Creating a Small Wildlife-Friendly Allotment Plot

Why a Wildlife-Friendly Plot Pays Its Way

An allotment is never just a place to grow carrots. Spend an hour on a warm June morning and you'll see it: bumblebees working the broad beans, a robin shadowing your fork, hoverflies hanging over the nasturtiums. All of that activity is doing you a favour. Hoverfly larvae hoover up aphids by the hundred, ground beetles and centipedes take slug eggs below the surface, and blue tits will strip a caterpillar infestation from your brassicas while you're still deciding what to do about it.

The good news is that you don't need to give over half the plot to a wildflower meadow to see the benefit. A few well-chosen plants, a reliable source of water and a firm commitment to keeping chemicals off the site will do more for your harvests than almost anything else you can spend a Saturday on.

Plant Flowers That Actually Earn Their Keep

The trick on a productive plot is choosing flowers that give something back, or that cost you almost no space. Annuals are ideal because you can tuck them into gaps — between rows of kale, at the end of a bed, or in a strip along the path.

• Phacelia is the single best plant for pollinators on an allotment. Sow it in April as a green manure; it smothers weeds, flowers for weeks, then digs in as organic matter.
• Borage and calendula self-seed cheerfully and flower from June to the first frosts. Both are edible, and borage is a magnet for bees.
• Poached egg plant is low-growing, brilliant for hoverflies and happy in the shade at the foot of taller crops.
• Nasturtiums work as a trap crop for blackfly — plant a few well away from your beans and let the aphids have them.
• Sweet alyssum and crimson clover cover ground quickly and keep beneficial insects fed into autumn.

Then add herbs and perennials at the edges, where they won't compete with crops. Chives, marjoram, thyme, rosemary and lavender are drought-tolerant once established and offer nectar over a long season. Comfrey deserves a corner of its own: bees adore the flowers and the leaves make an excellent liquid feed. Foxgloves, teasel and sunflowers bring height, and if you leave the sunflower heads standing, goldfinches will strip them for you in October.

Water, Shelter and Somewhere to Hide

Water is the thing wildlife needs most and finds least on a tidy allotment site. You don't need a big pond — a sunken washing-up bowl will do, as long as creatures can get in and out.

• Sink a bowl so the rim sits just below soil level, then build a ramp of stones or rough wood at one end. Add a couple of native pond plants and top it up in summer.
• For bees, a shallow saucer of water with pebbles breaking the surface gives them somewhere safe to drink without drowning.
• Leave a log pile in a shady corner. Dead wood is home to beetles, solitary bees and, if you're lucky, slow worms.
• Hang a bundle of hollow canes or drill holes in a block of untreated wood for solitary bees. Site it south-facing, at least a metre off the ground.
• Resist cutting everything back in autumn. Seedheads feed finches, hollow stems shelter overwintering insects, and the lot makes fine mulch by spring.

If you keep a compost heap or a bonfire pile, always turn it gently before using a fork. Hedgehogs, toads and slow worms love a warm heap, and a sudden fork through one is a heartbreak nobody wants.

Keeping Pests in Check Without Chemicals

The most important thing you can do for wildlife is to stop using pesticides, slug pellets and weedkillers. Metaldehyde pellets harm birds and hedgehogs, and broad-spectrum sprays don't discriminate between aphids and the ladybirds eating them. Instead, work with what you have:

• Hand-pick slugs and snails on damp evenings and drop them in a bucket of soapy water, or move them to a wild corner.
• Use nematodes as a biological control in spring, when the soil is warm and moist.
• Ring precious seedlings with barriers. Crushed eggshell is unreliable, but copper tape, wool pellets and collars cut from plastic bottles work well.
• Plant companions — marigolds among tomatoes, spring onions beside carrots — and accept that a little damage is normal and rarely fatal.
• Hoe paths regularly or mulch them with bark chip rather than reaching for weedkiller.

Expect some nibbled leaves and a few aphids. A plot with no pests at all has no predators either, and predators are the whole point.

A Plot That Works Through the Year

Wildlife gardening on an allotment is really about rhythm. In spring, leave a few early dandelions for queen bumblebees just out of hibernation, and get your phacelia and clover sown. Through summer, keep water topped up and deadhead flowers to keep them going. Come autumn, sow a green manure such as field beans or grazing rye on empty beds — it feeds the soil, shelters beetles and stops nutrients washing away over winter. In the cold months, do the least you can get away with. A slightly scruffy plot in January is a thriving one in June.

Do check whether your site has rules about grass and tidiness before letting things go completely. Most committees are delighted by a well-managed wildlife strip along a boundary hedge. Keep the wildness at the edges and the productivity in the middle, and everyone — neighbours included — will be happy.

Small Plot, Big Difference

You don't need to be a conservationist to make this work. A packet of phacelia seed, a bowl of water with a stone in it, and the decision to put the slug pellets in the bin are three small acts that between them will transform what your plot supports. Within a season you'll notice it: more bees on the beans, more birds on the fence, fewer aphids on the roses. Grow your vegetables, but leave a little room for the creatures that help you do it — they'll repay you many times over.