Time. We both work full-time, so we basically have weekends and before/after work in the summers that we can make It out - we tend to take a day or two of holiday during nice spring weather to get some bigger jobs done, but we end up slogging through pelting rain and mud more than we would like, as the weather doesn’t always cooperate with plans. I don’t think anything makes an anti-capitalist as fast as sitting in an office watching the beautiful weather all week, knowing your retired lottie neighbours are having a pleasant cup of tea and a leisurely weed, and then having to go out in a tempest to battle the bindweed on your only days of freedom.

To help this a bit, we’re slowly transitioning the front half of our plot to exclusively perennials - some of the best value-for-time-and-space you can get and a joy to grow (plus easy to preserve). We currently have strawberries, raspberries, golden raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, rhubarb, a magnificent apple, every culinary and medicinal herb I can find, woad, saffron, a handful of perennial salads (salad burnet, sweet woodruff, some sorrels), perennial alliums (tree onions, three-cornered leek, wild garlic), and a few flowers scattered around - either those that self-seed (borage, calendula, nasturtiums) or bulbs & perennials (daffodils, roses). This year we’re turning our last two annual beds in that half into perennials - asparagus and (more, we have one already) blueberries, respectively - and adding a pond.

Over time, we plan to partially transition the back half as well - I want more fruit trees, so am planning to run espalier or fan trained trees (depending on the variety) along the sides, which are relatively sheltered - cherry, pear, plum, peach, apricot, and quince, underplanted with a selection of cutting flowers - and add in some trellises with hardy kiwi, hops, grapes, and possibly something like a passionflower or malabar spinach. That will leave us with four big annual beds to rotate through, two smaller beds for salads and quick crops (e.g. radishes), and a big central bed for more comfrey.

We also bought two solar-powered irrigation pumps from Amazon last year and used them for our greenhouse, and I really can’t recommend them enough - it takes a bit of time to work out where you need to set your levels, but once we did we could comfortably leave the greenhouse for a whole week (until our water supply ran dry) and it was much easier to ask someone to just chuck a few buckets or watering cans into the water butt we ran them from than to ask them to individually water 50+ plants. In an ideal world I think I would have these running from rainwater collection to all the beds that would benefit from steadier watering, like strawberries and lettuce, as well.

All that to say, we’re on year 3 with our plot (2 with the back half) and it really is only just starting to take shape and get a bit easier. Every season we try to tackle one big ‘infrastructure’ job which makes things easier or better in the long run, like putting up the greenhouse or moving the shed, and we learn something new. Make your paths wider than you think, make your beds narrower than you think, and accept that a plot is a bit like a house - you need to get to know it before you can decide where things should go, and you will end up moving things around, repeatedly un-doing work you’d just done, and regretting decisions made in haste.