Seed sowing.

I had to get the breaks of the car seen to today so I did not get much done.

I just planted two rows of beetroot. I did dig over more of the back lawn. I am going to reseed it. Once too much moss gets into it there is no other way of repairing the lawn. Now the dug over bit is a lovely crumbly tilth. I will start to seed it tomorrow. I still have not bought myself a new mower.

First Terra preta experiments, chinampas, huglekulture and Montezuma method

I have had my allotment for 28 years now and still enjoying every minute of it. I completed digging this week and now the interesting part comes. Planting. I have planted Pentland Javelin and Kestrel potatoes breaking my rotation - something that I have never done before. I bought too many Pentland Javelin for the bed I had prepared for the potatoes so I had to put some of the kestrels in the bottom bed. That is the bed that the council replaced all the soil to a depth of 60cm because they found that it was contaminated with some foul chemical which I would be able to tell you the name of if I still had my original blog.

The new soil was completely unsuitable for allotment gardening and replaced some beautiful fibrous soil that had been built up over 27 years of continuous cultivation. Well, it has now been bashed into submission and is beginning to take on the resemblance of acceptable soil, however its fertility is suspect and I have just covered it, again, with about 4cm of well rotted cow muck.

Into this I have planted three rows of Kestrel. I am not expecting exhibition standard potatoes, although stranger things have happened. On the middle bed on the top half allotment I have planted four rows of sweet peas. I am hoping to grow some exhibition standard blooms again. I never show the sweet peas - I just like to show myself that I can do as well as the exhibitors. They are grown uncovered and open to all the elements. I will be growing them up canes and side shooting and detendrilling them as they grow.

I triple dug the onion bed during the winter mainly because I was taking down five silver birch in my garden. They had grown far too large for my small garden and were taking a lot of water and nutrients from the lawn. I needed to find somewhere to get rid of them and, as is my want; I like to bury anything that is or has been organic. So triple digging, and I think I will post the photographs to show what I did, allowed me to bury the five birches under about 1 metre of soil. I also buried about ten gooseberry bushes and an old Granny Smith apple tree which was not producing anything edible. Then I ran out of things to bury and I still had quite a bit of this bed to dig.
The allotment committee has allowed someone to dump laylandii shreddings in one of the bays near the gate. No one wanted to use them and one allotmenteer was heard to say that they were poisonous. Not a view that I subscribe to. Well if no one else wanted them, I thought, well why not put them under the subsoil because they cannot do much damage there.

Now there is madness in my method. I am becoming more and more fascinated by ancient South American Indian agriculture and horticulture. One of the things that the South American Indians did in the past was to stake out an area in a lake bed and fence it off. The farmers then layered it with mud, sediment and decaying vegetation until it was above water level. These were called Chinampas. When I first had my allotment there were about three springs on it. The allotment site is north facing at the top of a hill. So I have set about raising it in the same way that the Aztecs did in the past. I don't do raised beds - I do raised allotments. In order to keep the soil off the paths I have put upright paving slabs completely around the allotment. I will be doing this with the bottom half allotment too. So the allotment is about 2 foot higher than the surrounding paths.

However, I think that I overdid it a little with the laylandii shreddings on the onion bed and it is a little high now. Still it keeps the water flowing beneath my allotment and I do not sink into the soil to my hips like I used to do. I am not joking...  Still this is my Montezuma method and it is similar to huglekulture but I like to bury rather than putting brushwood on the surface and covering .  Burying high carbon organic material does not necessarily make your soil infertile, in my experience.

Trying to justify and research burying brushwood and logs, I found out a lot about South American agriculture and their methods of growing.

So what has all this to do with Terra Preta? Well as soon as it was brought to my attention that there were extensive farms and gardens along the Amazonian rivers and that they produced extremely fertile soil in an area that was thought to be extremely infertile my interest was aroused. It seems that these soils are very high in charcoal or what the Americans like to call biochar.

Some of these terra preta, manmade soils are over 2 metres deep and there is some evidence that they were being produced up to a thousand years ago. It seems that the Amazonian civilization was decimated soon after they were discovered by the Spanish, however their soils are still fertile to this day.

I, and several other allotmenteers, are trying to replicate these soils. I am using lump charcoal for barbecues, blood, fish and bone meal mixed in with comfrey tea. Now the science behind this could be very interesting and the adsorption of chemicals to the surface of charcoal may have something to do with it. I remain to be convinced. I am using this mixture along the planting lines for the sweet peas, onions, shallots, garlic and potatoes.

Mychorrhizal fungi and Terra preta

I am very sure that fungi have something to do with the very strange phenomena of Terra preta soil increase.  The film says that the soil replenishes itself but there is some indication that compost is used to ameliorate the process. 
I have watched the film ( http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/secret-el-dorado/ ) several times now trying to glean all the information I can.
As I have said, this could be mychorrhizal fungi but yeast is another avenue to follow. I don't know where to get sour dough yeast from; however my local garden centre sells mychorrhizal fungi.
As to producing my own charcoal, I think that I am going to experiment with various commercial charcoals first and I am going to mix them with blood fish and bone in a solution of undiluted comfrey liquid to start with.
I have a particularly infertile area of soil on the allotment, (If you want to know why look on my allotment blog under benzo (a) pyrenes). I am going to set up a proper comparison plot with several sections. One with charcoal on its own, one with blood fish and bone on its own, one with comfrey on its own, one with blood fish and bone and comfrey one with comfrey and charcoal and finally one with all. I would like to check out fungi as well; however that might make it complicated :-)).
Trying to think of ways that the soil remakes itself may not be too problematic. The increase in microorganisms within such a fertile soil could cause it, if they are produced in enough numbers. Any nutrient from decomposition seems to be adsorbed by the charcoal and this also gives soil fungi a really good habitat. Together with an increase in the population of roots and leaf litter from above ground you are very likely to get an increase in volume of soil.

Found my previous blogs - or some of them.

Sweet Pea

 Just been out pinching out the growing tip buds of the sweet peas. No more damping off thank heavens. After the second leaf I take out the growing tip to encourage two good buds lower down to grow. You get much better flowers from these side shoots than you get if you let the leader grow on.

I am going to grow cordon sweet peas this year. I do not have enough canes to grow them up although they are probably the best things to use. I am going to set up the rows in a similar way to my runner beans with two rows of canes tied at the top with a horizontal cane to keep them in place. This is attached to a post at each end.With the sweet peas I am going to run strings from the horizontal top cane to the ground (plus a bit to bury). I will put some vertical canes every 3′ on both sides of the row. When I plant the sweet peas I will plant the string under them. I have done this several times and the string never pulls out. In fact it is quite difficult to get the string out at the end of the season because the sweet pea roots have grown around it. It looks better if you keep the string fairly taught.I only use nylon string because ordinary string will rot off.

Last year I grew sweetpeas and they were very good indeed. I watered them every week with a weak comfrey liquid. One of the allotment holders near me said that her dad used to grow championship sweet peas using only comfrey liquid and I can believe her.

It is getting cold again tonight so I will not be watering. I like to keep my seedlings just damp so that I do not get any more damping off.