Still digging over the potato bed.

I am still double digging the potato bed.  I am putting partly decomposed compost from the compost heap in the bottom trench.  This will decompose during the winter and hopefully provide a good water sponge for developing plants next year.  There will be some nutrient from the breakdown of the organic material but it will not be a lot.  There will also be better drainage.

The ground is very dry even at the depths that I am digging. I had to water the ground today so that my topsoil did not blow away.  Remarkably, there was a little rain today but the ground is already starting to dry.

When digging out the trenches for the double digging I like to make conical mounds of soil.  I learnt this when I was working in the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute mixing up large amounts of potting and seed composts.  We mixed the composts in large conical heaps because the soil will fall down the sides mixing remarkably well.

I decided to take out the pink fir apple potatoes and put the tops at the bottom of the trench.  There are two reasons why I don't usually do this. Primarily, the tops may be infected with blight and this must not be recycled back into the soil to infect another potato crop. The other reason is that if you miss any little potato tubers the potatoes will grow back between the next crops in the rotation.  They are a bind to get out usually requiring a deep hole to find the offending tuber.

Well, there has been no blight this year so there is little fear that I will be recycling disease.  To prevent the potatoes from regrowing on this bed I carefully inspected the roots to ensure that there were no little ones clinging on within the root mass. I am also hoping that the depth that I am burying the tops will also prevent any I miss from being able to reach the soil surface.

I measured one of the pink fir apple tops and it was about seven feet long.  I knew that the tops had nearly reached the height of the new raspberry canes but I did not realise that they grew quite so big.  As I keep saying to my neighbours it is not how big the tops are but how many big tubers grow beneath them.  I only got one or two pounds of potatoes even from the very biggest tops.  The kestrel was giving me 5-6lb of potatoes from each plant and their tops were not as big.

I am recycling two rows of strawberries by burying them in the digging trench.  This is an if I do this then I can do that kind of scenario.  I am putting the strawberries where the brassicas are now.  It is a fairly large bed and can accommodate the strawberries and the peas next year.  To plant the strawberries I need to clean part of the bed and bury any material that I can.  I do not usually bury any brassicas preferring to take any roots and stems home to put into the recycling bin.  This year I have had a little club root something that I have not seen on the allotment for over twenty years now.  I am not sure but I think that it came from the mega compost heap compost.  I am going to be very wary of having other peoples compost from now on, no matter how good it looks when you have sieved it.

The old cabbage tops that I have not been able to eat and have gone very slug eaten can go into the trench.  I am hoping that the trench is deep enough to prevent any club root from reaching the top soil.  The roots and stems will still go home and be put into the green bin.

I have put about 25 strawberry plant runner plants into pots with good bought compost and they have put down adventitious roots.  These will be my new plants to replace the ones that I will bury in the digging trench.

I will start to plant strawberries as soon as I clear the space for them.  If I transplant the strawberries now, they will be able to establish themselves before the winter.  I will plant them with the newly comfrey inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.

A myth has grown up about the danger of growing potatoes next to raspberries.  Well if my potatoes grew seven feet of tops while growing right next to raspberries there cannot be much truth to the myth.

The potatoes were great this year and all to the thanks of comfrey inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.

Harvesting

I have been seriously cropping the peas this week.  Overall I have 11.5kg (25 lb) of podded peas, which is about 2.9 kg (6.3lb) per row.  The rows were 3.65metres (12ft) long and for this I should be getting at least 4lb per row.

So not bad. With charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi there is an increase of 2lb a row.  The peas were fertilised only with a top dressing of sieved home made compost and comfrey liquid.  So no bought fertilisers.  That can't be bad.

The harvest of strawberries has finished now.  The last ones I picked were on the 22nd June.  I got about 20.5kg off five rows and this seems eminently satisfactory.

At the moment I am harvesting brocolli, calabrese, raspberries, blackberries, broad beans, peas, courgettes, turnips, lettuce, carrots, beetroot and potatoes.

It is amazing just how much time it takes to harvest the vegetables and fruit.  I need to speed up a little.

I have taken out the summer purple sprouting and the calabrese and these will be replaced by one line of calabrese.  The broad beans have been taken out but new ones have been planted where the garlic has been taken out.  The winter cauliflowers growing under the broad beans need to be earthed up and given some comfrey liquid.

The broad bean tops have been taken off with a pair of secateurs and the roots left in the ground.  The roots are infected with rhizobium bacteria which fixes nitrogen from the air and converts it into ammonia which is a natural fertiliser for plants.  The nitrogen is taken up by the plants - such as broad bean - to make proteins. So to gain this nitrogen we can use the broad bean plant as a green manure.  If the roots are left in the soil they will provide about 30% of the available nitrogen but if the tops are dug in as well they will provide about 60% of the available nitrogen to the soil.

Lots of people leave the roots in the soil but burn the tops.  They are wasting 60% of the natural nitrogen fertiliser.

As there are winter cauliflowers in the way, the tops will not be dug in but put on the compost heap.  They will provide a little nitrogen for the rotting down process.

The peas have been harvested but there are a few left on to fatten up.  When these last few are cropped the plants will be dug into the same ground as they grew on as a green manure.  As with the broad beans, their roots are infected with rhizobium bacteria which has been fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere.  Digging them in will add nitrogen to the soil.

They will be replaced by a late crop of peas.

It could be argued that peas should not be planted where peas have been growing recently but there is little chance that there would be any problems. The peas will be planted with mychorrhizal fungi and inoculated charcoal again.  This will just add to the charcoal already on this bed.

Some of the sweet peas will be layered this weekend.  This involves them being taken off the cane supports and laid down along the ground to go up another cane support.  This will be time consuming too.

Just cropping and weeding the rest of the allotment.

Soft Fruit Harvest

I have about 2.75kg of blackcurrants from the poor bushes.  That is quite a lot and I am really pleased about it.  It took hours to pick them and then another hour to wash them and remove all the leaves and stalks which makes them totally uneconomic but like the Amish  I do not count this as work but a pleasurable activity.

What you have to factor in is the exercise, the fresh air and the pleasure that you get from being outside.  Blackcurrant picking is pleasurable - when it finishes.  There were some green currants that I left on the bushes but I doubt whether there is more than a couple of kilo.  I don't know whether it is worth the time and effort to collect these as well or just leave them for the birds.

I picked another kilo of strawberries.

Did a little feeding and watering.  The turnips and the radish got a good soaking to make sure they continue to grow.  They are being eaten by flea beetle but there will still be enough there for what I want.

I weeded around the peas but this is more cosmetic than of any benefit to the peas.  These weeds are the few that have not been shaded out by the peas.  The peas continue to grow.  I watered them again today and hopefully I will get them to four feet tall.

Remarkably the dwarf beans are surviving and have not been damaged by slugs and snails.   I gave them a good feed of comfrey liquid.

It was a lovely evening so I decided to have a quiet cup of tea and a sit in the sun.

The first strawberry of 2011

People in the south have probably been eating strawberries since April but I am proud to announce that I had my first strawberry for 2011 today. And it tasted excellent.


I  think that my strawberries have always started to fruit in Wimbledon week.  This year Wimbledon is 

20 June - 3 July.  

So this year the strawberries are about one month in advance. 


Now all I want is for all the other strawberries to fruit.  If they continue until 3rd of July then I will be more than happy.   

An Allotment too far?

The soil temperature was 15^oC today.

 I'm not too sure whether this new allotment is an allotment too far.  I took out another two trenches and filled them with weeds and compost. There is a great deal of mare's tail in the soil and I have found the roots three spits down in the subsoil.  I am not going to try and get them all out.  This is a long term project.

One of the old blokes came over and asked what I was going to use the new allotment for.  That is a good question.  Really I produce far too much on my other allotment so why I need this I don't know.  It is a challenge and it will get me fit.  Or do me a mischief...

I will also probably use it to put fruit on.  I have a few blackcurrant cuttings that have rooted and they would do fine on this ground.  I have cleared quite a bit by slicing off weed turfs and putting them in the trench. I have covered these with some compost and then some shredded branches.

The problem is that this is taking up a lot of my time and I wanted to get on on my clean allotment.  After it got to about three o'clock, I decided enough was enough and went to plant the rest of the broad bean plants.  I have got two rows out of them and they should fruit in a couple of months so that I can take them out and plant the brassicas.

Now that the soil has warmed up - 15^oC today, I have put in three rows of parsnips in the bottom bed.  Going on the surplus I had this year this will be plenty.  I watered them in with some comfrey liquid.  It was last years comfrey so I am not too sure how potent it is.  It will not do them any harm in any case.

The strawberries got a good weeding and they also had some comfrey liquid too.  I wanted to give the garlic and the winter cauliflowers some but I ran out of time.  Being very tired after digging deep trenches, I decided that I would go home and have a good cup of tea.

Next time, remember to take a flask of tea with you.

I took a cursory look in the greenhouse when I got home.  Most of the brassicas I sowed have come through which means that I will have to prick them out and that means that I will have to plant out all the sweet pea seedlings because otherwise I will not have room in the greenhouse.

Allotment Garden Planning for 2011

 In the early days, I religiously recorded where I had planted vegetables, how well they grew and the weight of the produce I got.  I must have done that from 1982 through to 1985.  I realised very early that I could not compete on price with shop bought vegetables, however I consoled myself by saying that I could produce vegetables that were not contaminated by pesticides.  I knew where and how my food was grown and that was enough for me.  Growing was not just a means of producing vegetables for the family.  It was also a means of keeping fit and exercising in the fresh air.  It was a means of keeping stress away and touching the earth.  

So for 29 years this little piece of ground, 25 feet by 124 feet, has been providing my family with vegetables.

This is what the allotment looked like in February 2010.  Wet and muddy.  You can see how I use slabs to hold the soil back. I do not raise beds - I raise allotments. 

What is most surprising is that it is still producing great vegetables and flowers after so many years.  In fact, I think that it is producing more now than it has ever done.  After the first few years, I did no more planning.  The rotation was locked in and I began to get stricter, not allowing myself to break out of the scheme I had developed.  (Last year was a great exception when I had too many seed potatoes). 

This year I am going to break with tradition because I have actually planned the allotment.  Really I did no planning at all because I knew where everything was going to be planted.  However, the software makes spacing and numbers of plants needed very specific.  It is interesting to see how my rough plan was interpreted by the software program and whether plants would fit where I had imagined they would.  

So this is what I envisage the allotment will look like when I have finished planting it this year.   

Allotment plan for  25 (b)

I don’t think that I will stick rigidly to this plan having already decided not to have so many rows of sweet peas.  I might also have the runner beans on the other side of that bed.   I may also put in some other varieties of brassicae having found seed in the shed.  The top pea and bean bed really needs to have some horse muck put on it.

This is the bed in 2007 with peas on it; the last time that it had legumes on it.  I had grown caliente  mustard in it and dug it in in September 2007.  

Allotment plan for 26(a)

I intend to plant Big Max pumpkins to replace the garlic and onions when they go over.  It looks like I will be planting Gardener's Delight in pots on the south side of the shed again this year.  I had some really good tomatoes off bushes planted here last year. 

Allotment plan for 26(b)

Have I planted too many strawberries this year?  We will see.  I did not buy any this year and these are all from runners off the old strawberry plants.  I thought that some of the strawberries would die because of the very cold weather but they all seemed to have survived.  The rhubarb will probably overshadow some of the strawberries.  I will be spraying nematode worms Phasmarhabditis hermaphroditaunder the rhubarb to try and limit the number of slugs and snails in this bed.  I will not even order the nematodes until March/April time though.  I hope that the Xania gooseberry cuttings grow because I will only have one if not.  I need five of the cuttings to take.  Xania is a heavy cropping red gooseberry that is fairly resistant to American mildew.  The other gooseberries have been taken out and buried because they were all very old varieties and they had been growing in the same place for about 20 odd years.  One of the old blokes on the allotment gave me them when I first came onto the allotment site.  I think that I would like to have named varieties so that I can look up and find out how and when they crop. 
Now I have changed the plan so go here if you want to see the final plan - or so I think at the moment.
http://tonythegardener.blogspot.com/2011/03/final-final-plan-for-allotment-although.html

Took Some Photographs of the Allotment Today

The allotment always looks untidy in January.

The ground was frosted and covered with a sprinkling of snow so I did not move any more of the blackcurrants.  I got some leaves and lawn mowings and filled up one of my bins with them. I put weed turfs on top of that.         

The bins are made from old pallets which are wired together with fencing wire.  I took two bins down so that I could putup my new shed  but I am going to make some new bins at the end of the comfrey bed.


There is a lot said about making compost.  I find that heaping anything that was once alive into a big pile and leaving for six months to a year breaks down into fairly good compost and even if it doesn't it can be buried relatively deeply and left to its own devices. I am not one for fussing about compost. 

This is one of my charcoal bins with charcoal marinating in comfrey and worm tea. There is also some sugar molasses, and some blood fish and bone in this bin.  I have used almost all of the charcoal in the other bin.  The lid is kept on so that the bins do not fill with rain water and overflow.

This is my comfrey bed.  The plants don't look too good at the moment but in the summer they can grow up to 1.5 metres.  The comfrey is harvested and put into the big green bins. 
Comfrey is as tough as old boots.  It will certainly come back in the spring.  Mine has died down and is difficult to make out at the moment.  I tried digging between the rows and started to dig up roots.  Not to worry though because I just planted them again.  They might not come but I have sufficient anyway. 
A bit of frost and snow will not hurt comfrey.



As the comfrey rots down, I run off the liquid into a small tub and put it into the charcoal dustbin. It looks a bit untidy because I had to move the dustbins.  Someone had pushed them over while I was on holiday but I have still been able to refil one of them with comfrey tea etc.

I use a water butt to make comfrey tea but I am not adding water at the moment. I have 5 rows of comfrey and two rows of nettles - grown properly with weeding and hoeing. I am now using sweet cicerly as well. It all makes a very good liquid fertilizer. I water it down in the watering can but it does not seem to affect the plants adversely if you use quite a concentrated liquid. I think that you are wasting it if you use it too concentrated. Looks just like Tomorite to me.

They say that nettles are high in nitrogen and comfrey is high in potassium. Compared with what though? I think we are talking about very small amounts of nutrient but that is all that most vegetables seem to need. Nettle and Comfrey have more nutrient than farmyard manure but farmyard manure has very little nutrient  so there does not need to be much more to be better. I think that the adding of both comfrey liquid and farmyard manure to the soil have greater effects than just adding artificial nutrient. They encourage soil organisms, which may form symbiotic associations with plant roots or at least provide further nutrients or nutrients in a form that the plants can use.

 5 rows of strawberries.  This half of the strawberry bed has marinaded charcoal and the other half of the bed does not.  I put the charcoal in the planting holes.  We shall see if Terra preta works with strawberries.
Several rows of broad beans behind the strawberries seem to be surviving the very cold weather.  The strawberries were planted during September and the broad beans during October 2010.


This is where the Kestrel potatoes are going this year.  The horse manure will be spread about and dug in as I plant the potatoes.  Half the potatoes will have inoculated charcoal and half will not.  I will also plant some earlies as well. There are still two half rows of carrots, two and a half rows of parsnips and several beetroot still surviving in this bed.  I will need  to clear it by March this year. 


This is the onion bed.  The garlic is in already and showing through. I have not dug this area because it had potatoes on last year.  I have just levelled it out a little so that I can plant the onions and leeks.  I will be covering both the onions and the leeks either with cloches or enviromesh to protect them from the leek miner fly, Phytomyza gymnostoma.  This fly was first detected in Wolverhampton and I have had it on my allotment since 2000 if not earlier.  I thought it was onion eel worm but I can grow very good leeks if I cover them which indicates this is an air borne rather than a soil borne infestation.  It comes to something when you have to cover leeks and onions.

I think that I added a little bit too much brush wood to this soil  It is three spits down though. I will be planting the cordon sweet peas and the runner beans in this bed. 








This will be the brassicae bed this year. I am attempting to move the black currant bushes to a more convenient position but it keeps on snowing.  I will endeavour to persevere. I am planting the blackcurrants with inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi. I don't really want to, however, I will plant half with charcoal and half without just to see if charcoal affects the cropping of blackcurrants.

The purple sprouting broccolli has been knocked about by the snow and frost but it is very hardy and I expect it to recover.  There are some winter cauliflowers behind them that are surviving well.  They are covered with netting to keep the pigeons off them.  Sprouts are behing them.

I am surprised that the bay tree has survived but it gets hardier the older it gets. 

I have picked a lot of the brussel sprouts.  The variety I have left were much smaller than the Trafalgar so I will not plant them this year. Needless to say I have forgotten what they are called.