Welcome to Doddy’s Allotment Project.
I have always been involved with gardening at one level or another. As a youngster growing up in the 1960s, my parents owned a house with a huge garden, in fact my mother still lives there. When we arrived, the back garden was in three parts. The part closest the house was a formal lawn and flower bed, the second part was a dilapidated lawn tennis court and the third, and furthest from the house had been left to go wild.
Over the years we cleared the ground and brought the second two sections under cultivation, and we became very much self-sufficient in vegetables and later fruit. We were still very much in the post WWII recovery and there was a great emphasis on growing your own. I would spend hours watching or helping my father in the veg plot.
Over my adult years I have lived in many houses all over the UK from the north coast of Cornwall to the southern shores of the Moray Firth on the north of Scotland. There has usually been a small garden associated with my houses and these have always been a source of flowers and veg plus grass for the kids to play on.
As the years have passed and family and circumstances have changed, I have gradually downsized to my current location, a 2 bedroom bungalow in the South Downs National Park on the border between Hampshire and West Sussex. The front and side gardens are only 3m deep and laid out to grass and mature trees and shrubs however, unfortunately, the back ‘garden’ is a 7m x 7m plot laid with paving slabs with an 8×6 shed and no flower beds.
Over the 4 years that we have lived here, we have added a greenhouse, a few raised beds and numerous pots, containers, and troughs. However, this was not enough, and I wanted a larger area to grow veg to maintain a level of self-sufficiency when I retire in October 2022. Therefore I have applied for an allotment from my local Parish Council so that I can return the ‘back garden’ to flower and outdoor living area.
My aim with this blog is to document the acquisition of the allotment and its development into a fully productive plot. Look at the failures and enjoy the successes and, hopefully, learn from my mistakes.
Doddy's Allotment 