Bisley Old Road Allotment, Stroud

We have been working with a group of volunteers on this allotment site since 2012. It was a forgotten plot with grass up to our knees and full of discarded bits and pieces. Now it is very productive and full of bees, butterflies and crickets and filled with organic fruit and vegetables that our volunteers can enjoy. We share our surplus produce with Stroud Foodbank, and sometimes sell it in our eco shop.

We also have a video which was made a few years ago by Devlin Price for which we are very grateful : Allotment video

Spring 2024: Above par(snips) at Bisley Old Road by Tamsin Bent

The Bisley Old Road Allotment group stopped for the winter, but before we broke up we harvested lots of vegetables to take home for our Christmas lunches. We had a particularly good crop of parsnips.

We started back again in mid March this year and started seed sowing straight away.

This year we’re trying some of the new tomato varieties from the SVP eco shop, which is very exciting and of course we have planted parsnips.

Autumn 2023: Seeds of success by Tamsin Bent

We’ve had a busy summer on the allotment, growing practically everything from seed, apart from some donations from our Seedling Swap in May.

Some crops did really well, while others didn’t! Our raspberries have been amazing, but our strawberries were a complete washout, perhaps due to the wet conditions.

We experimented with growing new varieties; this year we went for miniature aubergines and peppers and had much better results than previously, while the tomatillos picked up at the Seedling Swap were great to try in a salsa verde.

We also grew plants for the Sensory Garden, including an amazing Clary that has brightened up the bed for people with visual impairments all summer long. Our volunteers also learned how to take cuttings from other sites. Some of the wildflowers we planted last autumn have done well and we now have quite a few Cowslips, Wild Carrot and Field Scabious which we can hopefully plant out next year. 

We are about to stop for our winter break, but are looking forward to next spring where we will hopefully be using the knowledge and skills we have learned this year to grow bigger and better!

Spring 2023: Getting experimental at Bisley Old Road by Tamsin Bent

After our winter break, our Monday morning allotment group started back in late February. We had all the usual spring jobs: adding fresh compost to the beds, cutting back the grass that had been covering the edges, and of course planting seeds!

This year we tried growing aubergines from seed for the first year and five different types of tomato – including some saved from last year’s crops. We sowed flower seeds for the Sensory Garden in Stratford Park, focussing on Sunflowers and Rudbeckia.

Since last autumn, we’ve been experimenting with growing wildflowers for our sites... with varying levels of success. Wild Carrot and Wild Clary germinated very well, and Wild Liquorice initially came up, but we think they may have been lost to slugs! We’re also growing on a few tiny Barberry plants for one of our volunteers, Graeme Davis, who is very keen to try and encourage the very rare Barberry Carpet Moth back into the area.

Autumn 2022: As many of you may have experienced yourselves, 2022 was a tricky year for growing, with a cold start and then a boiling hot time over the summer.

We watered as much as we could, but this year’s harvest was lower than previous years.

However, we did have a bumper crop of onions and garlic. Also, the herbs we grew from seeds and cuttings have now been planted in the Sensory Garden in Stratford Park, where hopefully they will thrive for many to enjoy.

We’re looking forward to the next growing season and planning new wildflower beds to supply our other sites with plants.