Decisions, decisions

So what shall I grow? And where?

For the last few years I’ve had a little vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden and I’ve grown various fruit and veg.  But now I’ve got an allotment all sorts of other things need to be considered.

On the one hand, space is no longer such an issue and I can grow my beloved squashes without worrying about their taking over the garden (as they have done in the past). But on the other hand, we eat salad most days and am I really going to go down to the allotment to pick a few salad leaves? Or a bunch of herbs?

Clearly I’m going to have to give this some thought…

Here, in no particular order, is today’s long list of things to grow (with the caveat that I will have changed my mind tomorrow…):

Salad leaves

Tomatoes

Onions

Carrots

Broad beans

Beetroot

Peppers

Raspberries

Blackberries

Strawberries

French beans

Borlotti beans

Potatoes

Herbs (basil, parsley, tarragon, chervil, coriander, probably some others)

Courgettes

Rhubarb

Garlic

Broccoli

Aubergines

Cucumbers

Leeks

An enormous pumpkin

Sweetcorn

Globe artichokes

Jerusalem artichokes

I think that’s about it. But as I say, it’ll change tomorrow. So, the next job is to figure out where to put it all.

Some of the decisions are fairly easy; the aubergines and peppers won’t be very happy outside the greenhouse, and I’m far too lazy to walk to the end of the road for a sprig of parsley. I’m not digging up the rhubarb, so that’s staying in the garden.

But then it starts to get a bit more complicated. We use loads of onions, so maybe I should keep them in the garden. But they’re very low maintenance, so they’d be quite happy being ignored down the allotment for days on end. Hmmm.

And what about the courgettes? They’ll take over the garden if I let them, so they should definitely go to the allotment, where they’ll be free to roam far and wide. But then if I turn my back for five minutes those crunchy little baby courgettes will grow into two foot long marrows and that’s no good. Into the back garden, then?

This is going to require some serious thought. Time to sharpen the pencil and draw up some plans.

On the ipod while thinking: The Fratellis / Chelsea Dagger

Chorus sounds like a pub singalong, but none the worse for that

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