Digging the bean trench.

The only reason I am triple digging the climbing French bean bed is because I have some brushwood from the hedge alongside my allotment.  I have cut the hedge right back beyond the fence so that more light can get onto the allotment.  There is also a 30ft x Cupressocyparis leylandii  beginning to grow through the fence.  I will be cutting this back as far as I can.

The woody branches are being put on top of some pernicious weeds given to me by one of the top allotments. The weeds were put at the bottom of the trench.  Leaves and turfs are being put atop that.  The subsoil and the top soil are being sieved back into the trench with additions of pigeon and horse manure.

This process produces some really good looking soil.

I decided to take the Takesumi bamboo charcoal to the allotment so that I could marinade it in comfrey liquid.   I am wondering if I can apply this to the ground using the watering can.  It is very fine dust and will easily pass through the rose holes.  It can mash a bit in the tubs for a while until I need to use it.  

Took up six of the Brussel sprouts plants to take home.  Then I gave two to Chris, one to Mike and Mr Singh took some off one or two plants.  Even with all of this I have four plants still left in the ground.  

I think that I may  water the winter cauliflowers, leeks, strawberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, rhubarb and gooseberries with comfrey liquid.  This will give them a good start at the beginning of the season.  

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.

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. 

November still digging the new potato bed.

Spent another lovely day sieving out the stone on the new potato bed.  I am mixing in the horse muck and it is making very friable soil.  Just wish I could work a little faster.  There is still a lot of stone in the soil but slowly but surely it is being removed.

It certainly tires you out.

I am mixing the soil through the sieve and also using conical mounds of soil and throwing the newly sieved soil on the top so that it mixes as it runs down the sides of the mound.

The weeds are still growing and the strawberries will have to be hand weeded before they are taken over by poached egg plant seedlings.  Also the grazing rye on the top bed is getting a lot of Stellaria media seedlings growing between the rows.  A quick going over with hoe, cultivator and rake will see these weeds off.

Harvested some rocket Eruca sativa and some radish Raphanus sativus for salad today.  I would like to harvest the American winter cress Barbarea verna  but this is a little small at the moment.  It will be useful later in the year when there is nothing else growing.

Some of the purple sprouting brocolli is flowering so this could be harvested too.  The plants are large but they are not sending up many flowering spikes.  Don't think that so much of this will be planted next year.

I will concentrate on producing some really good cauliflowers and cabbages.

Last of the tomatoes and squashes.

A frost was forecast so I decided to harvest the rest of the tomatoes and squashes.  The plants had fallen over with the weight of the fruit on them and become a little dirty.  I gave them a good wash and left them to dry.

Some of these will be left in paper bags to ripen off.  Others will be used to make chutney.  The squash are not very big but I think they taste better when they are this size. They will probably be roasted.

The tomato plants have been put into large, empty compost bags to bring home and put into the green bin.  They are not diseased but I still want to be sure that I do not contaminate the soil with blight spores.

The pumpkins are getting really big now and I will have difficulty taking them home.  I want to weigh them on the bathroom scales to see how much they weigh.  They are not the biggest I have ever seen but they are not too bad.

I am using an old bread basket to sieve the new potato bed soil.  It seems to be just the right mesh.  The holes are about 1 inch square.  I am getting quite a lot of stone out of both the top and the subsoil.

                                 

The subsoil is particularly hard and full of stone.  I have to use a fork to get into it. However, I am determined to sieve as much of the soil as I can before the cold weather starts to close in.  

 It looks quite benign in these pictures but that subsoil is a tough old nut.  I could go deeper but it would take a lot longer for little effect.

You can see that I have been burying the old strawberry plants at the bottom of the trench and old horse muck is being sieved into the top soil.

So I put about three spade fulls of top soil to one of horse muck.  This is just right because the soil forms a cluster around the muck and allows it to fall through the holes.  So the sieve allows the soil to be mixed while removing the larger stones.  I don't mind a few stones in the soil because they keep the soil open: they may add nutrients when they are weathered and they can help with soil drainage.  

I am using this old spade because the ground is so stony.  I would much rather use a stainless steel spade because little of the soil sticks to the blade.  

Gave my tools a clean when the Sun went down just to keep standards up.  

  

Coming to an end of the triple digging.

I've got to the last trench of the triple digging and I am filling the bottom with oak branches, compost and old turfs.  This is a kind of huglekulture, however they delivered some pigeon muck today and I used some on top of the branches.

Now here is the theory.  Bacteria and fungi that will break down the oak branches need nitrogen to do this.  The bacteria and fungi's carbon source will be the branches, compost and turfs.  The nitrogen source will be the pigeon manure.  This should mean that the branches will decompose quickly into friable organic matter that is easy to incorporate into the soil next year.  Adding the pigeon manure may prevent the fungi decomposing the buried organic matter from depleting the soil of nitrogen.  This often happens when woody material is added to top soil.

Here we need a note of caution.  Pigeon manure is very powerful stuff.  It has a NPK of 5:2:1 but I think that the nitrogen ratio may be higher from the smell of ammonia coming off it today.  I have put most of the pigeon muck in one of the compost bays that I have just emptied.  I got about 18 bags of it all told.  I will be using it but in the same way as I would use chicken pellets.  I will put a top dressing on the surface of the soil when I begin planting and then hoe it in.  I will not be using great shovels full of the stuff.  It is serious manure.

I once dug in neat, new pigeon muck into one of the beds and then planted beetroot on top.  Nothing grew where the pigeon muck was dug in but I had big beetroot where there was no pigeon manure.

There were a few potatoes that I had missed in the potato bed but not too many.  I doubt if I have found all the tubers but I can live with just a few coming up in the onion bed next year.

I have been giving the top soil and the subsoil a good mixing separately to make sure that last years compost is distributed throughout the soil profile.  The soil was very dry so it was quite easy to do.  I like to make conical mounds of soil and put spade fulls on the point at the top.  This means that each of the spade fulls falls down the sides of the cone and you get a thorough mixing.  I have been careful to keep the top and subsoil apart so that there will be little mixing between the two.  I don't think that a little mixing is harmful but it is best to keep them apart.  The subsoil does not contain the amount of organic matter as the top soil although I am attempting to remedy this.  Also the subsoil is much lighter in colour than the top soil because it has not been dyed black by the humin together with the fulvic and humic acids derived from decomposed organic matter.

There are many reasons for digging but the one that has interested me recently is the suggestion that digging enhances weathering of the mineral part of the soil.  The mineral part of the soil is a primary source of soil potassium and phosphorus.  The idea is to increase the breaking up of particles so that these major nutrients can be released in a form that can be taken up either by mychorrhizal fungi or the roots of plants.  Mixing the soil with compost, which is breaking down into humic and fulvic acids and humin, also aids in this process because these compounds react with (chelate) mineral elements of the soil.  What we are doing is making previously inaccessible minerals locked up in stones or mineral fragments relatively soluble and available to plant roots.

This is why digging whether single, double or triple is a good way of improving the fertility of the soil.  So with the additional benefits of improving drainage; adding carbon; adding nutrients ( in the form of manures, fertilisers and green manures); removing weeds; producing a good crumb and friable  structure to the soil; adding air to lower layers of the soil profile; deepening the depth of the A horizon (top soil) to improve the root environment; increasing the solubility of minerals by ion exchange; there seems to be very good advantages to digging.  I can understand the reasoning behind the no dig method of cultivation but there does not seem to be as many advantages as digging.

I will have a major job in levelling the potato bed because of all the triple digging and mixing I have done but I want to plant some seed so I will have to do it well.  In order to consolidate the soil, I will be treading on it systematically before raking.  Most seeds seem to like a firm soil to germinate in.  I will be taking short side steps along the planting line and then going over with the rake.  This will also break down any large lumps of soil so that the raking will be easier.  It may seem silly to spend so much time putting air into the soil only to squeeze it out by treading on it.  There is a need for a good equilibrium between the amount of air within the soil and the amount of water.  Too much air will restrict the amount of water that roots can obtain and this might lead to water stress.  Too much water will restrict oxygen necessary for root respiration.  Much less oxygen is available dissolved in water than there is in air.  The trick is to make sure there is enough of both.

I will be sowing rocket, lambs lettuce, spinach ( under cloches) chard, and a variety of green manures on the triple dug bed.  I also have four pots of broad beans to plant here as well.

Still cropping big time.  Some large carrots - shows you how effective the enviromesh is; big beetroot - I hope that they are not getting woody now; Hamburg parsley, salsify and scorzonera giving remarkably large roots and parsnips are growing well.  I like to leave the parsnips until the first frosts and with all the other vegetables that are cropping now I do not need to use them.  Pumpkins are coming well except that they are not very large.  Got some big swedes and they still taste really good.  Kohl rabbi is still growing well.  The peas have not grown very well.  I doubt if I will have any off them at all.  Still they will make good green manure.  This is the last time I plant late peas in the same area as the earlies.  The Borlotti beans have done well but they really need to be harvested and podded.  Too many runner beans again.

And too many blooming tomatoes this year.  There has been no blight and all the plants I put outside have fruited really well.  I have tomatoes coming out of my ears now I have eaten so many.   Everyone is trying to give me apples too.  There are just so many apples you can eat.  The Bramleys can be kept for a while so I might put them into the store shed.

I am attempting to clear out the store shed so that I can put the canes in.  I am not succeeding very well because for everything I take out and home there are about seven or eight things I need to store in there.

I took out the broad beans so that I had room to plant some more leeks.  I podded the beans and have left them in the store shed to dry so I have seed for next year.  They are drying on one of the shelves.

I will have enough room on the shelves for apples because all the onions had white rot and had to be thrown away otherwise I would be squeezing things in.  I have room for the squashes, pumpkins and apples but I will have to move the potatoes around.  It would be much better if I could store the canes outside somewhere.  That might be the solution.

I am cropping the comfrey and digging the fresh leaves in along the raspberry row.  The raspberries seem to benefit from a good dose of comfrey.  I will do this with the strawberries too.  I am moving them up to the brassicae bed and will water them in with a little comfrey liquid too.

Then it is mostly clearing for the winter.