Simplification...

...is the name of the game. Over the last three years,Plum and I have tried all manner of things down on the lottie, a lot of which haven't quite worked out. For instance, we tried growing beans and sweet peas on a wigwam and found that they became too tangled together to be able to pick them. We have grown tomato plants in pots outdoors only to have them taken by the dreaded blight. We have tried growing brassicas under netting but, as soon as the plants reached the top, the butterflies laid eggs all over them. The' mini' pumkins we grew were, indeed, mini, however, the foliage certainly wasn't and ran amok all over the plot. The list seems to be endless, however, it is all part of the learning curve when you take on anything that you aren't familiar with.
This year, come Spring again, it's all going to be different! I have a plan. A simple plan in that we are going to grow less of everything. One of the problems with allottmenteering is that, you always plant more than you need 'just in case' and then when everything grows, you have a glut. We will have to hold our nerve this year, plant less and hope that it all germinates. Fingers crossed! Also there will be no elaborate constructions involving canes, netting, fleece, wood etc. All the veg will be put straight into the ground rather than pots etc.This makes for much lower maintenance as we have found that using the mini greenhouses and pots has meant that, whether or not we had the time to go to the plot,we had to to make sure that nothing dried out. The other thing is that we will start planting later in the year than we have been doing and only grow the veg that we know we like to eat rather than experimenting and then finding we don't like the taste of the results. There you have it then. What could be more straightforward than this? Watch this space and see how we get on this year, you never know, it might just work!!!