Sue Ling hadn’t grown vegetables until two years ago. Now look at her allotment! Dedication and a painterly eye transformed the plot. Garden writer Benedict Vanheems paid a visit

When Sue Ling took on her allotment in Kidlington, near Oxford, in 2019, she faced a tangle of weeds and tarpaulin.

The solution? Good old, honest hard graft and determination – and some very early mornings! Sue explains: “My husband David and I started digging at around 6.30 every morning.

We were usually first on site and it was absolutely brilliant – so peaceful, with all the birds flying about. We started digging on one side, tackling one section before moving on to the next. Within a week we’d dug about half of the front area of the allotment.”

Much of the soil was moved into other beds to help even areas out, with a lot of diligent sieving to remove the worst of the stones. That’s certainly commitment!

Mare’s tail covered a lot of the plot and despite the painstaking work that was involved in digging it up, and its occasional reappearance, Sue admits to having a bit of a soft spot for what she considers quite an attractive-looking weed.

Sue admires her flower patch next to her beehive compost bin

Having taken the plot on in May, time was never going to be on Sue’s side; and with the growing season marching on, fellow allotment holders stepped in to offer their advice, encouragement… and plants. “Someone gave me some potatoes to put in, just to set me going, so I planted them and harvested a small crop in late August. I had never grown them before, so I was really thrilled by this! “Then on the other side I planted a row of runner beans – probably too many – but they grew absolutely fantastically.”

Sweetcorn and beetroot also flourished, with Sue finding beetroot her most useful and easy-to-grow of all the vegetables she’s grown.

Tomatoes, courgettes and an existing rhubarb contributed further pickings in this first year, cementing her conviction that she’d made the right choice in taking on the plot.