Published: 18 May 2026 - Watch on YouTube
Hello everyone and welcome back. Today I am at my allotment for the first time in what feels like ages, because I have not been here for most of April. Not much has changed, and yet a little has too. The big story is the ground itself, which after a dry, cold spring has gone completely rock hard, so I am here to reset, tidy up and work with what I have.
The first thing you will notice is the cardboard situation all over the plot. I am laying it down to suppress the weeds that have started popping up, and also to build up the ground so I have somewhere to grow. We still get plenty of rain here, but the soil has become so hard that I honestly cannot get a shovel into it. Nothing is going to grow directly in that.
So the plan is simple. Cover as much of the surface as I can with cardboard, and I have bought some soil to create beds on top and plant into that instead. I am not putting pressure on myself to use the whole plot this season. It is a little too much to tackle in one go, so I will do as much as time allows and no more.
To my surprise, the onions are doing quite all right. They have bulked up nicely across two beds, which was a lovely thing to come back to. In one of them I topped up with another bag of compost and sowed carrot and parsnip, though that was very recent so it needs time. The garlic is a different story. I am not holding out 100 percent hope for it, but some of it is still alive, and there is even a bit of verbena popping up in there for some reason.
The sad part is that most of my potted plants have died. The one that really stings is a rose campion I dug up from my home garden specially to plant here. April was very dry and very cold in this spot, and pretty much all the rest went the same way. It is what it is. I will just work with what is left.
I had planned to cardboard the far end of the plot, add horse manure, top it with fresh compost and use it for big crops. But the ground there is so uneven, full of old footprints and craters from when the plots were landscaped last autumn on wet clay, that I have changed my mind. Rather than cardboard underneath, I am going to spread the manure straight onto the soil. It should suppress some of the weeds and, just as importantly, even out all those holes so I stop nearly twisting my ankle every time I walk across.
I still have so many bags of manure left, which goes back to a mistake I made in December when I brought it in and never spread it out evenly. I should have done that straight away. So today the job is to tip those bags along one side to make a long border, layer compost on top later and plant into that. We will see what happens.
I brought some new boxes from a bike shop local to my town, and I will take them apart to use as I did with the others. I also have a spare piece of shed that arrived damaged in delivery. They sent a replacement but never took the broken one back, so I want to break it down and use the little bits of wood to make raised beds, or at least edges of beds, for one corner of the plot.
For the big crops I have a Big Max pumpkin, which I think will be perfect for that long manured border because it will want a lot of room. I have never grown a big pumpkin before, simply because I never had the space. This part was originally meant for potatoes, but with the soil gone so hard I ended up planting those in my home garden instead. I still have quite a lot of crops growing from seed at home that were always meant to come here, so really I just need to get to work and plant them out.
Once the beds are in, I will lay cardboard around them to mark out the paths. Eventually, when the wood chip I am waiting on finally gets delivered, like everyone else at the allotment is waiting too, I will spread it over the cardboard to give the whole thing some structure. Wood chip is extremely expensive here in the UK, so I would rather not spend a fortune buying it in.
For now it looks a bit messy, I know. But if you can picture it through the mess, the idea is neat raised beds all over with tidy wood chip paths in between. At some point I will also build a proper compost heap from the pallets I still have lying along the edge, the ones that served as a path over winter. It is coming along.
By the end of the day I had used up all the cardboard I brought and made a start on that long manure border. There is still a wonky L-shaped bit to sort out, and the sky turned wonderfully dramatic while I worked, but I am happy with the progress. Sometimes gardening is less about a perfect plot and more about working with what you have, one messy, honest step at a time. If you are also battling hard clay or a plot that got away from you this spring, I would love to hear how you are getting on down in the comments.
Tags: #AllotmentGardening #NoDig #ClaySoil #WindyGarden #MayGarden #MyWindyGarden