Page 35 - Allotment Gardener Issue 1 2024

Like many people in London, I live in a flat
with no garden. During lockdown in 2020, I really missed having a growing space and my partner suggested I put my name down for an allotment. Six months later on a dark, drizzly December day, I viewed my new allotment in the London borough of Bexley, a 125 square metre half plot, very overgrown, on a slope with stony clay soil and a lot of rubbish! My heart sank. How on earth was I going to be able to grow anything on this wasteland with my zero veg growing experience? Game on! I picked up the keys and threw myself into making this little piece of land into something productive and beautiful.
By the time I had taken on the wedding flower challenge, I had got the plot into reasonable shape. I now had a shed, polytunnel and decent number of beds. I had even managed to grow some lovely vegetables, sometimes too many. Courgettes with every meal for three months of the year can get a tad tedious!
My late Dad had grown dahlias in our garden; there is a blurry family photo of me as a toddler in 1969 having picked one of his prize dinnerplate dahlias, he wasn’t best pleased! Having visited some lovely gardens and a flower farm with amazing dahlia displays, I was inspired to grow dahlias for the wedding, despite knowing nothing about what this would involve. Dahlias were traditional flowers to have at weddings during the Victorian era, one of their meanings is ‘everlasting bond’. So, I ordered
80 tubers and dug out a couple of extra beds, ensuring I would still have space for growing veg and hoped for the best.
By the end of March, I had eighty dahlias in pots growing in my two-bedroom flat
crammed on every windowsill and compost sprinkled everywhere! In May, I planted out
the dahlias on the plot and put in stakes and a web of string to support them. It was a summer battling with the slugs who love to munch
on dahlias. I treated the soil with Nemaslug every six weeks, put a ring of copper wire around every plant and raw sheep’s wool which protected most of them. June was sizzling hot and like many allotments, mine is hand water only and it is a fifty-metre hike to the water tank - thirty cans were needed to do a decent water of the plot. I’m so grateful to my partner who did most of the graft with the watering during that time. I was overjoyed when the dahlias started to flower in July and started giving them a weekly dose of high potash tomato feed.
Two days before the wedding, I headed to the plot with some friends and cut 150 dahlias along with amaranthus, cosmos, zinnia and sparkling fountain I had grown from seed. Luckily a couple of friends who also grew dahlias were able to supply me with extra flowers. The next day, more friends arrived and helped me make up 5 bouquets, 10 big table decorations, 10 buttonholes, a large garland
and a harvest basket (yes there were allotment grown pumpkins, apples and tomatoes in one of the wedding arrangements). At 6am on the day of the wedding, my partner and I crowbarred
all the flowers in the car and set off for the wedding venue in Sussex. The wedding was truly special, it was so amazing to watch my beautiful daughter and lovely partner seal their 10-year relationship surrounded by flowers I had grown on my allotment. All that hard work was more than worth it. Mission accomplished! Follow Mary’s allotment journey
on Instagram @plotmassive
The wedding photos taken by Amy Davies The photo of Mary on the allotment
is by Donna Ford
“All that hard work was more than worth it. Mission accomplished!”
READERS ARTICLES
Allotment Gardener | Issue 1 2024 | 35