I grow beans, peas, tomatoes and lettuce on half a plot in Walthamstow mainly for their seed, and I write down how each lot was kept true, dried and stored, so that the envelopes handed out at the gate are worth sowing.

I took on half a plot on the allotments below the reservoirs in 2019, after six years on the waiting list and one very wet viewing in February. The soil is London clay, heavy and sticky in winter, cracked like crazy paving in August, and slowly improved by barrow loads of leaf mould every autumn. For two years I grew what everyone grows. Then the plot-holder next door, who had been saving the same runner bean for longer than I have been alive, gave me a handful of his seed, and the plot quietly changed its purpose.

These notes are about seed rather than harvests. Runner beans come first, because they are the hardest of the easy crops to keep true, and then the heirloom French beans, peas, tomatoes and lettuces that have come to me through the gate over the years. Each entry records how many plants a lot came from, what else was flowering within reach, how the pods were dried, and how the seed germinated the following spring. The failures are in here too, including the year a whole tin of beans went to damp.

Every February a few of us put a trestle table by the main gate on a Sunday morning and swap seed. There is no money, no membership and no organisation, only biscuit tins, a pile of envelopes and a rule that everything must be labelled. I started this site in 2021 partly so that anyone who took an envelope could read how it was grown. I am a keen amateur, not a botanist, and where I pass on advice from better-informed growers I say so.