Early November

Its early November and we have just had the first frost.  It hasn't really cut anything back yet but the foliage on the pumpkin plants have gone black.  Although this time of year I imagine that I am shutting the allotment down, I doubt if there is a day that passes in winter that I don't have something to do and this year it will be to clear allotment 3A.
The new onion bed has been dug over ready for planting.  The garlic will be planted as soon as the bulbs come.   Mammoth onions have been sown in the hot bed and they have germinated already.  They will be pricked out in the next few days into 3 inch pots using a multipurpose compost and left to grow on in the greenhouse.  Sometimes the shallots do well if they are planted in 3 inch pots during the winter.  This will bring them on slightly but is not really necessary because they will survive even if put out now.

Field beans on the old potato bed in October
(And rainbow going into my greenhouse)

The greenhouse has been erected on concrete slabs with the door facing slightly south west.  An automatic window opener has been put on one of the roof windows and another will probably put on the other window too.  The greenhouse needs a good clean because some of the glass was stored on the ground and has been muddied.  The glass will be washed with dilute washing up liquid and the floor will be scrubbed with Jeyes' fluid .  The field beans have been eaten by either mice or rats and there are a lot of gaps, which I am slowly filling up with transplants. Field beans are nitrogen fixers so they will be dug in to increase the nitrogen level in the soil.

Field beans growing in November

This bed has been triple dug and sieved through a 1 inch mesh.  The French and runner beans have been dug into the top soil to add nitrogen .  The subsoil has had shredded woody material mixed into it.  This, in theory, will increase its porosity and water retention.  Chicken manure has been added to the top soil and then a green manure of field beans planted on top.

Green manure on the new sweet pea bed.

The small area where the outdoor tomatoes were has been single dug and sown with tares, clover and rye green manure. Field beans were also planted but the mice have had a field day eating most of them.   I will probably dig some farmyard manure into this area when I have harvested the leeks.  The comfrey is going to die off in the next few weeks so the leaves will be taken off now and added to the comfrey butt by the little shed.  They will rot down and provide comfrey liquid for next spring.  Comfrey is a nutrient accumulator, which means that the leaves will rot down to produce a rich fertiliser.  

Comfrey

The comfrey has been harvested quite hard this year because there is so little of it.  A larger bed will have to be made on allotment 3A when it is cleared.

In order to get a load of farmyard manure, the compost in the bins was emptied, sieved and dug into the top soil on the new allotment.  The material that was sieved out was put into the composting dalek and the large bag.  These sievings will need to be composted for another few months before they are ready to be used on the allotment. The metal drum was being kept to make biochar but  there is a gaping hole rusted in the side, which will make it useless for this job.  It has some nets stored in it at the moment so it is of some use. I may put it in the greenhouse and fill it with woody shreddings as a kind of heater.   Another allotmenteer has offered their biochar burning bins so I will use them instead.  The compost bin pallets were taken apart so that the manure could be stored but the compost bins will be remade when all the manure has been dug in.  

Farmyard manure

I have had two loads of farmyard manure and one load of woody shreddings delivered to the allotment and these are slowly being dug into the soil to add organic matter.  The manure is being dug into the top soil and the shredded woody material is being dug into the subsoil.  I have just listened to, "Gardener's Question Time" where the panelists suggested that woody chippings should not be added to top soil.  They seem to focus especially on it changing the pH of the soil.  The largest factor that influences soil pH is the underlying rock that the soil is made from.  You would have to put a lot of woody shreddings on to change the pH of most soils.  Woody shreddings are high in cellulose and lignin (carbon rich) and low in nitrogen, which means when bacteria and fungi decompose it, it is suggested they rob nitrogen from the soil.  However, this is a slow process and the amount of nitrogen that these organisms need is relatively small and can be easily replaced .  Regardless of this, burying the woody shreddings in the subsoil means that any nitrogen found to help decompose them  will have been leached from the surface and captured by soil decomposers.  Isn't this what we want to happen because this means that the nitrogen can be eventually recycled into the topsoil rather than being lost in ground water.  Finally, lots of people are finding that burying logs in Hugelkultur does not lead to nitrogen robbing of top soil and a change in pH and annual nitrogen hungry crops can be grown in topsoil heaped over the woody material.
The scientific evidence of nitrogen robbing and pH change is very scant and the meager evidence needs careful analysis.  Don't just take my word for it.

http://puyallup.wsu.edu/~Linda%20ChalkerScott/Horticultural%20Myths_files/Myths/Wood%20chips%202007.pdf

All I can say is that it grows big pumpkins...

New sweet pea bed

The pumpkin plants have gone over now and have been dug in.  These two pumpkins are the largest I grew this year and I would expect them to weigh around the 70kg mark.  I needed the barrow to move them. This bed has now been single dug with the addition of farmyard and chicken manure.  A green manure of tares, rye and clover will be sown as soon as possible.  The horse radish in the foreground has been taken out as deep as possible but it will probably return next year.  Most of it is in the trackway path but some has spread into the allotment.  Armoracia rusticana can be very invasive if you do not keep it under control.  There was a little field bindweed Convolvulus arvensis and, although it is not a troublesome weed, the bay and Pyracantha rogersiana were taken out and the roots were inspected before replanting with a little chicken manure.  The Opal plum was summer pruned to a wineglass form and to outward facing buds.  It should form a very good free fruiting tree.    The fruit trees by the big greenhouse have been espaliered to form a barrier between this bed and the new onion bed.  The trees are probably too close together but this will be sorted out when the trees get a little bigger

Grapes

The grape supports have been remade a little better.  The vines are being trained by the Guyot system - hopefully.  There are three grapes, two reds and one white.  They did fruit this year but the grapes were very small.  I think that the red grape is a wine making one so I do not expect the fruit to be very big.
I have nailed bracers on the top of the uprights.  These prevent the uprights leaning in as the wires are tightened.  It means that the wires are quite taught and not sagging.  

New brassica bed.

The new brassica bed has been single dug with the old sweet pea plants buried in the top soil.  Sweet peas are a legume with nitrogen fixing bacteria in root nodules.  This means that digging in the whole plant will add organic nitrogen to the top soil.   A little chicken manure was added and then the area was sown with green manure.  Some of the farmyard manure will probably be dug in later in the year or January or February next year. I am toying with the idea of adding lime to the brassica bed not particularly to alter the pH but to add the nutrient calcium to the soil.

All the bay and the box, Buxus sempervirens, are growing well.  There were no weeds in this area so they have not been replanted.  I have pruned many of the bays to produce standard trees rather than bushes, however their stems are not particularly upright and need staking so they will grow straight.  My main bay tree with the ball head died back during last winter, however it has regenerated from the roots producing several suckers.  I will select the strongest growing one to train to a standard tree.  This is why I never take any plant out for at least a year.  They may well regenerate when you least expect it.  The sage edging has been cut back fairly severely to promote bushiness but they will be allowed to flower next year because they produce a very herby sent which I like.  

More of the pumpkins

  

I think that I may have overdone the pumpkins this year.  I am fairly sure that I will not be able to process all of these even with the best of wills.  Still, they are good to show off and people from all over the allotment site have come to look at them.  A bit of a tourist attraction.

Sieve digging the soil on 3A

The bread tray sieve is beginning to suffer from wear and tear so I have had to strengthen it with the concrete reinforcing wire and additional mesh.  The pumpkins are doing a good job holding the soil back from the path.

As the water has been turned off and I have so many plants in green houses and frames, I need to collect as much rain water as possible  So the little greenhouse has both the blue and the green water butts although they will probably be used on the big shed and big greenhouse when I eventually get around to setting these up.

This area of the new allotment had a great deal of mare's tail and bind weed so had to be triple dug.  Even though I had sieved dug earlier in the year, I am still finding mare's tail rhizomes deep in the subsoil.  

First spit being taken out.  

As the top soil is being sieved, chicken manure is added and mixed in.  The subsoil will then be taken out and the bottom of the trench will be well forked over.  About six inches of woody shredded material will be added to the bottom of the trench together with hedge prunings and covered with subsoil.  Farmyard manure will be spread on top of the subsoil before the top soil will be raked back into the trench.  

Sieving is the best way to remove perennial weed rhizomes and add lots of organic matter to the soil. Although this soil had not been cropped for about two or three years, it was very thin and poor.  I don't think that any organic matter had been added for a number of years.  As so much weed had to be composted because it was invasive perennial, this could not be dug into the soil for additional organic matter.   Additional top soil from the paths is also being added after sieving to increase the depth of top soil.  

If this does not produce some good crops, I  will be very disappointed.  

Concrete reinforcing wire

The next area to be dug over is covered in an old shed and concrete reinforcing wire.  The shed is not really worth keeping so will be used to make biochar later in the winter.  There is a lot of rotten wood which would normally be buried in the digging trenches, however this will be kept for biochar too.  

   The reinforcing wire will be buried in the paths when I remove the top soil to put on the allotment beds.  It will be covered by the sieved stones and topped with subsoil from the bottom of the digging trenches.  (The subsoil is easily replaced by the shredded woody material and top soil from the paths.)  I bury any rubbish I find on the allotment under the paths so that I don't need quite so much subsoil to fill the holes left by removing topsoil.  Subsoil is heavy particularly when wet.  

The reinforcing wire was used to dry out the mare's tail, couch grass and bindweed earlier in the year.  These weeds were also covered with a tarpaulin.  This material will be sieved and any rhizomes that look like they are still alive will be further composted and the rest will be buried deep in the digging trenches.   

More area to be triple dug

I will work backwards across the allotment until I reach the pathway.  The topsoil on the path will be put onto the allotment and the hole filled with subsoil and stones - some of which you can see under the blue stone tub.  There are three tubs being used while I am digging.  One for stones, one for perennial rhizomes and one for rubbish.  I always have a tub with me whatever I am doing on the allotment.

Hot beds in the little greenhouse.

I have noticed that the piles of shredded woody material we have on the allotment get very hot due to decomposition.  In the past oak bark, a waste material of the tanning industry, was used to make hot beds. The Victorians called it tan.   I thought that maybe I could use the woody shredded material to make hot beds in the little greenhouse. The beds go down about two feet and should really be built up about another foot.  However, they seem to be working and warming up the greenhouse.  I have put a hot bed on both sides of the greenhouse.  

Various cuttings and potted up plants.  

The middle of the greenhouse has about two foot of really good sieved top soil and will be planted with a peach later in the winter.  

Unfortunately, with all this excavation and the decomposition of the shredded material, the back of the greenhouse has subsided a little and I will have to do a little remedial work before the peach can be planted permanently.

Brassicas 

I still have winter cauliflowers, Brussel sprouts, kohlrabi and swedes on the old brassica bed, and these will be used during the winter.  The other half of this bed has been single dug with added chicken manure and covered broadcast with winter green manure.  The whole bed will probably be manured later in the year when the brassicas have been harvested.  Next season this will be planted with peas and beans.

Dug over part of the brassica bed.

In september the pea and bean bed was dug over and a green manure sown.  The pumpkin decided to grow over it and weeds grew between the rows of green manure.

A little overgrown

Added to this both the peas and the broad beans began to grow from seed fallen when being harvested. So it looks a bit of a mess.  However, this is all good organic matter that will be easy to dig in particularly as the pumpkin has died off now.  This is not the mess...

Mess

This is the mess.  It is allotment 3A and to my knowledge it has not been cultivated for over two years. Under the carpet is a mat of mare's tail and bindweed.  I want to keep the red currants, black currants, raspberries and gooseberries, however I will have to take them out and wash their roots before I can be sure they are free of perennial weeds.  All this soil will have to be sieved and triple dug to get rid of the perennial weeds. It is my winter project and potatoes will be planted here next spring.

Needless to say, the carpet and the blue plastic will be buried in the path by the big shed.  I will reiterate; blue plastic is translucent and allows light to pass through it.  It will not kill off plants; it will probably protect them a little.

Roots

I still have a lot of roots left for the winter.  Salsify, carrots, parsnips, beetroot and Hamburg parsley will all survive in the ground for some of the winter.  There is also some celery in the background which will be used in soups during the winter.  This will be where the potatoes are going next year so the bed will be triple sieve dug with woody shreddings added to the subsoil, and farmyard and chicken manure added to the top soil.

The raspberries on this side of the path have not done very well so I will take them out and change the soil and replant them after manuring the ground.  The raspberries from allotment 3A will be planted here as well. I should then get raspberries from about the middle of June to the end of October if I am lucky.  I don't know what name the raspberries are on allotment 3A go by but they are autumn ones.  I have Glen Ample and Malin's Admiral already planted and growing well on the other side of the path.  These crop in the summer.

Blackcurrants.

I have dug over the soft fruit bed and mulched all the plants with a good dose of manure. This time of the year they get quite shaded in the afternoon but they are in full sun most of the summer.

Cold frame.  

Plants in the cold frame

I have redone the cold frame because it was slowly subsiding into the hot bed.  I had dug out a deep hole and filled it with woody shreddings to make a hot bed.  This was working really well but as the woody material was decomposing and making heat, the surface was sinking.  I have boarded round the frame, then filled the boards with shreddings and put the frame on top.  This has raised the frame about a foot higher than the photograph.  This just gave more shreddings to heat up.  There is a constant air temperature of about 20 degrees celsius and the shreddings themselves warm up a lot more than this.  I have to keep the lights raised when it is sunny because it gets too hot in there.

The large greenhouse.

I have washed the majority of the pots although I am still finding ones that I have missed.  The small shed is full of trays and large pots so this is the only place I can store the small ones.  Really, I need to empty this plastic greenhouse and use it to protect the delicate plants.  This will be done later.

M9 rootstock potted up for grafting.

I have two M9 and 10 M26 rootstocks to graft this year.  I just need to go around the allotment site cadging sions from everybody.  I can get some from the Egremont Russet but I want to get some different ones.  I will use these apples to train to espalier or stepovers around the edges of the allotment.

Daphne

I have planted some daphne in large pots to propagate from.  When they are big enough, I will take cuttings or layer them.

Pond

The pond has done very well this year and produced quite a few frogs.  It needs a clean out and a fountain put in.  I will get the water to come out of the watering can rose.

So the winter project is to get allotment 3A into shape before the spring and to graft 12 new apple trees. Not impossible with a little clement weather.  

Seed order has arrived.

All the seeds that I ordered in October have come now.  I have sorted through them and put them into groups according to the rotation beds.

I did order some garlic and shallots (I didn't think that I had)  so I have quite a few of those to put in.  Ed gave me quite a few and I bought some because I thought that I had not ordered any.  The ones that I have left over will be planted on the new allotment.  As most of the old allotment is covered in tares and grazing rye green manure, I don't really have the room to put the garlic in so I have potted them up in some of the old potting compost.   The elephant garlic that Mick gave me together with the large ones I got from Ed are making some good root growth but not produced any tops as yet. Some of the small garlic have produced both tops and roots.  The potted garlic will be planted out on the old allotment but I am not sure when.  I will put them outside preferably in the cold frame until there is some space to put them in.

The new allotment has quite a few plants in pots ready to be planted.  There are about ten small bay trees, eight asparagus plants; a rhubarb plant; a vine that Ed gave me; two apple trees that were really cheap at the garden center; and several herbs.  I will  plant these over the winter putting some mychorrhizal fungi in the planting holes each time one is dug.  There is room now but I am not sure where to plant things at the moment and it would irritate me no end if  I planted one of the perennials only for it to have to be moved later in the year.  I will  probably use the asparagus to divide two of the beds and I could use the bay trees to do the same.

I might sow some of the giant cabbage, leeks and mammoth onions.  I doubt that I will get really big ones but I would like to try.  The sweet peas should have been sown during October and it is a bit late to start planting now.  I will leave the sweet peas until the early spring now.  They will flower a little later but I am happy with that.

The new summer fruiting raspberry canes have arrived too and I have put these in a large pot and covered the roots with the old potting compost to keep them  damp until I have the time to plant. The autumn fruiting raspberries will be taken out and put onto the new allotment.  They do not grow too big - about one and a half metres - so will not need any supports constructed.  I will put these at the north end of the allotment along the pathway.

The summer fruiting raspberries will be planted where the autumn fruiting ones have been taken out of the old allotment.  There is some suggestion that this is not a good strategy and new plants will not do very well.  This seems to be a similar thing to rose sickness.  I think that I will replace the soil with new from another area of the allotment and use mychorrhizal fungi to help to ameliorate the sickness.  I will also use some sequestrene in order to add some micro-nutrients.

Digging over the new allotment is coming along quite well.  I am bastard trenching  the whole allotment sieving the soil through my trusty bread tray while I  am doing it.

There are three different types of digging.  Single digging, double digging and bastard digging.  Single digging is more than adequate in most situations but sometimes a more serious technique needs to be used.

• Single digging is where the soil is turned over usually with a spade to one spit deep incorporating well rotted organic matter.  Annual weeds and green manure can be turned in as well.  When done well the surface weeds can be cut off with the spade and put at the bottom of the trench.   
• Double digging is where the top soil is taken out and a trench one spit deep is made.  The bottom of the trench is forked over, with added organic matter,  one spit deep but the soil is not taken out.  I usually add skimmed off annual weed turfs to the bottom of the trench.  This is why I call it skim digging.  If the ground adjacent to the trench has been skimmed then the ground is clear when you are digging.  A wider area of ground can be skimmed and put into the trench so that the surface weeds do not need to be cut off with the spade and get in the way when you are trying to fork the bottom of the trench.  Perennial weeds would probably be able to grow at this depth so it is best to remove them.  
• Bastard trenching is a bastard to do.  Now you can do this by continuous trenching, working, backwards, but I find that this creates a vast hole and is quite hard to control. So I remove the top soil of the trench to a depth of one spit, sieving it and adding well rotted organic matter.  That goes on the dug side of the trench.  Next I remove one spit of subsoil and put that on the undug side of the trench on ground that has been skimmed of weeds.  The bottom of the trench is forked over to one spit depth but the soil is not removed.  This will mean that the soil is dug three spits deep.  I then search around for any organic matter I can lay my hands on.  Rotting wood, shreddings, hedge trimmings, perennial weeds (except for bindweed and horse tail), prunings, leaves, grass mowings, in fact anything that was once living can go at the bottom of the trench.  Today I was using perennial weeds from the track way covered with  shredded hedge clippings.  The subsoil is sieved back into the trench with well rotted organic matter being added at the same time.  The top soil is then replaced and, just to make sure, this is sieved back into the trench too.  

You don't have to triple dig.  For many people single digging is too much and they can garden just as well using mulches and the minimum of forking over. Triple digging is not necessary for most allotments and gardens but I have several reasons why I am doing this now.

1. I like digging holes.  One of the reasons why I like gardening is for the exercise and fresh air that it gives me.  
2. I am triple digging a new allotment and this will give me a good idea of  the top soil and the subsoil  structure and texture.  Luckily, at the moment there is no indication of hard pan or consolidated soil except where the pathways went.  
3. The new allotment has a lot of organic debris that can be buried such as old compost heaps that are more weeds than compost; overgrown hedge branches that need to be cut back, rotting wood, perennial  weeds, tree branches and trunks.  All these can and are being put at the bottom of a bastard trench.  
4. I am also putting hedge and tree shreddings into the trench.  I have a large pile of shreddings and it is steaming away during these cold months.  This is an indication that it is producing heat from micro organisms breaking down the organic matter into plant nutrients.  Putting a good layer of shreddings at the bottom of the trench will produce heat, albeit not as well as when it is heaped on the topsoil, and this will keep the soil warm for planting next spring.  Or that's the theory anyway.  
5. I will have a large sponge of organic matter that will regulate the drainage over the allotment allowing water to run away when in excess but retaining water during drought times. 
6. The allotment is infested with both Calystegia sepium (bind weed)  and Equisetum arvense mares tail and triple digging will help to remove them at least from the top 60 cm of soil.  This is another reason for sieving the soil.  

I still have a lot to do and triple digging is not a speedy way to clear a weed infested allotment, however it is a fairly effective method of removing pernicious weeds.  I am not foolish enough to expect the soil to be clear of all the bind weed and mare's tail but I will certainly have given it a bang on the head.  I am an advocate of slow gardening and would rather have a good well mixed homogeneous  top soil that has taken some time to produce than a quick fix heterogeneous top soil with layers that are more or less fertile.  

Digging the allotment in this way will take me most of the winter and possibly beyond, however there is no point in complaining.  I might as well just get on with it.  It will be finished when it is finished.  

November digging the new potato bed.

I have put all the comfrey, sweet cicely and the nettles in the bins and they are not very likely to produce any more tops until next year.  The comfrey bins are nearly full of comfrey liquid and I am going to run out of bins to put it into soon.  I will put some on the leeks to see if I can get them to grow a little quicker but this is the only place that I think that it can be used at the moment.

I am triple digging the old strawberry bed at the moment. This is the replacement soil that the council put onto the allotment because the other soil was contaminated by some foul chemical.  They only did the bottom area of the allotment but the soil was, and still is, not very good.  It is mainly a sandy clay with the emphasis on the clay part.  However, this is not the most irritating thing about this new soil.  It is also full of boulders  and stones.  So, while it is being triple dug, it is also being sieved.

I am using Fred's old bread basket to sieve with because it is ideal for sieving out boulders.  I can easily dig down one spit because the top soil is fairly open and friable.  However, the subsoil is just like rock and a fork is needed to penetrate the concrete like soil.  This is not like the soil on the rest of the allotment.  I can go down about a metre on the rest of the allotment and even then the soil is fairly open and friable.

So, the soil is being sieved into the wheel barrow and at the same time horse muck is being added and sieved with it.  An amazing amount of stone is being taken out and it could lead to a lowering of soil level.  I have decided to replace the stones with turfs from the bins by the entrance gates.  It is more soil than turfs but this is of no consequence because I need some top soil to improve this concrete,granite like soil.  The remains of the home made compost is being put at the bottom of the trench with the old strawberries and this is covered with the turfs and then the sieved subsoil goes on next with the sieved top soil going on top.

I have to be careful when I am sieving not to sieve out large pieces of inoculated charcoal.  The bits that I am finding in the bread basket sieve are taken out and crushed with a bull hammer so that I can mix it in with the sieved soil easily.  I am also using the bull hammer to crush some of the stone.

My theory is that a lot of soil nutrients come from the bed rock through weathering.  Although turning over the soil is a kind of weathering and will lead to some breakdown of stones and pebbles, if I crush stone with the bull hammer maybe this will help to add some nutrients to the soil as well.   If it doesn't then I haven't wasted my time because the crushed stone is mixed in with the sieved soil and this will help keep the soil open and easily drained.  I might use some of the stone that I have removed and put by the car park to crush and put back on the soil.

I will apologise now for the overuse of Latin names but I am doing the Royal Horticultural Society's level 2 course and I need to learn a load of Latin names of plants.  So whenever I am writing about the plants I will use the Latin names.

Looked at the Lathyrus odoratus (sweet peas) and some of them are germinating already.  It just goes to show that chipping or sanding the seed is not necessary. I think that this myth is perpetuated by people that do not grow Lathyrus odoratus  and have never tried to germinate the seed.

The Ribes grossularia 'Xenia'  (Gooseberry) and the Rubus fruticosus (blackberry - not sure of the cultivar at the moment) cuttings seem to be established and growing on.  The Rheum rhaponticum 'Timperley Early' has started to throw out leaves already.  I am not sure that this is what I want it to do at the moment.  I know it is an early cultivar but not this early.

The winter flowering Cyclamen persicum spp. have just regrown their leaves and are nearly ready to go back into the house for a Christmas display.

Early digging.

I am digging quite seriously at the moment.  I am going down about four spits and burying a mixture of not very decomposed compost; lawn mowings; laurel Prunus laurocerasus shreddings; damson and oak tree branches and weeds.  I am not putting this mixture into the soil to increase the fertility but to improve the drainage while giving the ground a sponge to soak up excess water. In the summer when the ground gets a little dry it may release water into the soil by diffusion allowing plants to access it.    

Since the allotment has now got onion white rot and club root where I put the compost from the giant compost heap, I am more than reluctant to have any weeds or compost except my own.  However, Beryl's allotment had a lot of weeds that needed dealing with so I decided to bury them on my own allotment.  I buried them deep though.

There is a lot of hearsay evidence on the internet that Hugelkultur produces good results when brushwood is added to the soil.  I like to bury high carbon organic matter quite deep in the soil.

About two years ago, I buried big x Cupressocyparis leylandii branches deep in the soil and reported that I could no longer find them.  However, this week I have found some of them when digging in the compost.  They are deeper down than I remember and are being decomposed by fungi growing on them even at this depth.

I put quite a lot of inoculated charcoal into this bed for the potatoes and I had to be very careful to keep the various parts of the soil separate to maintain the charcoal in the top layer.  

Lots of old woody compost was mixed into the second spit soil.  Some quite large branches were being dug up and they looked unsuitable for mixing into the top soil.  However, after examining them closely they could be crumbled into quite fine material that mixed into the soil well.

I have dug over about a quarter of the bed at the moment and I have already started to run out of material to bury.  I think that I will be lopping off some more branches from the hedge soon.


I hope to plant this area with leaves (chard, rocket, American land cress and lamb's lettuce) together with green manures.  The green manures I will be using are crimson clover Trifolium incarnatum, grazing rye Secale cereale and winter tares Vicia sativa leucosperma.  These green manures will be dug in in the spring.  Only grazing rye will not be a nitrogen fixing plant so I am hoping that digging them in will provide the soil with additional nitrogen.  

I am going to sow the green manures in rows rather than broadcast.  I have grown green manures like Caliante mustard Brassicae juncea by broadcast sowing in the past and this has been quite successful.  Until the green manure has developed a canopy over the ground there is a risk of weeds being able to germinate.  They may well be shaded out by mustard but it is best that there is some easy way of weeding.  With this in mind, I am growing in rows to facilitate hoeing.  Also, I get as good a ground cover in rows as I do broadcast sowing.  There are several reasons for wanting a good ground cover.  Green manure will prevent winter rains leaching out nutrients from the top soil.  It provides a good habitat for micro and macro organisms.  It also provides an effective store of nutrients that can be dug into the soil during the spring.  

Triple digging

I am triple digging the allotment. I have some brushwood to get rid of so I am digging a trench about three spits down and putting the hedge and tree cuttings in then covering them up again with the soil.

There are several reasons for doing this. The alternative is burning and I do not like to burn good nutrients and send them up into the atmosphere to pollute someone else's land. Taking the brushwood to the council tip means either it will be burnt or composted. Why should they have the benefits of my brushwood?

Putting the brushwood deep into the soil helps to drain the soil and keep it open. It will also raise the level of the soil and this will help with soil drainage. Nutrients locked within it will slowly be broken down and returned to the soil. Brushwood forms very good compost when it eventually breaks down. I am using a lot of mychorrhizal fungi throughout the allotment and I would like to think that they could exploit this brushwood both aiding in its breakdown and delivering the resultant nutrients to plant roots.

Before adding the brushwood, I put a layer of lawn grass mowings in to give the microbes a boost. Lawn mowings have relatively more nitrogen in them than the brushwood does. Another layer of lawn mowings goes on top of the brushwood to make a sandwich.

This has raised the level of the soil about 30 cm. and judging from last year’s triple digging the level of the soil continues to be elevated well into the second year.

Not only does the trench help to bury large amounts of brushwood, it also helps me to clear off a lot of the weeds and vegetables that have gone over. I have buried the old peas and some of the lettuce that has gone to seed. I will be also adding the chard that has gone to seed as well.

I still need to get some horse muck though Tone.