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.

Potatoes neither like nor dislike lime.

I think that it is safe to say that potatoes do not have emotions.  They neither like nor dislike lime.

The addition of lime to a potato bed seems to be associated with potatoes getting scab.  Scab is a raised unsightly blemish on the potato skin.  Streptomyces scabies seems to be the organism that produces scab and this appears to live in more alkaline soils.  Lime makes soil more alkaline (raises the pH).

These organisms, that resemble fungi, only infect the surface skin of the potatoes and do not grow into the centre.  So I eat potatoes infected by Streptomyces scabies  and have done so for years.  Most of the time I peel off the outer skin of potatoes anyway.  I tend to avoid the scabby ones when making baked potatoes.

The most that can be said about growing potatoes in soil with a relatively low pH is that the skins will probably be more smooth and "shop like".  The taste will be exactly the same as potatoes growing in a soil that has a relatively high pH. I don't think that scab overtly alters the size and quality of the potato.

If you are growing for exhibition then the state of the potato skin is important and a low soil pH would be essential  but how many of us are exhibition growers?

Digging over the sweet pea bed

I dug over most of the new sweet pea bed today mixing in the horse manure.  The only parts that I did not dig were where where the manure pile is and where the celeriac and leeks are.  I wasn't going to dig any manure into this plot but I had the manure so I used it.

I will get some more manure for the new pea and bean bed.

I watered the leeks with a little comfrey liquid manure to encourage them to bulk up a little.  I planted them late to avoid the leek miner fly and they really need to bulk up now so that I can use them.  The celeriac is big so does not need any extra fertiliser.

I dug up four Brussel sprouts plants to take home.  Most of the Brussel sprouts are over one metre tall and have grown really well.  Due to the warm weather in autumn a lot of the lower sprouts have opened out but the plants still have a lot of usable sprouts which I will take off to cook. The rest of the plant will be put into the big green compost bin.  There was some evidence of club root although I might be misinterpreting cabbage root fly Delia radicum damage.  Regardless, the most effective way of dealing with pests and diseases is to remove the potentially infected material and put it in the recycling bin to be composted well.  


I watered the winter cauliflowers with liquid comfrey fertiliser.  It might be a little early to encourage these to put on growth because they are susceptible to very cold weather.  This year they seem to have kept their leaves and not been cut back as they usually are.  Maybe I will be lucky.   


I have put one dustbin over the Rheum rhaponticum to force some of the leaves.  The Victorians used to put manure around the forcing bins to warm the soil through heat generated by decomposition.  I will not be able to use all the manure on the sweet pea bed so I used some around the rhubarb bins.  It means that the rhubarb will  be fertilised this year.  I may even put some pigeon manure around them - in very small doses.  I have two more dust bins and an old black Darlek compost bin that I can use to force the rhubarb.  I will put these over the rhubarb tomorrow.  


Any manure that is left over will be put around the blackcurrants.  I will feed the Ribes nigrum with liquid comfrey fertiliser  before I put the manure around them.  Two of the plants I cut back hard because of big bud mite Cecidophyopsis ribis have died so I will have to replace them with cuttings.  I will plant them with some inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.  


After the high winds we had in early January, the roofing felt has come off one of the sheds.  I will need to replace this as soon as possible so that water does not get into the shed.  

Finally finished sieving

I have finally finished sieving the soil on the new potato bed.  It has taken me over two months to do it and I really don't know whether it will make the smallest amount of difference to how well the potatoes grow.  However, it has made me feel I have achieved something.

So over the whole of the potato bed I have sieved the soil to a depth of two spits at least.  The couch grass, twigs, branches, weeds, etc. that I buried two years ago have rotted down to a fine compost and could be mixed in with the horrible soil.  Once this was done it made some passable soil.

The whole bed was raked and roughly levelled but I will have to do this again when the weather warms up and the soil is a little drier.

I still have quite a lot of the horse manure left so I will put it around the upturned dust bins that are covering the Rheum rhaponticum.  I am forcing the rhubarb to give me some good petioles in early spring.  I don't mind eating unforced rhubarb but this first crop is always the sweetest.

The hardy cyclamen are flowering again but the species iris still have some time to go before they flower.  I planted some more species iris next to the cyclamen but these have already flowered.

I planted some Lactuca sativa "Web's Wonderful" and some Brassica Oleracea "Golden Acre". I don't know whether these early sowings of vegetables is going to give me anything worth growing but I am only using a few seeds so I don't think that I will be wasting anything.  It is trying to keep them alive that is the difficulty.

I pricked out the Brassica oleracea botrytis "All The Year Round" into their own small 2 inch pots.  I will be a little more optimistic when I have sown seeds during February.  But you have to give it a go don't you?

I really write this blog  so I know when I have done things in the greenhouse and allotment. If you do what I do then you will get the same failures that I get and there is no guarantee that you will get the same successes.

Good growing.

Tomato seed sowing

Sowed the Lycopersicon esculentum seed in a three inch pot using New Horizon's multi-purpose peat free "compost". I did not sow all the seed I had because there is no guarantee that I can keep the seedlings alive this time of the year.  I have other varieties of tomato and these will be sown in February.

I put the pot in the airing cupboard so that it would have enough heat to germinate.

The "All the year round" Brassica oleracea botrytis has germinated well and I will be pricking the seedlings out into 3 inch pots very soon.  The Allium cepa "Ailsa Craig and Befordshire Champion" have germinated but I will leave these for a while before I prick them out into larger pots.

I watered the Lathyrus odoratus  today.  I hope that I will not regret it.  They tend to get fungi attacking them this time of year if they are watered.  Phytophthora and Pythium, which are like fungi and Rhizoctonia and Fusarium, which are fungi, all attack seedlings.  This kind of attack is called damping off.  It is less likely to happen if the compost or growing medium are carefully sterilised but this time of year there is always the threat.

I might try germinating some Lactuca sativa and some Brassica oleracea capitata in the next few days.  

I washed quite a few pots today using washing up liquid diluted in a bucket of water.   There is some suggestion that it is not too important to wash pots nowadays because of the use of sterilised planting mediums that are almost always used.  I would question this.  To avoid the transmission of plant pathogens washing carefully in soapy water is a fairly essential procedure.

Now that I am going to start to make my own composts, I think that keeping pots and tools clean is only prudent.