This time of year is great to get ready for the coming season.
No patch of land – whether on your allotment or garden – is to tiny to help you create a superb vegetable plot.
This site will provide information on how to prepare soil, how to plan rotation (what you grow and when) and provide some ideas and inspiration.
And there are also other items to consider
- For example did you know that some seeds need more water than others to germinate ?
- …. just how far away are you from the water on tap ?
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Why the seeds you use matter..
But there is an important feature often not considered, and which will have a profound impact on the success of your allotement
- selecting the best seeds to use on the allotment (or your vegetable and fruit garden).
Step by Step Manual
If you want advice on how to select the right seeds (and all those other important elements) then the best information we have seen in ages is in the book “Food for Wealth”
It contains everything you need to know on how to make an organic allotment work. For example it will help you with key items like ‘How to create a planting table‘ so you don’t plant the wrong plants at the wrong time – too early or too late.
For more information click here
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Grapes ? This is a great time to start 
With climate change – with the average temperature continuing to get warmer – this is the ideal time to consider growing grapes.
Written by a very successful wine grower our featured manual will show you how to grow juicy, successful grapes.
It provides step by step advice ranging from how to prepare the soil to selecting the right vines have a look at our selected guide. click here
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Help and Advice for Allotments and Vegetable Gardens
March Feature
Secrets the Allotment Prize Winners won’t tell you
Read this article in detail to find out what champion allotment gardeners read at night
From the desk of Andrew Simms (senior editor)
Just imagine that day in late summer on your allotment when you are happily harvesting your crop. The juicy tomatoes, crisp carrots and crunchy celery. Every time you turn over the soil there are perfect potatoes, you fill bags and bags of them. Let alone the stunning flowers you have been cutting from late spring onwards….
Sounds great doesn’t it ? When you open any book, catalogue or allotment and vegetable website you will see perfect pictures. The strawberries are just seconds away from being put in a bowl, even the salad has no blemishes, bugs or imperfect leaves. When you read the specialist allotment and vegetable garden books the concept of coping with a hosepipe ban, rabbits tucking into your crops or the mystery of the unpredictable potatoes yields seem years away.
Having had an allotment for many, many years – in 2 completely different parts of the country – I have spent many evenings consulting my gardening and growing vegetable books. Surfing the internet for hours looking for hints and tips. I always find it mystifying that the ‘champion’ allotment winners always have PERFECT RESULTS. Yes, it could be the hours they spent but probably more importantly they have build up a fountain of knowledge over all the many years.
As I wanted this year to be my best ever year on my allotment I decided to make a detailed comparison of all the major vegetable garden and allotment books and reference guides. What struck me was how incomplete (and similar) they are. Yes, they would all have the basics, which plants to put in in March, April, May…… (pretty useless if your march is so wet you can’t walk on the soil, April is bone dry and your allotment is like concrete, etc.)
Because I wanted this to be as scientific as possible I decided to contact as many vegetable gardeners and allotment holders as I could. They all made the same comment – books are great for background info but “I get more useful information from Bill, Bob, etc.)
Having said that some of the prize winning allotment, vegetable and flower growers did let slip that they did have a few favourite books even they would consult. Books which they would read at night and not mention to often, as they contained snippets of information which will help make a good allotment into a GREAT allotment or vegetable garden. There were 2 books which kept being mentioned as containing useful information. Not the same rehashed content as everywhere else, but actually some very practical hints and tips.
These were the kind of books which:
Will make the difference between ‘good’ vegetables and prize winning vegetables
The type of information and help for your allotment you will want to consult time and time again
Particularly when it comes to such mundane items like compost will make you wonder why you had never heard that information before.
The books which will really help your allotment or vegetable garden I managed to unearth are mentioned below – but I am not sure how much longer they will be available online before the publishers decide that a hardback copy in the shops (at a far higher price) will be much more profitable.
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