The notebook

An allotment and small-garden notebook for west London

This is a notebook. We write down the measurements, the species lists and the sequences of work that a small plot actually needs, in the plainest English we can manage, and we show the arithmetic when there is arithmetic to show.

A row of allotment plots on a still autumn morning, bean poles and a low hedge behind them. — Produced illustration, not a photograph of a named site.

Sixteen pages are online. They cover four things: what a plot is and how it is measured, what to do with the soil between crops, how to grow and prune food on a small area, and how to turn a neglected corner into something a hedgehog can live in. A fifth strand runs through all of them – the local produce show, which is where a lot of British growing knowledge has quietly been kept for a century.

Nothing here is an announcement. We hold no meetings, sell no plants and run no competition. Where a rule depends on your site or your council, the page says so and stops, rather than inventing a figure. Where a number can be checked, it is written out so you can check it: a rod is 5.5 yards, ten square rods are 302.5 square yards, and that is 253 square metres of ground you will be digging.

The four sections are not the same size, because the matter behind them is not the same size. The plot carries the measurement and three pages on soil. The wildlife plot is the longest, six pages, because a planting plan drawn up for a real wild corner survives in full and gives species, spacings and aftercare layer by layer. Growing has two pages under it and the show has one. We would rather publish sixteen pages that each say something than thirty that pad each other out.

Four of those pages are almost entirely species lists, and they are the ones we would point a new plot holder at first. A native hedge is not a shopping decision, it is a proportion: eighty to ninety per cent of one group of species, ten to twenty per cent of another, planted in a double row at 30 cm spacing, which is five plants to the metre. A meadow is not a packet of wildflower seed, it is three grasses first and the flowers after. A pond is a depth and a slope before it is a plant list. Those numbers were written down once, on this address, by people who had actually dug the ground; the pages here carry them forward with the arithmetic intact and nothing added.

What you will not find here is a calendar. There is no page telling you what to sow in March, because a month is not a growing condition and the same month means different things on a south-facing slope and in a frost pocket two streets away. The pages are organised by what you are doing – measuring, covering, composting, pruning, planting for wildlife, showing – and each one says when in the year its work belongs.

The address is older than the notebook. From 2003 until about 2014, chsw4.org carried the website of a horticultural society in west London: allotment news, composting notes written by one of its members, a soft-fruit pruning guide, a plan for a wildlife plot drawn up for the group, and the paperwork of an autumn show. That material is why this notebook exists, and several pages here answer at the exact addresses that once carried it. What belonged to the subject has been rebuilt; what belonged to the group itself – its paperwork, its prize lists, its members' names – has been removed. The about page explains how that line was drawn.