Hello!

I’m Sandra,  a mad-keen allotmenteer, currently working my second plot, which I’ve been custodian of for five years (I had my first one, which I had to give up when I moved, for seven).

With the price of basic vegetables so low at the moment, I’ve turned the whole plot over to what I call my Event Allotment – where every new crop is not just a new veg for the table, but an event in itself

Flavour is everything, certainly over yield. I’d far rather have one or two extraordinary meals from a crop than an interminable glut that has my neighbours avoiding me in the street (though when the inevitable mountain of plums/beans/blackcurrants etc happens I’ll make a fist of some recipe or other with my trusty maslin pan…)

Bottom line – I want flavour you cannot buy at any price. Sweetcorn eaten within 20 minutes of picking. Gariguette strawberries that taste divine but squash so easily and crop so sparsely they cannot ever be commercial. Rhubarb forced to bubble-gum pink perfection. You get the kind of thing…

By trade I’m a freelance writer who has written about gardening for many publications, including the Times,  Daily Telegraph, The English Garden and Garden News. I am a full member of The Garden Media Guild.

You can find my main website here, where you can also contact me.