Congratulations! You’ve gotten your hands on an allotment space that you can transform into your dream garden. Now what?
In this article, we will help you learn how to make the most of your community plot. We’ll cover key aspects to consider and suggest a list of plants that’ll give you the most bang for your square foot buck.
Before you know it, you’ll be harvesting food and flavorful herbs for your table and trading deliciousness with your plot neighbors.
1. Get to Know Your Community Plot
Before you buy a single seed or seedling, get to know the space you have to work with. Gardening allotment plots vary in size, so grab a measuring tape and measure exactly how much space you have to work with.
While you’re at it, take note of how light falls and moves across the plot. Is your space oriented from north to south, or east to west? How about your neighbors’ plots? Are they separated from yours by fences or just walkways?
Talk to the other gardeners to find out what their experiences have been like. They can give you a heads-up about what has thrived best for everyone and which issues have arisen.
For example, if a tomato blight has hit everyone’s crops several years in a row, that’s a species to avoid in your own community plot—at least for the time being.
If you’re planning to plot directly in the soil rather than in raised beds, then be sure to test said soil to see what you’re working with.
Test to determine soil makeup ratios and nutrient levels to see what needs amending. It’s always better to test first so you can save yourself potential disappointment with failed crops. DIY testing strips are affordable and can give you immediate results.
2. Plan Carefully
Once you’ve measured out the space you have available to you, it’s time to get planning.
First and foremost, determine what you’d like to grow. Are you growing as a hobby? Or to provide food for yourself and your family? This will help you to determine how much you can grow in the space you have available to you.
Make a list of the vegetables, fruits, and herbs that you enjoy most, and rank them by highest to lowest priorities. This will give you an idea of how much space you’ll need for each species.
Next, use some graph paper and a pencil to draft different design layouts.
Be sure to consider accessibility when you’re doing your community plot planning. For example, if you struggle with joint or back pain, you may benefit from raised beds rather than planting right into the ground.
Similarly, if you use mobility aids like a wheelchair or walking frame, you’ll need to ensure that the spaces between rows can accommodate them.
You’ll also need to determine how much growing space you’re willing to sacrifice for storage. Some people set up a small shed for tool and supply storage, while others set up a bench to sit on that just happens to have a storage space beneath the seat.
If you’re only storing a watering can, basic tools (trowel, spade, etc.), and some fertilizer, then a smaller storage option is the better one.
3. Maximize Space Whenever Possible
Speaking of space, you only have so much room to grow in a community plot, so try to make the most of it however you can.
Some people like to do square-foot gardening, dividing their space into tidy, square-foot portions. These are easy to manage and can be reached from all sides, making them great for accessibility.
If you’re growing cucumbers, climbing beans, climbing peas, or zucchini, train the plants over a cattle fencing panel archway that’s tall enough to walk beneath. Then, create long beds beneath this archway for growing lettuce, kale, and arugula.
This doubles your growing space while providing the tender, bolting-prone plants beneath with protection from direct sun and heat.
Is there fencing that divides your plot from the others? Then, utilize that to its greatest potential by setting up lattice frames along the entire length.
Use these to grow dwarf espalier fruit trees and bushes (like peaches and berries) if desired, or tall plants that require staking or trellis supports. If you don’t like any of these, you can hang window boxes or pots all around the perimeter of your community plot.
4. Choose Dual- or Triple-Purpose Plants
Having a community plot is an excellent opportunity to cultivate food plants that you may not have much access to otherwise. Choose high-yield, low-maintenance cultivars that thrive in your area, and place them as advantageously as possible.
Since you only have a limited amount of space, aim to grow species that provide food in a few different ways. For example:
- Pole bean pods can be eaten fresh (cooked as green beans) or left to mature into soup or chili beans.
- Amaranth leaves can be cooked like spinach (e.g. callaloo), and its mature grains can be cooked like quinoa or ground into flour.
- Pumpkin and squash flesh can be cooked into savory or sweet dishes, and their seeds can be eaten raw, ground into protein powder, or toasted as snacks.
- Root vegetables such as radishes, beets, and turnips have delicious edible greens as well as tasty roots.
- Garlic creates tasty scapes as well as fiery bulbs.
- Sweet potato leaves are just as edible as their tubers and can be cooked like spinach.
- Harvest male zucchini blossoms and stuff them. Allow the female blossoms to mature into fruits.
- Grow soybeans to eat as steamed or boiled edamame or to process into tofu and tempeh.
If you’re cultivating medicinal plants, aim for those that have multiple purposes as well. There’s a lot of overlap between edible and medicinal plants.
For example, mullein (Verbascum thapsus) leaves, flowers, and roots are all used for different health issues. Raspberry fruits are delicious, and their leaves are medicinal as well.
Remember to also plant pollinator-attracting species among your fruits and vegetables. These will draw bees and butterflies over to pollinate your edibles, and if these plants have healing properties as well, then everyone will benefit from their presence.
For example, anise hyssop (Agastache) leaves are delicious in tea and have numerous medicinal properties. Similarly, bee balm (Monarda spp.) is amazing for pollinators, and its flowers and leaves are invaluable plant medicines for humans.
5. Choose Species that Offer the Maximum Yield per Square Footage
The following plants can offer you the greatest yields for your community plot. When you’re making lists of the types of foods you enjoy the most, be sure to keep these in mind:
Determinate Tomatoes
While indeterminate tomatoes produce fruit throughout the growing season, determinate varieties produce fruits that ripen all in one go. This is ideal for a community plot, because you can harvest all your tomatoes at once and then pull down the plants for an autumn crop in their place.
Prolific Cucumbers
Cucumbers that have a good reputation for being abundant producers are ideal for small spaces. As mentioned earlier, these can be trained to grow over arches, so you can basically double your growing space.
Furthermore, if their soil is amended with plenty of nutrients, you can harvest over 50 lbs of cukes from 10-20 plants. That’s a lot of pickles for your pantry.
Climbing Peas
Few plants are as prolific and abundant as climbing peas. They’re ideal for a community plot because you can train them over just about any vertical support.
Each plant can produce anywhere from 100 to 500 peas, so if you have an archway or entire fence of peas planted, your harvest could range in the thousands.
Zucchini
Those who have grown zucchini know that most plants produce more than the average person can use. Grow yours vertically on tomato cages to avoid soil-borne pathogens and maximize your community plot space, or train them over trellises like cucumbers.
Potatoes
Instead of growing potatoes in rows, tuck a few budding spuds into a tall (aerated!) barrel full of soil and let them go wild. Continue to add soil as the plants grow, and the tubers will extend throughout the barrel or tub.
Sweet Potatoes
Like potatoes, these plants can be quite prolific in the right circumstances. If you’re in a hot climate, cultivate these beauties up a trellis or along a fence. Harvest the greens to eat like spinach, and harvest the abundant tubers once the growing season is over.
6. Interplanting and Succession Planting
Remember to maximize growing space in your community plant by tucking good companion plants together in the same spaces. Tuck basil, nasturtiums, oregano, and/or parsley around your tomato plants.
Dill, sage, and thyme are great companions for cucumbers, beans, and lettuce, while onions, chives, and garlic will help to defend your broccoli, cauliflower, or kale against interlopers.
Similarly, aim for succession planting whenever possible. For example, if you sow lettuce seeds every two weeks, you’ll have a constant supply of fresh leafy greens throughout the entire growing season. Plant radishes the same way for constant roots and spicy greens,
You can also use succession planting with different seasonal crops. For instance, once you’ve harvested your zucchini in August, amend the soil and plant carrots or cabbage to harvest in November.
7. Which Plants to Avoid Growing in a Community Plot
Since you only have so much space in an allotment, avoid growing plants that :
- Need a lot of space to grow but offer minimum yield, such as oversized pumpkins.
- Are prone to severe insect infestations.
- Block sun from other plants (or your neighbors’ plots), such as sunchokes, fruit trees, sunflowers, and tall corn.
- Aggressively invasive species: most mint (Lamiaceae) species grow aggressively via their root systems and are difficult to eradicate. If you want to grow anything in the mint family, keep it confined to a planter or pot.
- Are toxic or otherwise potentially dangerous: some herbalists cultivate plants like nightshade, foxglove, and aconite in home gardens, but these are far too dangerous to grow in community plots and allotments where others may come into contact with them.
- Don’t thrive in your area due to incompatible climate needs.
- Might injure people: if you’re keen on growing cacti, roses, etc., then make sure they’re in the center of your plot rather than the periphery to minimize potential injury to others.
This is where talking to your community plot neighbors comes in handy. If they tell you that nobody has had luck growing pepper plants in that area, then it’s a good idea to skip those.
8. How to Deal with Tall Plants You’d Like to Grow
If there are tall plants you’d like to grow in your community plot, your best bet is to talk to other gardeners in that community, as well as those who manage the space.
Most community allotments have official associations that meet regularly to discuss plans and potential issues. Find out when these meetings occur, and see if you can bring up the topic of using under-utilized peripheral areas for communal gain.
For example, some fantastic food plants can provide nourishment to many but can’t be grown in standard community plots because they grow too tall. For example, “walking stick” kale grows 6-12 feet tall.
The leaves from just one plant can feed several families for a good few meals, but your allotment neighbors would chase you with pitchforks if you tried to grow them in your spot.
Similarly, some amaranth species can grow over 8 feet tall. Their nutrient-dense seeds can be milled into flour or cooked like quinoa, but you need to grow a lot of them for a proper harvest.
Depending on how your community plot garden is laid out, there may be extra space available that isn’t ideal for equal space division. For example, there may be oddly shaped spaces or sharp vertical terrain around the periphery.
If this is the case, those extra spaces are ideal for taller species, provided they’re placed so that they don’t block the sun from anyone’s plot. I’ve seen community gardens where the perimeter fences were dense with amaranth, sunflowers, sorghum, and Jerusalem artichokes.
Note that if you aim to grow corn, it can’t be planted along perimeters like this. Corn needs to be planted in blocks, as air rather than insects distribute its pollen.
Additionally, corn takes a significant amount of space to be worth growing at all. If you’re absolutely dead set on growing corn, then aim for a dwarf popcorn species that’ll give you plenty of ears on shorter plants.