I started this design before I did my PDC at Ragmans Lane Farm in June 2014. I had watched the Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton’s PDC, the one that was recorded and released in video format. I had also watched all of Geoff Lawton's documentaries on permaculture that had been released. Ten years ago the internet was very different from how it is today regarding the amount of high-quality permaculture information that is online. I hunted down and watched all the videos I could find, I downloaded interviews, podcasts, and talks and would walk around constantly listening to them. I was also reading lots of permaculture books, in short, I had a vast knowledge of permaculture with no practical experience.

What went well?

When my partner told me she had just rented an allotment plot and when I come over at the weekend we can go and have a look, my mind sprang into action.

Looking back now after walking around the plot for a short while I must have sounded like a crazy person when I started to describe what I was going to do on the plot.

With the help of all that I had learned about permaculture, as soon as I got home I started to work on the design. From the very beginning, I knew I was breaking one of the golden rules of permaculture. The “observe the property for at least a year before making any big decisions” rule. The following weekend I would be fencing the plot, with the weekend after that I’d be making a start on digging it up and adding the beds. Waiting a year was never going to happen.

Having consumed so much permaculture information I understood I needed to have a design to follow. There was never going to be too much I could do wrong on such a small area but following the layout helped me to keep the focus on what I was wanting to achieve.  I also never let what I thought other people might be thinking about what was doing hold me back even though it did play on my mind.

In the end, my plot became a novelty and with any novelty people get curious so I got to talk to lots of people at the allotment about permaculture who had never heard of it before. It was a nice thing to be able to do for other people and through describing permaculture to them, in return, I got to hear their own stories.

Reflecting back to the permaculture ethics, I was practicing "Earth Care" through creating a garden that was benefiting not only myself but everything in and around it. For the permaculture ethic of "People Care", I got to talk and to listen to other people. Lastly, the Fair Share permaculture ethic was not just about sharing some of what I had grown, I got to share knowledge and received knowledge from others, most of all I got to share the beauty of the allotment plot when each day people would walk past it.

What has been challenging?

I was very conscious that I was an outsider to the small village where the allotment site was located. I didn't know anybody at the allotment site so nobody had any idea what to expect from me. My design involved digging up the plot and building beds in a way that nobody else on the site had seen before. If that was not enough when the ground cover went bonkers and covered the plot with five-foot-high plants I had to pretend that it was all part of the plan. From the very beginning, my plot was a talking point for the other plot owners.

As the years went on I was still very conscious that my plot was the one that people talked about at the allotment site. This is also why I became a little obsessed with making sure there were no weeds in my plot, or on the paths directly outside of my plot. I didn’t want to give any reason for people to complain about the randomness of how my plot looked.

As time went on it was many of the other plots that became the problems, with people slowly realizing how much work their plots involved, it wasn't long before the grass and weeds reclaimed them.

Once the people at the allotment got to know me and my way of gardening, they could see I was not part of the usual competition for growing the most vegetables. They seemed to enjoy how I was growing and enjoyed the diversity my plot brought to the site.   

A trait that I still struggle with is cutting plants down before their peak, there were many times at the plot where I should have gone through and chopped and dropped a lot of plant material but never did. The result was getting a lower yield from many crops I tried to grow.

What are my long-term vision and goals for this design?

When I first started the design I always knew it was going to be only a matter of years before I would have to give up the allotment plot. With this thought always in the back of my mind, I grew many things that I could dig up and move eventually to a garden of my own. It was this long term vision that eventually paid off when I moved into my own house and moved all the fruit bushes and most of the perennial plants into my new garden. (see Forage Garden Design).

What are the next achievable steps?

The allotment site was a great place to learn. There were little things I did that I would not do again, for example, I’d never sow radish as a cover crop. I was constantly pulling out leggy radish plants for years after the one time I sowed them. Another thing I would not do again is leave rhubarb growing that never turned red, year after year I thought that this year it would be different, it never was.

The next achievable step for this design is to take everything I learned and to keep using it as a foundation to work and build from with my other land-based permaculture designs. Already this has paid off both with my “Kitchen Garden Design” and my “Forage Garden Design”. In these designs, I had a much better understanding of layouts especially when it came to planting.