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.

Sowing seeds at the beginning of the season.

   The season has begun and seed must be sown.  I am growing big onions and leeks this year and they need a very long growing season.  They will be sown tomorrow and so to will some of the tomato seeds.

I am not sure yet whether I will sow the seed in the sectioned seed trays or just in a pan.  I can put the pan next to the hot water tank inside the house to germinate the seeds.  Onion seeds can germinate at 0^oC so I will put them in a tray and keep them in a warm room.   The tomatoes will be put into a pan and left next to the hot water tank because they will need extra heat.   I will be using the New Horizons peat free compost and putting the trays or pans into clear plastic bags.  The seeds will germinate in any plastic bag if they are removed when the seeds have germinated.  White plastic bags let a lot of light through and these can be left on for a little while.

When the onions and leeks have germinated, I will put them out in the cold greenhouse  and when they get to a reasonable size pot them up into 3 inch pots.  I will try to put them out around March time and cover them with enviromesh to keep the onion miner fly Phytomyza gymnostoma off them.  It will be particularly prevalent in late March and early April so I will have to cover from the time I plant out until early July.

I am going to try to get some very big onions and leeks this year.

I may plant the oca in pots as well because this is another vegetable that needs a very long growing season.  I only got little tubers last season and I would really like to get some reasonable sized ones this season.

Sieved some more soil on the potato bed and mixed in the horse and pigeon manure.  Really, it was too wet to dig and the ground was getting a little too compacted and muddy.  This is when compaction could cause problems.  I am not too concerned because all the soil will eventually get dug over to two spits deep and any compaction will disappear.  I am keeping off the area of soil that I have finished digging over.  There is no reason to walk over; if I do I sink leaving footprints that just fill with water.

The ground will have to be firmed before seed is sown. Seeds don't seem to germinate very well in too friable soil.

I have two dustbins full of comfrey liquid which might sound good, however I would like to use the bins to cover the rhubarb Rheum rhaponticum so that I can get a good early crop this year.  I might have to get another big bin to put the comfrey liquid into.  I don't really want to waste it because it has taken me a long time to amass this amount of comfrey.

Might do photographs tomorrow.  I want photographs for each month for the whole year.  The allotment is looking very untidy at the moment but that is not unusual for this time of the year.  Plants are not really growing very much at the moment and this leads to a very dull allotment.
                                    

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.

Using pigeon manure

I am trying to remove all the large stones from the new potato bed which is quite a chore.  Both the top soil and the subsoil need to be sieved and this is time consuming.  The sieve I am using is the bread tray.  While I am sieving, I am adding pigeon manure; compost; horse manure and sieved turf to the top soil.  

The bread tray sieve

The pigeon manure has a  ratio of 4/2/1 which is fairly good going in the realms of manuring NPK ratios.  Chicken Manure (fresh)   has a NPK ratio of 1.6/1.5/1.0 so pigeon muck compares very well with this.  Now I don't really think that I should give an awful lot of credence to these ratios because I got them from the internet and you should never believe anything you see on the internet.  Having said that,  it does give you a rule of thumb. 


It is obvious from the ammonia smell coming off the pigeon muck that it is very high in nitrogen. And loads of people tell you how good chicken manure is and I agree with them.   So if pigeon muck is like chicken manure,  it will be a valuable addition to the soil.  However, the high levels of nitrogen can damage roots and foliage unless  pigeon muck is added with care.  This is why I am adding the manure now, when there are no plants growing in this soil, so that it can rot down a little more during the winter.  By the time I plant potatoes the concentration of nitrogen should be at a level that will not cause damage. The damage that it causes roots is due to the high concentration of salts in the rhizosphere that cause water to be drawn out of roots desiccating them.  This is what people call burning the roots.     


The various additions to the soil have been really well mixed because of the sieving.  It has also produced a very friable soil.  There is now a good mixture of manure, top soil and compost fairly evenly mixed throughout the soil profile to a depth of about 600mm.  Homogeneity of the soil mixture means that there are no high concentrations of manure in some places while other parts of the soil profile have little or none.  There seems to be more benefit in producing a homogeneous soil, where all plants have equal access to added nutrients and organic matter, than having a patchwork of high and low concentrations of nutrient.  Manure added in the top 300mm of soil is most readily taken up by plant roots so this is where the manure should be mixed in.  However, I am trying to encourage mychorrhizal symbiosis and the fungi will be able to access nutrients below the 300mm depth and be able to transport them to plant roots.


I would have dug deeper but I was digging up the x Cupressocyparis leylandii shreddings that I put in last year as a kind of Hugelkultur.  The whole idea of using shreddings is to provide a sponge for water which will be released slowly throughout the summer.  I didn't really want to damage my sponge by mixing it with topsoil.  


I don't know whether it works but it keeps me happy doing stuff like this.   


I dug right up to the Boltardy Beta vulgaris  so I cannot carry on digging until the beetroot, carrots and parsnips are taken out.  


So to begin the clearance, I harvested Beta vulgaris;  Petroselinum crispum; Tragopogon porrifolius; Scorzonera hispanica;  Daucus carota;  Pastinaca sativa and Oxalis tuberosa.  However, I still have a lot left in the ground.  Who says there is nothing to harvest during the winter? I did not harvest any Allium porrum or Brassica oleracea bullata   mainly because they will stand for a while without deteriorating.  I was also going to get some Eruca sativa but it got too late and dark.  I will have to get some tomorrow.  


Still eating the pumpkin Cucurbita pepo and the Apium graveolens rapaceum  that I harvested earlier in the week.  


I am going to put some of the root vegetables into a box in the shed and cover them with soil.  The rest will be clamped and really I need to get onto doing that quite quickly because we are having the second heavy frost tonight.  

How I make a clamp.

The best way to make a clamp is to put a layer of gravel onto the soil; put the carrots on top with a little top soil to keep them in place;  cover with straw and then cover the straw with top soil.  This keeps them in fairly good nick for most of the winter.  I will probably use them all before the end of the winter though.  I used this method for the parsnips too.  


I am going to try to grow some long carrots next year so I took the bread tray sieve up to the new roots bed and began sieving the top soil.  I want to remove all the stone so that the carrots do not fork.  No fertiliser is being added at all because this may also make the carrot roots fork.  I'm not sure whether this is true but I am not taking any chances.  Really, the soil is in good heart and I don't think that it needs fertiliser.  The carrots are going where the squashes were last year and I added a lot of compost for the squashes.  This should be more than sufficient for the Daucus carota.  


Water from the springs has started to flow down the side of the allotment again so I am going to dig out a new soak away and put in another drainage pipe alongside the allotment.  I am going to put the soak away under the tap path and this will involve lifting two slabs.  Not something that I am looking forward to.  I have not raised these two slabs since I put them down in the 1980s.  It means that there is still some top soil underneath them.  I will use the bread tray to sieve this top soil and put it on the allotment somewhere.  The hole will be filled with stone that I have sieved from the potato bed.

This is a central precept of permaculture:  Always turn an adversity into something positive.  So the stones will be used to make the soak away and the slabs will be put on top.  This means that I will gain some more topsoil and a soakaway. There is no downside.  Second thoughts; it's cold and wet and it was trying to snow today.  That's the downside.
There are some leaves mixed with lawn mowings in the bins by the gate but I have not used any of them yet. 

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.