
Salvia uligosa
Under Construction
This is a garden still very much under construction. So at the moment it houses my spare irises, clumps of sulking daylilies rescued from shadier places, my potato patch, and several small beds for vegetables.
Calendulas and yellow annual daisies have been actively encouraged to self-seed everywhere. Several peonies have been popped in to recover and organise themselves. In spring the blue annual forget-me-nots are spectacular, though the perennial Alkanet is more of a nuisance.
A huge stand of Salvia uligosa, planted by accident (I thought it would be too dry) delights the bees (and me) for weeks in late summer. Obviously it has to stay.
Sun and Wind...
The Allotment Garden is open to the sun and the wind, and two of my little gardening hoses can reach it. Whenever I remember I add more organic matter. The weeds are flourishing, naturally, but they can tell that the soil is improving.
The Allotment Garden
Things may change. Last summer, in a fit of garden madness, I released my potted strawberry plants into one of the rectangular areas. I may well regret this, but we'll see. And my initial idea for lots and lots of vegetables was - ahem - hijacked by last autumn's rose sale.
New Roses in The Allotment Garden
Oh well. I wonder what the Allotment Garden will look like in a few summers' time?
The Allotment Garden