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.

Garden maintenance

The onion bed needed weeding so I started with the onions and worked across the bed.  I find that doing this systematically gets it finished very quickly.  I used the onion hoe to weed between the plants.  It is a very useful tool.


It is a handy tool that allows you to earth up the leeks as well as hoe the weeds.  I don't always hoe up the leeks but if you do it will give you more blanched leaf than if you just leave them.

I had a different tool for many years which was more or less an oval blade but it eventually  wore itself out. I did like it because it was very efficient getting weeds out.

I was going to feed the onions but I didn't want to take the weeds off.  They would wither away in the hot sun if I just left them on top of the soil.  Watering would only help them to recover and start to grow again.  I will leave it until tomorrow.

I took out a couple of lettuces that had gone over and put them in the worm bin.  I didn't think that there would be any worm liquid after I had cleared the bin out, however there was quite a bit.  I put this into the comfrey bin without a tap.  It will go through and get some comfrey liquid with it.  I am using the liquid from this bin to put into the dustbin with the charcoal.  It is pretty concentrated because I have not put any water into this bin.  I am hoping to get some powerful inoculated charcoal.  I would like to keep this charcoal marinading in comfrey mixture until next year if possible.  The I will use it on all the vegetables.

I tied up the tomatoes that I planted on the onion bed.  I just noticed that the potatoes might have blight so I will probably loose all the tomatoes.  We shall see.

I gave the runner beans and the sweet peas another feed with comfrey liquid.  The sweet peas are beginning to recover from being layered and producing some really big flowers.

There was a handful of runner beans to be picked and the stems that had reached the top of the cane supports needed pinching out.  If you pinch out the growing tips of the runner beans when they reach the top of the canes it makes them produce more side shoots.  The more side shoots, the more flowers so it is worth doing if only to prevent the top of the canes becoming overcrowded and top heavy.  When this happens the whole row could topple over especially as we have some wicked winds at the top of the hill.

I have taken out another row of potatoes.  Got a barrow load from twelve plants. Not sure of the weight because I have not weighed them yet.

I washed the potatoes so they are looking quite good at the moment.  They were washed for a couple of reasons.  There is no point in bringing best topsoil home and washing the soil off them only to go down the drain.  If the potatoes are washed in a tub at the allotment then I can put the soil back on the potato bed.  The dirty water was poured around the tomato plants on the potato bed.  Secondly, any slugs and snails will be washed off the potatoes and not be put into the store paper bags to reek havoc while the potatoes are stored.

I started cutting the old fruiting raspberry canes out because they have gone over now and all the strawberries have been picked.  This is a summer fruiting variety with a very sweet taste.  The old canes apart from having the fruiting branches are also very dark brown while the new ones are usually quite green.  This means that it is quite easy to identify the old canes and cut them out.  I tied most of the new canes to the support wires but I will have to make sure they are fastened securely but I will do this when I take the Pink Fir Apple potatoes out and I can get down the other side of the row.  I might have to take the potatoes out sooner than I expected because they might have blight.  I was going to glean the old raspberry canes for any fruit left on them but there was very little and what there was had been spoilt by the rain.

More blackberries were ready for picking and I took off quite a few.  With a few beetroot, carrots and the last of the summer cauliflowers I had quite a car full when I was going home.  All the summer cauliflowers had club root and if they did it was probably in the seed.  However, cabbage root fly also makes the cauliflower root swell.  It probably was cabbage root fly (Delia radicum) rather than club root (Plasmodiophora brassicae.)  I have not had club root on the brassicas for years now.