RHS Half Hour Allotment
Timely Tips for the Most Productive Plot Ever
Lia Leendertz, with the RHS · Frances Lincoln, 2019
A productive plot on roughly two and a half hours a week, written by someone with a job and children rather than a professional grower.
Although the layout was redesigned in 2019, the horticultural advice was not fully updated — and it still includes glyphosate weedkiller as an option. Glyphosate is contentious in UK amateur gardening and is being phased out on many council allotment sites. We'd rather you knew that than found it on page 60. The underlying material also dates to 2005–06 despite the recent-looking publication date.
What's actually in it
- The Half-Hour Principle — and the important nuance that the time can be chunked up; it's regularity that matters, not literally thirty minutes daily.
- Taking on a plot; deciding what to grow; growing the best varieties.
- Keeping on top of your plot; the first year; nurturing your plants.
- Managing pests and diseases, from biological controls to companion planting.
- An allotment for children; what next.
- Charts showing how much of each crop to grow to feed a family of four — genuinely unusual information that's hard to find anywhere else.
- Deliberate advice on what not to bother with: maincrop potatoes are called out as cheap and easy to buy.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- The method isn't actually hers. The book credits it to nurseryman and allotment holder Will Sibley — the claim being that half an hour a day yields something from the plot every day of the year. It explicitly lets you bank the time instead, as roughly two sessions a week.
- Charts of how much of each crop to grow to feed a household of four, plus sample seasonal work programmes. Genuinely hard information to find anywhere else — one reviewer used the charts to settle on eight celeriac plants.
- It tells you what not to bother with. Don't grow things that are cheap and easy to buy — maincrop potatoes are named. New potatoes are judged worth the space on taste; purple sprouting broccoli is recommended but flagged as expensive in time.
- Three time-saving rules of thumb: buy plug plants rather than sowing where time is short; sow crops needing fleece in long rows, because that's the shape fleece comes in; and never rotovate a weed-infested plot, which only multiplies the problem.
Buy it if
You have a plot and a full-time job, and the guilt is starting.
Don't buy it if
Anyone wanting an A–Z crop reference, or growing in a garden bed rather than on a plot.
Where it falls short
Beyond the glyphosate issue above: no plant directory, no month-by-month calendar (it works in looser seasonal programmes), very little undercover growing, and thin on fruit. At 208 pages across ten broad areas, depth per topic is limited. The 2019 variety recommendations are now seven years old.
Who wrote it
Leendertz trained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and began as a trainee journalist on the RHS's own magazine, The Garden. She wrote the Guardian's weekend gardening column for around a decade and now writes The Almanac, her bestselling annual seasonal guide. She gardens an allotment and an 80ft garden in Bristol, so the book comes from real UK plot practice. Two caveats: she is a journalist with horticultural training rather than a career horticulturist, and the 2019 volume is a redesign of a 2006 text — which is the likeliest explanation for the dated chemical advice flagged above.
Where it was written
RHS-endorsed, built around UK allotment tenancy and the UK growing year.
The facts
- AuthorLia Leendertz, with the RHS
- PublisherFrances Lincoln
- Published2019
- FormatPaperback, 208 pages
- ISBN-13
9780711244108 - LevelBeginner to improver
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.