My name is Charlotte and I have an allotment in Devon, UK. I got my allotment in December 2025 so at the time of writing this post I have had my own allotment for five months. My patner has had his own allotment for just over a year and a half before I got my own so I am not completely blind going into this! This is just a little introductory post into my allotment and my experience so far.

Why I started my allotmet

After spending several months over the summer helping out with my partners allotment I found a love for gardening. Before last year I would spend a majority of my summers indoors playing games or sat behind a screen coding - basically never seeing the outdoors so when my partner first got his allotment I was pretty sure I would have no interest in it. That was until he dragged me up there and we dug out our first bed in his allotment and planted some onions - I believe we planted them around october time - we were outside in the freezing cold digging out this bed but it felt amazing to plant something knowing that the next year we could be eating it.

Now I don’t believe we actually got many decent onions (they had bolted during the summer) but by then I was already hooked. After spending a couple months in the summer helping tend to all of the plants we had grown I decided to get onto my local councils waiting list for my own!

How long was the wait?

After how long my partner had sat on the wait list for over a year for an allotment I knew that I could be waiting for quite some time. I had signed up about nine months previous to getting it and I think I was quite lucky that it wasn’t such a long wait and it was well worth it.

What did I think it was going to be like?

After helping my partner with his allotment I had thought that it was going to be a massive amount of work, his allotment was completely abandoned with the grass growing up to our waists so plenty of digging had to be done before we could even consider getting anything in the ground. However when I saw my allotment, once again, I felt quite lucky as it already had established beds, waterbutts and even a shed! But I still had plenty of weeding and improvements to make before I could get started with the fun stuff.

What went wrong/unexpected?

I knew that not every step of getting my allotment up to speed was going to be perfect! For example I had bought a small greenhouse for my allotment and had it set up in about half an hour however after one night of it being up it had already blown into the neighbouring allotment and had come apart - even though it was pegged and staked into the ground. So after some thinking and some handy work, the greenhouse was moved from the edge of the allotment to up against the shed. Using pvc pipe clips and some wood spacers made out of plywood, me and my partner screwed through the back plastic of my greenhouse into the shed and fixed the clips over the poles of the greenhouse to keep it secure - we also put two bags of compost at the bottom of the greenhouse to weigh it down. So far it has survived the recent windy weather we have had!

I had also decided to create a ‘mini orchard’ in my allotment, not just for the fruit but to attract bees to my plot. I had not expected this to be so much work! I had discovered that due to the huge tree that is positioned to the right of my plot some of my beds were incredibly rooty so that involved a lot of digging which we probably should have used something like a pickaxe to pick out but we did eventually manage to get all the trees in with just a shovel.

After watching loads of youtube videos, I also knew that any trees that I wanted to put in my allotment were going to have to be supported well. I currently have ten apple trees, all at m27/m9 rootstock, two dwarf rootstock cherry trees and four quince C pear trees in the ground which all needed supporting. When erecting the supports I had thought the hardest thing would have been to get the posts into the ground however it was surprisingly difficult to get the wires for the supports at equal tensions. When we would tighten up one of them the others would get loose - this was incredibly frustrating until we bought some wire tensioners which helped considerably.

One thing I am wary of and have found conflicting views about online is how close together to plant these fruit trees, due to limitations of space on my allotment and not wanting to cover the whole plot in trees, I have planted them in cordons just over a foot apart. So far they all seem to be doing well but only time will tell as to how well they will do.

What surprised me

One thing that surprised me back when my partner got his allotment and when I got my allotment is how helpful everyone is on the allotment site, I don’t know if this is the case everywhere but at my allotment people are always happy to give advice, lend a helping hand or even give you any surplus of plants that they have, which is especially helpful when you are just starting out. It was only today that I received four off cuts of a taunton deane kale plant from some and previously I had mentioned that I wanted to get some tomatoes going and before I knew it someone came over to me with two tomato plants for me to pot up and put in my greenhouse.

One thing that has surprised me this year is how quick my first early potatoes have shot up this year, previously me and my parter had tried planting potatoes in ‘potato towers’, basically some wire mesh staked in a circle shape into the groud with compost down the middle and straw around the outside. Using that we had only got a few more potatoes than what we had planted in them! After watching a few youtube allotment vloggers I had seen some people using potato buckets, which I thought would have had a similar effect as the potato towers, however my first earlies have shot up and i have had to ‘hill them up’ twice already.

Where I am at now

After a couple months of getting everything set up I am finally at a point where I have some seedlings in my greenhouse and my trees are flowering. I have a tonne of peas, herbs, squashes and peppers sprouting in my greenhouse and I have just put my second earlies into their potato buckets about a week ago. My fruit bed with my bushes in (black berries, tayberries, blueberries etc) seems to have sprung to life with the sunnier weather moving in and I seem to be slightly taken over by masses of amounts of strawberries!

My next aim is to plan out what plants I am going to be planting in what beds and hpefully by the end of may planting out my main crop potatoes in their potato buckets. I also hope to be making myself a little herb garden using pallet collars/pallet wood to create a two tiered bed along with creating a flower bed to attract more bees to pollinate my trees.