Can you fit veg-growing into a busy lifestyle? ‘The Half-Hour Allotment’ makes the case for just that.
Growing vegetables may be rewarding but there’s no doubt it’s also time-consuming. The sheer scale of the task puts many off even trying, while countless others abandon allotments or veg plots within months.
I often feel overwhelmed by the number of jobs that need doing in my veg plot and it’s easy to end up dithering between seed-sowing or watering, harvesting or weeding.
I was given a free copy to review.
Yet, it needn’t be so, as Lia Leendertz outlines in ‘The Half-Hour Allotment’, which has just been republished by White Lion Publishing. Working with a system dreamt up by nurseryman and allotment holder Will Sibley, she argues that you can raise enough vegetables and fruit to provide something from the plot every day of the year with just half-an-hour’s work a day.
Despite the title, it’s a method that can also be applied to a home vegetable plot and even the timings can be adjusted to two one-and-a-quarter hour sessions a week, for example.
The book works through vegetable-growing from why homegrown is better – principally taste and the carbon footprint – and how to set up an allotment, including the importance of seating and sheds, to how to choose what to grow.
There’s advice on different crops and suggestions for varieties, along with how to get the best from your plants.
Other chapters cover gardening for wildlife, encouraging children onto the allotment and growing cut flowers.
Particularly useful are charts showing how many of each plant you should grow to feed a family of four and sample work programmes for each season.
The key is starting small – don’t try to tame an entire overgrown plot at once – persistence, and planning. Know what you’re going to do for your half-hour a day, stick to it and don’t worry about the jobs that are still to be done. Prioritise what’s important and break down big jobs into smaller chunks to make them less intimidating.
What I liked about The Half-Hour Allotment was its realistic approach. Many gardeners are juggling families and jobs with growing and don’t have time to do everything. The book encourages gardeners to “make life easier”.
One example is using plug plants, which, although more expensive than seed, do cut down on time-consuming sowing and pricking out.
As Lia says: “. . . spending a little frees up so much time and spares you so much bother that it is worth it.”
Likewise, don’t use your time growing things you don’t like just because you feel you should, or that are cheap and easy to buy, such as main crop potatoes.
There’s also plenty of practical advice from growing crops that need fleecing in long rows as that’s the shape fleece comes in, to a warning about rotovating a weed-infested plot as it will make the problem worse.
My only niggle is that while the layout has been updated with this new edition, I felt some of the advice, such as using glyphosate weedkiller, is now out-of-date.
However, with colourful photos and an easy-to-read layout, it’s a book that certainly makes managing a vegetable garden less daunting.
The Half-hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz and the RHS, is published by White Lion at RRP £14.99 paperback. Buy now for £10.11 on Amazon. (If you buy through this Amazon link, I get a small fee. The price you pay is not affected.)
Top photo copyright Suzie Gibbons/GAP.
You can read more of my garden and garden-related book reviews here.
Don’t miss out – sign up for an email notification of new posts.