We Have An Allotment!!

(6 weeks progress update!)

At the end of May, we were lucky enough to be offered an allotment space out of the blue, and we snapped it up without a second thought. Suddenly we had so much more room to grow our own food, and flowers too, than we'd ever had before. It felt like too good an opportunity to pass up.

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May 29th - 31st 2026

There's a particular kind of madness that takes hold when you look at a fenced-off rectangle of waist-high grass and think, yes, I could grow vegetables there. That's where this all started, a plot so overgrown you could barely see the paths, let alone any soil.

The first job was simply making the grass behave. Mowing, raking, mowing again and clearing strips through the tangle just to see what we were actually working with. It didn't look like much yet, but every cut path felt like progress.

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May 22nd - 24th 2026

Once we could see bare ground, the real building began. Treated timber, a spirit level, a lot of measuring twice, and our first raised bed frame went up. A simple rectangle, then an L-shaped bed with a cross brace for extra strength. Nothing fancy, but solid, square, and ours.

With the frames in, we filled them with soil and stood back to admire something that finally looked intentional instead of accidental.

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May 22nd - 24th 2026

Seedlings we has grown at home were able to go in almost as soon as the soil did. Three rows of brassicas, small and a little wind-battered at first, dotted across freshly raked earth. A bamboo tee-pee went up for climbing beans, and before long there were real, living plants clinging to the canes.

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May 22nd - 24th 2026

It wasn't glamorous. There was mud, a drill left in the grass mid-job, footprints everywhere, and more than a few "just one more bed" moments. But each photo from this stretch shows a little more green creeping in among the brown.

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7th June 2026

Anyone who's grown brassicas knows the real enemy isn't the weather, it's every pigeon, butterfly, and slug within a mile radius.

So the netting tunnels went up: blue piping bent into hoops, mesh stretched and clipped over the beds, turning our rows into a little tunnel city. A squash bed got the same treatment, its sprawling vines eventually spilling out from underneath.

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Fast forward, and the plot barely resembles that first overgrown rectangle. There are proper tunnel-covered rows of cabbages, butternut squashes, pumpkins, runner beans, courgettes, and carrots, marigolds standing guard at the edges, a shed for tools, and even a couple of chairs for well-earned breaks.

Dahlias and sunflowers have muscled their way in too, adding a splash of colour to all that green. Maszi has also claimed supervisor duties!

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It's still very much a work in progress, there's always another bed to build, another row to net, another patch of grass to tame, but it's starting to look like the allotment we pictured when we first opened that gate.

Because we picked it up so late in the season, there wasn't much time for proper planning, a lot of this has been figured out as we went along, bed by bed. But that's not a bad thing. We've learned what works, what doesn't, and how we actually want the space laid out, so next year we'll be going in with a real plan instead of just winging it.

More updates (and hopefully more harvests) to come.