Grow Greener with Garthdee Field Allotments Association

Category: Advice Page 2 of 13

Dobies’ Sale Seeds

Dobies have a seed sale on at the moment.

Please note this is the online seed merchants, not the local Dobbies’s Garden Centre.

If you miss the deadline, remember you can get a 40% discount on seed prices throughout the year when you use our Garthdee Field Discount Voucher. Copes of their 2024 Catalogue and a letter with the NEW Discount Code are available in the Octagon. Order online at your convenience, but you MUST use the code at the point of ordering to get the Garthdee Field 40% discount.

I am not sure our code will work with these sale purchases. Let us know if you find it does.

There are still lots of free seed packets in the Octagon Seed-Swop – many current and viable.

Seed Sale Alert

Thanks go to Pete (Plot 33) who passed on the alert and suggested this post.

DT Brown have bargain seeds for sale right now – but their sale ends at Midnight Sunday 22 October 2023. Jump in now and grab yourselves a bargain or three.

Compost: A Valuable Resource

The benefits of making your own compost are well known. The best compost requires the right blend of green and brown materials added in layers. Making your own on your plot removes the need to cart weeds and the like off site for disposal.

During the Summer we have on site plenty of free-to-all grass cuttings. These are to be found in a bin in the South-East corner of the site.

The materials in the white bags seen in the photo are coffee grounds. C-Fine deliver these grounds to us weekly. Many plotters consider coffee grounds to be a useful addition when compost making.

Please feel free to help yourself to these materials. There is nothing quite like grass cuttings to heat up and speed up your compost making.

The materials on the right side of the bin are seedy weeds dumped in the bin by a plotter. This is very disappointing. Plotters are best to compost their own weeds, or failing that, take them off site for disposal via their brown bins. They must not be dumped around the site or in communal bins.

Dung and/or Compost Opportunity

We were all disappointed to find that our local supply of cow dung had dried up – so to speak! We are investigating alternatives which can be delivered in bigger tonnages – of domestic green waste compost and/or manure.

The scrapping of the containers from site produced a one-off windfall for GFAA funds and we hope to make around four barrowloads of dung and/or domestic green waste compost available free of charge to GFAA members.

We fear demand my outpace supply, so requests will be fulfilled on a first come, first served basis while supplies last.

If you are interested, please leave a comment below this post with your name and plot number. The compost/dung will be delivered to your plot once it is available. This may take a few weeks to organise. Bear with us.

If things work out and there is enough interest we may try to repeat this exercise.

Hi-Tech Gardening Advice

Artificial Intelligence is much in the news – as always – and Chat GPT was until recently, and perhaps still is, flavour of the month. If you have not yet given it a go, checking it out might take your mind off this terrible weather.

I checked it out tonight asking this question: Why should I go to the bother of making my own garden compost? Here’s what it came back with:


There are many benefits of making your own garden compost, including:

  1. Improving soil quality: Garden compost is rich in nutrients and can help improve the quality of soil by providing essential organic matter and minerals.
  2. Reducing waste: Making your own garden compost is a great way to reduce the amount of kitchen and garden waste going to landfill.
  3. Saving money: Buying compost from garden centers or nurseries can be expensive, so making your own can save you money in the long run.
  4. Promoting biodiversity: Garden compost supports diverse soil life, including beneficial bacteria and fungi, which can help promote a healthy ecosystem in your garden.
  5. Sustainability: Composting is a sustainable practice that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from organic waste in landfills.

Overall, making your own garden compost is an easy and rewarding way to improve soil fertility, reduce waste, save money, and promote sustainability in your garden.


Pretty good I thought. What do you think? Then I tried what I thought might be a bit harder. I asked for suggestions for companion plant combinations that would work well in a Scottish vegetable garden. This answer came back in seconds:


As an AI language model, I don’t have personal experience or knowledge of specific locations like Scotland. However, here are some suggested companion planting combinations that can work well in vegetable gardens:

  1. Carrots, onions, and lettuce are good companions as they help repel pests such as carrot rust flies and onion maggots while the lettuce provides shade for the carrots.
  2. Tomatoes, basil, and marigolds make a great combination as basil improves the flavor of tomatoes while also repelling pests, while marigolds repel various pests.
  3. Cabbage, celery, and beets grow well together as cabbage and celery stimulate the growth of beets while repelling pests.
  4. Beans, peas, and corn form an ideal trio as beans add nitrogen to the soil, peas fix it, and corn provides support for both.
  5. Spinach, radishes, and strawberries make a great match as radishes deter aphids and strawberry moths while spinach helps to suppress weeds.

Note that these are companion planting suggestions and may not work in all circumstances, depending on your soil type, climate, and other factors. Also, remember to rotate your crops to prevent diseases and pests from building up in the soil.


OK, good. Chat knows its limitations. But can it make up a garden joke? How about a limerick? I asked for a limerick about a gardener with a bad back. Here’s what it offered:


There once was a gardener quite green,
Whose back was the weakest you’ve seen,
He’d bend and he’d twist,
But then he’d enlist,
A robot to help with the weeding.


:-) 10 out of 10! Except we at Garthdee Field use volunteers not robots. Only kidding! :-)

OK Smart Alex how about this: What do a basket of fruit and a punnet of potatoes have in common? Here’s what came back:


As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions or beliefs, but the answer to your question is that both a basket of fruit and a punnet of potatoes are containers for storing and transporting food.


Blooming heck – there just might just be something to this. Give it a go and let us know how you get on. Link above.

Garthdee Field on High

If you have visited your allotment recently you may have been greeted by scenes like this –

All very depressing

A wee warning, if needed, that nets need to be removed from fruit cages and other vulnerable structures before winter comes, or else snow cleared from them before it turns to ice.

But this too will pass and here is a wee reminder of just how wonderful Garthdee Field looks at its best. The video was shot in mid July – as I recall. Best viewed in full screen mode.

Thanks go to Alison (Plot 80) for arranging for this aerial video to be made and to her friend, Alan Rae who programmed and flew the drone.

Page 2 of 13

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén