Charcoal is breaking apart in the soil

There is very little evidence of charcoal in the sieved potato soil except for the larger lumps. This is the first area where I used inoculated charcoal.

In the early stages of my experiment I did not crush the charcoal.

I was putting these few large lumps to one side to crush before putting them back on the soil. However, there was little need to use the bull hammer because they seem to crumble easily between finger and thumb. Now I am not sure whether this is due to the soil, the type of charcoal or possibly the natural weathering of charcoal.

I have put quite a lot of charcoal onto this area over the three years that I have been trying this experiment and the charcoal seems to have broken down in to smaller and smaller pieces incorporating itself into the the soil structure.

An aside: What farmers consider as top soil is completely different to what allotment growers would consider top soil.  My top soil has considerably more organic matter and is much darker than this so called farm top soil.  I also had to remove a awful lot of stones - I will take a photograph of the stone that I have taken out.

The soil was particularly poor being replacement for contaminated soil on my allotment. Now, after adding charcoal and carefully cultivating,  this area of the allotment is cropping as well as the rest of the allotment.

 No shops are stocking charcoal this time of the year but you can still get it from the internet.
http://www.creativegardenideas.co.uk/supagrillcharcoal10kg
Just put that in so that I do not loose the web address, which I am always doing.

I have just bought some Takesumi charcoal to see if has any better properties than lump wood charcoal.

I am going to plant some more onions, tomatoes, summer cauliflowers (All the year round) celery and celeriac tomorrow.

Heritage or modern seed?

I have bought quite a few seeds from the Real Seeds Catalogue but maybe I should have tried a little harder to buy heritage seeds.

http://www.realseeds.co.uk/

However, if you want disease resistant varieties because you need to grow without pesticides then sometimes you need to compromise.  Also, I want to be able to keep some of my vegetables stored over winter and these good keeping varieties are not necessarily heritage.  Cauliflower: Brassica oleracea botrytis 'Clapton F1 Hybrid'  is a club root resistant variety so I thought that I would try it.  It was also half price in an end of season sale so I could not resist it. (Several others of the F1 seeds were in the sale as well so I got them too)  I have been growing Daucus carota 'Flyaway F1 Hybrid' for years to combat carrot root fly.  This year I am growing Resistafly F1 Hybrid.

The bottom line is to produce some organic carrots to eat. To make this a little more certain I will be growing crops that are resistant to pests.

I would like to believe that heritage plants have a greater affinity for mychorrhizal fungi and grow even better with charcoal but I have not found any significant difference between modern varieties and heritage grown with charcoal.  Both types of plants seem to benefit from the application of inoculated charcoal and  mychorrhiza.  Keeping the old varieties going is more to do with biodiversity than anything else.


I have two dust bins full of marinading lump wood, barbecue charcoal.  The liquid is made up of comfrey, nettle, sweet cicely, worm bin and diluted pigeon manure.  It has been marinading for at least five months now and I will not use it until the spring.  I reckon that will be ample time for the charcoal to take up nutrients.

It will be used on the potatoes first.  I cannot get barbecue charcoal at the moment because there is none in the shops, however I still have the Takesumi charcoal to experiment with.

While some of the old vegetable varieties are better flavoured there are many that are not and they are not so disease resistant either.

Looking around the allotment site people are using the same varieties year after year because they grow well in our allotment soil  with our north facing aspect.  These varieties are more or less the same as I am growing some of which are F1 hybrids. I think that I will continue to buy F1 seed at the moment.

Finally, I have got into growing particular varieties and want to carry on if I can.
This is why I kept some seed in 2011 and I am going to sow it during next season (2012). Seed saving has been quite successful this year so I am going to continue to collect my own seed.  For this I need non F1 hybrids because only these will breed true.  Maybe this is an argument for selecting heritage seeds. So, there are good reasons for getting both F1 hybrids and heritage seed and I will be using both.

Harvesting

I have been seriously cropping the peas this week.  Overall I have 11.5kg (25 lb) of podded peas, which is about 2.9 kg (6.3lb) per row.  The rows were 3.65metres (12ft) long and for this I should be getting at least 4lb per row.

So not bad. With charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi there is an increase of 2lb a row.  The peas were fertilised only with a top dressing of sieved home made compost and comfrey liquid.  So no bought fertilisers.  That can't be bad.

The harvest of strawberries has finished now.  The last ones I picked were on the 22nd June.  I got about 20.5kg off five rows and this seems eminently satisfactory.

At the moment I am harvesting brocolli, calabrese, raspberries, blackberries, broad beans, peas, courgettes, turnips, lettuce, carrots, beetroot and potatoes.

It is amazing just how much time it takes to harvest the vegetables and fruit.  I need to speed up a little.

I have taken out the summer purple sprouting and the calabrese and these will be replaced by one line of calabrese.  The broad beans have been taken out but new ones have been planted where the garlic has been taken out.  The winter cauliflowers growing under the broad beans need to be earthed up and given some comfrey liquid.

The broad bean tops have been taken off with a pair of secateurs and the roots left in the ground.  The roots are infected with rhizobium bacteria which fixes nitrogen from the air and converts it into ammonia which is a natural fertiliser for plants.  The nitrogen is taken up by the plants - such as broad bean - to make proteins. So to gain this nitrogen we can use the broad bean plant as a green manure.  If the roots are left in the soil they will provide about 30% of the available nitrogen but if the tops are dug in as well they will provide about 60% of the available nitrogen to the soil.

Lots of people leave the roots in the soil but burn the tops.  They are wasting 60% of the natural nitrogen fertiliser.

As there are winter cauliflowers in the way, the tops will not be dug in but put on the compost heap.  They will provide a little nitrogen for the rotting down process.

The peas have been harvested but there are a few left on to fatten up.  When these last few are cropped the plants will be dug into the same ground as they grew on as a green manure.  As with the broad beans, their roots are infected with rhizobium bacteria which has been fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere.  Digging them in will add nitrogen to the soil.

They will be replaced by a late crop of peas.

It could be argued that peas should not be planted where peas have been growing recently but there is little chance that there would be any problems. The peas will be planted with mychorrhizal fungi and inoculated charcoal again.  This will just add to the charcoal already on this bed.

Some of the sweet peas will be layered this weekend.  This involves them being taken off the cane supports and laid down along the ground to go up another cane support.  This will be time consuming too.

Just cropping and weeding the rest of the allotment.

Filling up the allotment.

The problem with this time of year is that you don't know when the last frost will strike.  Last night the allotment had a relatively mild frost, however it affected my potatoes.  They were not cut right back but tonight there might be another frost and this time they will find it very difficult to avoid being affected badly.

There is little I can do because they are quite big now - over 6 inches tall.  Even further earthing up would not help.  I will just have to grin and bear it.

I planted another row of brocolli and that really fills the brassicae bed except for a small area which I might use to put some turnips into.  My daughter wants me to grow an enormous turnip for her F2 reception class. (Four and five year olds) There seems to be a book with a similar title.

I put another row of leeks in and this time I added inoculated charcoal to the planting holes.  I haven't been doing this recently because I had run out of charcoal.  I also added some mychorrhizal fungi.  I was going to leave the leeks exposed to the elements but, after some thought,  I decided to cover them with enviromesh and fleece. I used old cloche wires as supports and buried the edges in the soil.  I had to use this combination because neither was long enough to cover the row.  Now I have run out of things to cover the leeks with so I will just have to take my chances and leave them exposed to the ravages of the leek miner fly.

Now that the allotment is virtually full, there is more time to concentrate on the allotment too far.  There will be some opportunity tomorrow to clear a little more of the jungle.  I need to take my loppers to cut down a damson sapling and the brambles.  I will also try to demolish the corrugated iron compost bins.

I still have not transplanted the celeriac yet and believe it or not I will have to resow my French beans because they have not germinated again.  If at first you don't suck seed, try drier grain.

I am hoping the weather will break tomorrow and we will get a little rain.   It will not stop the frosts by the looks of the forecast but the ground is so dry that some of the plants have stopped growing.

I will take some pictures of the allotment in early May tomorrow.  It is interesting to see how the allotment has changed month by month.  I will also write something about identifying soils and soil profiles.