Skip to main content
What To Sow
A white and black cat sitting on a wooden planter covered in cascading purple flowers, the full allotment visible behind
allotment diary · wildlife

Meet Dot, the allotment cat

There is a cat on my allotment site. She is white with black patches and she turns up every time I start watering. I call her Dot, or sometimes Baby, depending on what mood she is in.

Save to Pinterest

She is not my cat. I do not know whose cat she is. She lives somewhere on the site, or near it, and she is not looking for food — she is just a fun visitor. Within about five minutes of me arriving, she is there.

A white and black cat looking up at the camera through metal climbing frame bars at an allotment
Dot, arriving through the climbing frame as she always does.

She is the best gardening companion. Not much practical help, admittedly — she has settled in a freshly sown bed more than once, and she likes to walk across whatever I have just planted and look back as if I should be grateful. But she watches over us while we work, and the plot is better for having her in it.

A white cat flopped on her side in a raised allotment bed among small seedlings, completely relaxed
In the seedlings. Those are lettuce seedlings she is lying on. She was there for some time.
A white and black cat on a wooden decking area at an allotment, white metal garden furniture behind and the allotment stretching out in the distance
She treats the whole site as hers. She is not wrong.

There is something about an allotment cat. She is part of the plot now, in a way I cannot quite explain. She turns up, settles in the sun nearby, and watches over us while we get on with the watering and the weeding. Every visit is better for it.

more from the shed
A few well-used allotment tools and the evening's harvest laid out on the decking

The allotment tools I actually use, compared

A raised allotment bed divided into a string grid, each square sown with a different crop — square-foot growing

Square-foot growing: more crops from every bed

A sunflower in full bloom against a dusk sky on a UK allotment, the first summer

My first allotment summer, in pictures

Get personalised dates for your postcode

Every veg patch is different. Enter your postcode and we'll work out your frost date and tell you exactly what to sow right now.

Enter your postcode