I do love a bit of organising. One of my November jobs has always been to plan out my planting schemes for the next year. This gives me time to consider which seeds I need to order. I was super-organised with this and had completed my plan in September. However, having recently acquired plot 5b I have had to reconsider my layout so I had a look at the plans this morning.

I use excel to produce my plan – nice and simple and I have plans going back to 2008. This helps me to carefully plan rotation and is a good aid to memory. As my structure is saved within the excel file I can just amend any change to layout and then type where I will plant a crop in each box.

I draw this out on a blackboard on the back of my shed door to aid with planting, but keep a hard copy on my computer for future planning. I admit I don’t always rigidly stick to the plan and I don’t plan any second cropping; just putting this in as plants come out.

Click here for a large scale picture to show detail (Note this is a .pdf file)

On our new plot (5b) there is a massive patch of Jerusalem artichokes. Here we tackle this and harvest all the tubers. The plan is to clear the plot using the ‘no dig’ method. In order to do this we need to remove the artichokes, some globe artichokes, raspberries and brambles first.

#nodiggardening #allotment #growyourown

We have a bamboo problem on plot 1b.