Winter weather getting colder closing down the allotment..

I was the only idiot down the allotment today.  It was very cold.  I went up to finish off digging in the manure into the sweet pea bed.  The soil here is very good now but it needs levelling out .  I have still to put up the supporting posts for the sweet pea canes but this can be done later.  I am going to put cross pieces on the posts so that the canes can be attached vertically rather than sloped.  After some thought, it is better to keep the tops of the plants away from each other because they just grow into each other and this encourages pests and diseases.  Also it is more difficult to take off the side shoots and and tendrils.

There is some thought that you should dig over roughly and leave the weather to break down the clods of soil. Well, I religiously did this year after year until I suddenly realised that the weather was not having any effect on the soil and the person who broke up the clods of soil was me.

If I am going to have to break up the soil, I might as well do it while I am digging rather than later on in the early spring.  So I have broken up the soil with a fork and raked it over to make it fairly level and presentable.  It will have to be done again in the spring but it will not take a lot of time to go over it once or twice more with the rake.

There is a bit of horse manure left on the sweet pea bed band I am going to dig this in where the celery is going to go.  I am going to take out a trench and sieve in horse and pigeon muck. I will plant the celery at the bottom of the trench and keep the trench as damp as I can during the spring and summer.  With any luck I will get some good celery plants.

Rather than start on the top allotment, I decided to go down and tidy the comfrey bed.  I wanted to plant some autumn fruiting raspberries here so I decided to do this too.  It was not the best time to transplant the raspberries because the temperature was about 2^oC.  However, it was either plant now or throw the plants away.  The raspberries were planted with a good dose of mychorrhizal fungi but nothing else.  Although it was very cold, the wind was drying the roots out and I wanted them covered as soon as possible.  


I didn't water them in because the soil was very wet verging on waterlogged.  


Along the side of the comfrey bed I am planting a small 150mm hedge of Locinera nitidia one of the shrubby honey suckles.  I am putting some mychorrhizal fungi on these plants' roots as well.  The theory is that these mychorrhiza will form associations with the Locinera nitidia  and grow out to the comfrey making associations with them as well.  The hyphae will then forage for nutrients from the surrounding soil passing some of them to the comfrey.  As this part of the allotment is at the bottom of the hill, all the nutrients leeching out of the other allotments will pass through this part of my allotment and the fungi will be able to tap into this.  My comfrey will potentially be fed by all the nutrients that other people are putting on their allotments.  Thus  I will get comfrey liquid fertiliser fortified by other allotment holders.  I doubt very much if this will happen but I like to think that it will.   


I then when to straightening the lines of comfrey plants which was quite difficult because they have died right back and I could not find them.  Eventually I found some of the roots and put them in the line.  Any that come up in the wrong place later in the spring will be moved onto the correct line.  


I just threw in the original lines of comfrey so they were all over the place.  The new lines of comfrey just followed the old ones.  They were fairly straight but going a little diagonally across the bed and this was annoying me.  Now they are straight and parallel to the new potato bed.

I have mulched the Vitis vinifera with some of the stones that I took out of the soil.  I have chosen stones that are smooth and about the size of my fist.  It looks just like Ground Force.

A black dustbin has been put over one of the Victoria rhubarb plants.  I have put some horse muck around the bin to warm up the soil around the plant.  I will do the same for as many of the other rhubarb plants as I can.  With any luck I will have some forced rhubarb for the early spring.    The rhubarb is not showing yet.  It really needed this cold snap to prod it into growth.  Unless February is particularly cold, I will expect to see some buds developing fairly soon.

I have ordered the Nemaslug nematodes and they will probably be coming in March.  I will have enough nematodes to cover the whole of the top beds.  I am hoping that they will reduce the population of slugs and snails enough so that I can get some fairly large plants this year.  You can tell where they are at the moment because they are eating the green manure.  All around the edge of the allotment the green manures are stunted and eaten back.  When the beer runs out, I am going to try the sugar water and yeast trap to find out if it is better than beer.

JBA potatoes has just sent an email saying that the seed potatoes will be delayed a little due to the frosts and cold weather.  I am not worried at all because keeping them alive during cold spells like this is quite difficult. I would rather have them later and be able to put them out into the cold greenhouse to chit.

The celery and the tomatoes are growing on now but they are a little drawn.  I will plant them quite deep in three inch pots and see if they develop a little more robustly.  Regardless of the weather, I will still carry on planting seeds through February.

The weather is getting decidedly colder and little can be done when the ground is frozen.  I think that I will be shutting the allotment down for the next week or so.  In other words, I will be keeping in the warm until the weather decides to get a little warmer.

I have been sieving this soil for over two months!

I was wondering today when I began to sieve the potato bed soil.  Looking back at the blogs, it seems as though I started in November. It is now January and I still haven't finished.  I have tried several different ways to speed up but if I want to mix in the horse manure and pigeon muck then I will have to stick to the technique that it am using now.  I put the bread tray onto the wheel barrow; fill it with soil; add  the manure and then push the  soil backwards and forwards with a spade until it all falls through the holes unless it is a stone larger than about 1 inch in diameter.  The stones are then put into a bucket and finally put onto the stone heap by the car park.

I am not joking when I say that I am thoroughly fed up of doing it now.  However, I will continue because there  is not much left to do.

It  means that the soil has been sieved to a depth of about 600mm and that manure has been mixed throughout this profile.  Whether that makes a jot of difference remains to be seen but it is worth doing just to see if it does produce better potatoes.  I would not recommend anyone doing this because it is time consuming and could be completely pointless.

I have a rat on the allotment and I have to decide what to do about it.  I don't think that it is living on my allotment although there are some holes and runs around the compost heaps.  I was going to take down the compost heaps and redo them so this might help it get the message that I don't want it on the allotment. If disturbing it does not deter it I may have to take sterner action.

There are two ferocious cats on the allotment and I heard one of them having an altercation with the rat but it escaped because I saw it in the compost heaps later.

I dug up all the remaining parsnips because they were in the way of the digging.  They were piled up and covered in soil to keep them fresh.  Some of them were quite big and shows you how important it is to thin them out when they are young.  Even though I was quite ruthless and thinned them to about 150 mm apart, I still have too many and will find it difficult to get through all of them.  This season I will thin to about 300 mm and see if I can get even bigger ones.

The rocket and the American land cress have grown remarkably well during the winter and I am continuing to harvest them.  This is probably due to the warm winter we are having.  I have put the cloches over the American land cress to see if it will encourage growth.  The leaves are a little small at the moment.  I am coming to the end of the carrots and they have had a really good season last year. I just hope that they do as well in the new season.  Thinning is important when growing carrots as well as parsnips.

Getting fed up of sieving the potato bed soil.

  I got a bit fed up of sieving the soil today.  I am mixing in some new horse manure and the pigeon muck as well as sieving out the stones.  The ground has become very wet over the last few days and this means that the soil is a little more reluctant to go through the holes in the bread tray sieve.

It is really time consuming and I am wondering whether to give it up for a while and continue to remove the rest of the stones next autumn.

Sieving is good exercise and produces a very friable soil.  The ground is free of cropping vegetables - the beetroot and the carrots are clamped and the parsnips soon will be.  So, I might as well sieve the soil  now and get it over and done with.

The number of stones that are in this soil is remarkable.  It was replacement soil for contaminated soil that was on my allotment and several others. The new soil was supposed to be top quality organic soil.  I am not sure whether it was organic because it was clay, full of stone and empty of both nutrients and body.  When a soil has no obvious organic matter or small creatures you start to wonder if this soil was treated with chemical fertilisers.  These chemicals will kill off things like worms because there is no organic matter in the soil for them to feed on.

This new soil has reacted really well to the addition of copious amounts of  compost, manure and cultivation.  The soil is finally becoming workable.  I am hoping that cultivating the potatoes will help to break it up  and work in the organic matter a little more.

I took the top off a 210 litre blue plastic butt to make a water barrel.  We have had a lot of rain recently and I am missing collecting it.  The down spout was reinstated - it had fallen off in the wind. I am going to duck tape it to the guttering to secure it and then put a small screw through it.  The down spout is tied in securely with wire.

There were quite a few slugs in my beer traps a few days ago.  I emptied them  into the comfrey butt and replaced the beer.  I looked today but there were no new slugs in the beer.   I am happy about the beer traps being effective.

I put some horse muck on the new sweet pea bed and if I have any left over from the potato bed I will use the left overs on the sweet peas.

Finished digging the new potato bed

I haven't really finished digging because I haven't dug the area where the roots are.  I will dig this new area quite deeply like I did on the other half of the bed and remove all the stone using the bread tray sieve.  I think that I have done this fairly well in the area I have dug already.

I have removed considerable amounts of stone.  This has been replaced by topsoil, horse manure and pigeon manure.  All the soil and manures went through the makeshift bread tray sieve because it helps to mix them together.

The new topsoil has come from turfs left in the bins by the allotment gate.  I sieved out the topsoil using the bread tray sieve.  The grass was put at the bottom of the double digging trenches.

One of the advantages of digging is that it mixes well and manures get distributed throughout the soil profile.

If you look at the horticultural textbooks, it tells you that some nutrients come from the weathering of rocks.  I considered this carefully.  Stones come from rock.  I am removing lots of stones from this soil.  Maybe if I weather these stones by hitting them with the bull hammer and return the dust to the soil, this would add nutrients to the soil.

There may be few nutrients in quartz and sandstone but I still give them a tap with the bull hammer.  Plants do not need a great deal of micro nutrient from the soil so the little that I get from stone might be sufficient.

As I was sieving out the stone from the soil, I also sieved out large pieces of inoculated charcoal that I had used in planting holes.  I don't think that the larger pieces of charcoal are doing very good jobs so I am hitting them with a bull hammer to crush these too.  It is all getting mixed into the topsoil through the sieve.

When using a no dig system of gardening, nutrients are put on the top of the soil in the form of compost and worms are used to distribute this throughout the soil profile.

Although digging seems to kill a few worms, there are still a great many worms to do a similar job when the soil is dug.  Also there is nothing stopping me from putting a layer of compost or manure over the dug bed.  In other words you can go up adding compost to the soil surface or you can go down adding compost or manure to the subsoil.  Or you can do both.  I would rather do both.

Digging might destroy mychorrhizal symbiotic associations and this is one of the few disadvantages to digging. However, this will occur when crop plants are harvested anyway and new associations can be promoted using  commercial mychorrhiza spores.  The subsoil in this bed was so hard that I could not get a spade into it.  I had to use a fork.  Although there were a few resourceful worms that had worked their way into it there was little evidence that many other organisms were making it their home.  When I was sieving this subsoil I was mixing in topsoil from the turfs, horse manure and pigeon manure and this gave it a very friable texture.  Introducing carbon (organic matter) throughout the soil profile should mean that there is a source of food for a wide range of soil organism.  This should increase the soil micro organism population and diversity.

There are times when there is no need to dig so I don't dig.  However, passing the soil through the makeshift sieve has produced a really fine tilth and this makes all gardening jobs much easier.  I will have to earth up the potatoes next spring and summer and having this really fine tilth soil will make it much easier.

I raked over the soil after finishing digging and it was a delight because it was so easy.

Put some xCupressocyparis leylandii shreddings on the pathway between 25(b) and 26(a) and I am going to plant a little hedge of Lonicera nitida, which is a honeysuckle would you believe, along the path.  Lonicera nitida doesn't have a honeysuckle sent though.

Do potatoes need a concentrated NPK fertiliser?

I have to keep reminding myself of this: N - Nitrogen: promotes the growth of leaves and vegetation P - Phosphorous: promotes root growth K - Potassium: promotes flower and fruit growth I know that the biochemistry is much more complicated than this but this is good enough for me. The Marshalls's potato fertiliser is N:P:K 15:21:24.5 which is massive and I don't know why potatoes would need so much potassium. Whatever, I use comfrey for potatoes and this has a higher ratio of potassium, but nothing like the Marshalls's fertiliser. Comfrey's percentage NPK is 0.74:0.24:1.19 nowhere near the Marshalls's fertiliser. Relative to the amount of carbon dioxide and water that the plants need to produce sugars, the amounts of N:P:K that they require is tiny. I would question the necessity for such high ratios. It is remarkable how the amounts of these elements in plants mimic the amounts in the soil. There is some evidence that excessive nitrogen in food is not a good thing. I like to put quite a lot of animal manure on the potatoes and this year it was mixed in well with tree leaves. Apart from this, I am sticking to home made compost, comfrey tea and nettle tea to fertilise my veg. Have a look at what my potatoes are like now in May with only comfrey, horse manure and leaves added to the soil.  Kestrel potatoes at the end of May Kestrel potatoes in June

There is still some weather to come.

It was very cold down the allotment today.  My feet were fine to begin with but my hands were really cold even with gloves.  

I started digging in the manure on the new potato bed.  I took out the primula plants next to the shed and moved them up onto where the brassicas are going to be this year.  It keeps the primula out of the way and they will not be over shadowed there.  

I dug back until I reached two retaining slabs that were leaning over.  I wanted to straighten them up and make them more horizontal.  This meant digging down a little more than 2 feet below the surface of the soil, digging out some soil under the path and then replacing them.  Just like that.  It took me about two hours.  

By this time my hands were as warm new made bread, however my feet ...

As my daughter had requested my presence, I decided to collect up the vegetables that I was going to take home and go.  I had lifted the beetroot yesterday with the parsnips and the last of the carrots.  So I just had to scoop them into a bag. After this I went up to the Brussel sprouts and picked quite a few.  There are a good few left on the plants even after picking.  Tomorrow, I will be washing all the vegetables and considering what to do with them. 

Two very large pumpkins I was storing in the allotment shed have succumbed to the frost and started to rot. I could not leave them there to get mushy so I scooped them up with a spade and put some into the worm bin and the rest into the charcoal bin.  I don’t want to waste anything.  When I was tidying up the brassicas and the carrots I got a lot of waste material.  Now I could just dig this in but this might introduce club root and carrot root fly to new areas of the allotment.  What I would usually do is take the waste home and put it into the big green council bin.

Well, do I need to give away my nutrients quite so easily?  I am going to keep the waste leaves and roots and put them into the worm bin when there is room.  The worms are not very active at the moment but they will soon finish off the waste material when I put it in.  I don’t think that the brassicas or the carrots were diseased but you need to keep a tidy allotment.  As Percy Thrower used to say: a tidy garden is a good garden. 

Chilly December

I have just returned from holiday in Malta and Greece to a very cold England. The ground has been frozen for about two or three weeks now and little can be done in the allotment.

I went to the allotment yesterday with the intention of moving some of the black current bushes. Althought the top couple of centimetres were not frozen, below this was a thick layer of frost. Not the kind of ground to start planting into. The black currents will probably have to be moved in the spring if this weather continues.

Remarkably, I was able to get out some of the parsnips. They were excellent and shows you why thinning out is very important if you want big roots. I also got some carrots. I think that the ground was not so frozen here because of the horse muck I had put close to them.

Beetroot are very small but I harvested them in any case.

I took off some of the Brussel sprouts and I will prepare them today by peeling off the outer leaves. There are some plants that are producing large buds and some that are only producing small ones. I cannot remember the varieties that I planted so I will not be able to ensure I have large buds next year.

They did not burn down my shed on bonfire night which I am very greatful for. The committee put the bonfire closer to Tony's allotment and quite far away from my shed.

Someone however put a load of fireworks on my allotment right where I had planted broad beans. I am not happy. These are the fireworks you stick into the ground. Needless to say I will be asking the committee why they pick on my allotment to do these things without any consultation with me.