Now that duties at Chelsea are over, the allotment can get some attention. My favourite part of allotment gardening is raising new plants each year. Every sunny place in the back garden near a tap or water butt is covered in young plants and tray by tray these are scooped up and conveyed to the plot and carefully planted one-by-one.
Sowing seeds direct in the ground is a lot quicker, but they have to fight their way through the weeds that are so damaging on sandy soils. Transplants on the other hand are put out later, giving a interval to eliminate weeds. On bare ground weeds are lightly hoed or treated with contact weedkillers. The occasional bindweed or creeping butter cup is spot treated with a glyphosate weedkiller in a handy ready-to-use pack. After recent wet summers horsetails have staged a comeback. Normally frequent hoeing and heavy smothering crops keep horsetail at negligible levels, so it is back to repeated hoeing to beat this weed back down.
Opaque plastic sheeting is my secret weapon of allotment growing and many crops are planted through the plastic and are then essentially weedfree. Tiresome weeds do occur at the edges of the plastic just where they cannot be hoed but a contact weedkiller usually polishes them off nicely.
With care the sheets can be recovered and re-used year after year. Even better when the time comes to replant later in the summer or in the autumn, the soil is weedfree and in perfect condition for quick re-planting. The downside is that the sheets can harbour slugs so slug controls are applied before laying the sheets.
Tender plants such as cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, squash, sweetcorn and tomatoes set out through opaque plastic are usually covered with fleece or clear polythene cloches to boost growth and provide protection from the wind that can be very damaging to plants raised in a sheltered garden and suddenly exposed in an open allotment site, as well as boosting their growth.
The general idea is to get as much leaf out as quickly as possible to turn the high light levels in May, June and July into useful plant material; by August and September the best of the growing season is over with light levels are falling fast and days shortening. There is not day to lose.