My Daughter’s Blog

A Flower Garden
I have been challenged by my daughter to create a garden that is in bloom all year round. She would like vibrant colour, different textures and a space she can use for entertaining all year round.
I was given a blank canvas.

To see the progress of this garden, click on my daughter’s blog.

It looks a lot different now.  I have sieved all the soil and planted quite a few plants.

Allotment photographs for September 2012

It is always a little sad when this years vegetables have been harvested and the ground is empty.  Even looking forward to next season is no consolation.  However, there are still seeds to sow and seedlings to plant but these will not take up such large areas of the allotment.

 This is why planting a crop of green manure is ideal.  Green manure will cover the ground during the winter protecting it from heavy rain and preventing excessive leaching.  The grazing rye has particularly fibrous root clumps, while tares have root nodules containing nitrogen fixing bacteria. When the tares are dug in they will add extra nitrogen to the soil.  The green manure will take up nutrients from the soil and sequester them in their tissues during the winter and prevent them from being lost from the soil.  It will eventually form a canopy over the soil preventing light getting to weed seedlings.   Hopefully, this will prevent germination or, if germination does occur, the weed seedlings growing.  Finally, green manures  rot down relatively quickly when they are dug in releasing nutrients into the soil for the new crop.

Winter tares and grazing rye green manure mix.

I got a winter green manure mix of grazing rye and winter tares to cover areas of the allotment that would not have vegetables growing on them until next spring.

As the ground would not be cultivated for a while, I took the precaution of careful single digging with consolidation and raking to make a good seed bed.  I also added pigeon manure at the same rate I would with chicken manure.  Although I was very careful to bury all the old strawberry plants, several stems and leaves were dragged to the surface when I was raking.  They will not hurt the seedbed and will decompose during the winter. Having said this,  Strawberry stems and roots take quite a while to decompose.  I am still finding them where I have dug in strawberries before three years ago.

After digging over I shuffled over the area consolidating the ground.  This helped to break down the lumps of soil and enabled me to get a good tilth.  The RHS advice is generally to sow green manures broadcast and their video advice is very good.  However, they do say at the end of the video that if annual weeds are a problem then  growing in lines enables you to hoe between the lines.

I have news for the RHS.  Annual weeds are always a problem even on an allotment as clean as mine - so I always grow green manure in lines.

If you look closely weed seedlings are growing between the rows of green manure. Several years ago I sowed poached egg plant Limnanthes douglassii as a green manure.  It continues to germinate even though none has seeded itself since.  This seed must be three years old.   I will take the hoe between the rows to keep them clean.  Eventually the green manure will grow large enough to shade out weed seedlings and the ground will not have to be hoed any more.

Green manure on old pea bed

I will be hoeing until October though.   The lines of tares and rye mix are about 30 cm apart.  They will still make a canopy and cover the ground completely.

Green manure slowly covering the
ground.  

As the ground has become free I planted green manure.

Green manure covering the old potato bed.

This means that I will have to dig again in the spring.  There are some times that you can avoid digging but I don't think you can when using green manure.  Some say that the green manure can be cut off and left on the surface of the soil to rot down.  Others suggest that green manure can be covered with black plastic until it has rotted down, however to avoid slug and snail problems I find it much easier to dig it in.

Celery has a little rust on it.

Celery

This has been the first time I have grown celery in over twenty years.  Remarkably it has done quite well and I will be trying it again next year.  I have already eaten most of it particularly in soups.  One thing is for sure it has had enough water this year.

Asparagus pea

First time ever that I have planted asparagus pea.  It has grown about 30-40 cm and produced a lot of small pea like pods.  They are a welcome addition to stir fry.  Quite successful. Although it does flop about a little it does support itself and does not need anything to climb up.   

Chamomile

As the summer has not been so pleasant, I have not really been having much chamomile tea.  That is why there are still lots of flowers on the plants.  The fresh flowers make the best tea so I do not want to dry these ones.  I will use the best ones for tea and collect the others for seed.

Russian tarragon

The Russian tarragon does not really have much of a smell and tastes a bit bland.  I have tried to transplant a couple of plants but it does not seem to like being moved.  I will still try to put it along the path to form a little hedge and maybe I will use it in salads just as an additional leaf.  It germinated very well and the plants have grown quite big now but it would have been better if I had grown the french cultivar.

beetroot

Too many beetroot again.  I thought that I would not have enough because of the poor germination in the spring.  I should not have worried.  I have given quite a lot away and will still have more than enough.

Net over the carrots

I am still keeping the net over the carrots just in case carrot root fly is still about.  I took the net off about this time last year and the carrots were infected by root fly.  I bury the edges of the net in the soil so I am sure there is a good seal and the flies cannot get in.

Second sowing of carrots

Having to sow the carrots again due to the very wet spring, these are now producing a good crop.  They will not be as large as last years but they will be adequate.  This second sowing was "Resistafly"

Trail of tears climbing french bean

The trail of tears beans are just coming into their own now and producing prodigious amounts of excellent beans.  The flower is purple and the beans are purplish too.

Trail of tears beans

More trail of tears beans.  

Trail of tears flower

I am growing them up some old branches that I cut off the hedge and some that I got from birch trees.  The birch tree poles are rotting away now and I will need to cut some more.

I have fed the black currants with pigeon manure and mulched them with horse manure.  Hopefully, I will be able to mulch the others before the winter sets in.

Another of the allotment holders had a trailer of horse muck delivered and put on the path by my allotment.  After they had moved the pile I raked up what was left and put it on blackcurrants.  You have to make use of any free stuff like this.

I am going off horse manure because of its lack of nutrients.  I think it is very good for mulching and use it all the time but I would never buy any.  We are lucky to get free deliveries of horse muck and I don't mind putting this on the allotment.

It will be the pigeon manure that gives the blackcurrants the nutrients and encourage them to produce next years fruiting stems.

I am still cropping summer cabbages although I am coming to the end of them.  They are a little slug eaten but this is just on the surface and if the outer leaves are removed it will leave a good hearty cabbage.

The allotment and plants tend to look a little untidy at this time of the year regardless of how much work you put in tidying up.  While I will keep the allotment clean by weeding regularly, I do not worry too much about appearances.

The winter cauliflowers in the background are beginning to be eaten by cabbage while caterpillars but they  will not take too many of the leaves and I am taking them off by hand.  They have been given a top dressing of pigeon manure but they don't really need it.  It may make them put on new growth that will be susceptible to frosts.

Brussel sprouts are getting some height now and should be ready just before Christmas. They are getting on to be about 1 metre tall.  I like to keep all the brassicas together like this so that I can regulate club root infection.  I did get a little clubroot in the summer cauliflowers and the calabrese but this ground will not be used for brassicas for another six years and by then there will be few spores in the ground to infect the plants.  The new brassica bed has the sweet peas on at the moment.  These will be dug in to give a little more nitrogen to the soil because they are legumes and have root nodules that fix atmospheric nitrogen.  The new bed will be limed in the spring to make sure that this soil is not a good habitat for the club root fungi.  The new brassica bed has not had brassicas on it for about six years.  Rotating strictly like this enables you to eradicate diseases like club root.

The brassica plants still need to be netted against pigeons, cabbage white butterflies and cabbage root fly.

The transplanted strawberries seem to have taken a long time to establish themselves.  They are planted on the Hugelkultur trench that I did last year.  I dug in quite a few comfrey leaves to give them an additional boost and when I did that before they really perked up.  I will just have to wait for them to grow a few more roots.

Strawberries

I like to make a new strawberry bed each year using the new plantlets from the stolons that the old plants produce.  There are always far too many new plants produced and these cover the strawberry bed so you cannot tell where the rows are.  A new bed allows you to plant at whatever distances you think are appropriate and into clean ground that has been prepared specially.  I also watered in these plants with comfrey liquid and used a little mychorrhiza to aid in their establishment.

Hopefully these strawberries will grow on and establish
themselves.

The sweet peas have definitely gone over now.  They got the dreaded yellow disease which starts on the lower leaves and gradually works its way up the plant.  I think that it is a viral disease and affected them particularly this year because they were under stress from the cold wet weather.

Virus infected sweet peas

Not much you can do about this.

I am not worried about digging these into the soil because a viral infection will not affect new sweet pea plants from the soil.  I think that the vectors are aphids.  Also, I will not be growing sweet peas in this ground for at least six years.  

I planted some gladioli between one of the sweet pea rows and they have produced some good flowers.  I want to grow some big corms and get even bigger flowers next year.

Taking down the sweet pea canes is the next big job on the allotment and will take some time.  I will have to carefully store the canes so that they do not rot during the winter.  I try to keep and reuse all the wire ties that I have used to tie up the plants.  Inevitably, some of them break or are lost on the ground but keeping them is a saving that allows you to spend money on some other more important items for the allotment.  

The runner beans will continue to flower and produce beans well into October so they will have to be regularly picked and watered.

Although the squash is yet to fruit, the pumpkin has produced several very good fruit.  I will let some of them get bigger while using the others for pies and soups.  

Apart from the squash and the courgettes, I have grown marrow again.  Something I had neglected for over ten years.  

Marrow

Squashes are slow to flower this year

Although they are slow to flower, the squashes are taking much more room than they did last year and are starting to overwhelm the leeks.  

The sweet corn has produced quite a few cobs although neither the plants nor the cobs are very big this year.  Sweet corn is a C4 plant and needs a lot of sunshine.  Unfortunately, these plants have not received nearly enough light to produce good cobs.  

I am just glad that I have got some sweet corn.  

The leeks on the other hand have really enjoyed the dark wet weather and produced some good plants.  I have only cropped one of the leeks up to now but they will be used during the autumn and winter.  

They will do fine if they are not too swamped by the pumpkin and squash.  

I have cut out this years fruiting canes from the raspberries and tied in the new canes.  These are the summer fruiting raspberries although somehow some autumn fruiting ones have sidled in somehow.  

Glen Prosen  raspberries

Not sure which raspberry this is.

I don't know where these autumn fruiting raspberries have come from but the fruit grows remarkably big.  They are a little more bitter than 'Autumn Bliss'.  Needless to say I have eaten all the red ones  already. Raspberries rarely go home.  

Victoria rhubarb

I put quite a bit of farmyard manure of the rhubarb in the spring and it seems to have done them a lot of good.  They have also liked the cool wet summer we have had.  

I have three varieties of rhubarb; Timperley early, Champagne; and Victoria.  The slugs and snails have had a really good go at the Champagne but it has recovered and is growing well now.   

Victoria rhubarb

In order to grow herbs really well, you need to make sure that you keep picking them whether you are going to use them or not otherwise they will loose their bushy shapes.

The mint really needs to be cut back

Rainbow sage (Salvia officinallis 
'Tricolour')

Variegated lemon thyme
Thymus x citriodorus 'Variegata'  

Mentha × piperita 'Chocolate Mint'

 I will tidy up the herbs when I have a little more time.

 Both the comfrey and the nettles are ready for cropping and putting into the large green bins to make liquid fertiliser.

That is the allotment in September.  There are a lot of spaces that have been filled with green manure ready for digging in next spring. Crops are still being harvested and we are slowly moving towards autumn.

New strawberry bed

The new strawberry bed is finished now.  I have four rows of new plants and two rows of one year old plants.  That will be more than enough for me.

I was all ready to plant some rocket, American winter cress, lambs lettuce, spinach and winter lettuce until I discovered that I had left my seeds at home.  Not to worry.  The seed bed is raked and level ready for when I do remember to take the seeds to the allotment whenever that might be.

I dug over the old strawberry bed and dug in the old plants mixing in a little pigeon manure.  I was practising (NB I am writing in English) my digging techniques because I will be lecturing on how to dig effectively on the 30th of September.  I was just single digging throwing up the sods onto the top of the dug soil and slicing off the top 2 inches and letting it fall into the trench.  I kept the surface of the turned soil level by breaking up the sods with the back of the spade.

There is some thought that you should leave the soil rough and the clods unbroken so that the winter frosts can break them up.  This might work with some soils but it certainly doesn't with mine.  If I were to leave the soil rough dug then I would have to spend time in the spring breaking down great clods of soil that have set like concrete.  I will continue to break down the soil into a good friable texture and carefully level it as I dig  during the autumn and winter.  If the winter frosts then want to break it down even further then it is welcome to.

I wanted to continue to cover this bed with grazing rye and winter tares for the winter and this necessitates making a seed bed.

I raked over the ground but did not have time to plant green manure because I spent about an hour weeding between the rows I planted earlier.  The rye grass and tares mix will prevent weeds from growing but not until they have grown quite large and formed a good canopy of leaves to cover the ground.  Until then, I will  keep the weeds down.

I usually go along the rows with a hoe and cultivator and this seems to be adequate to remove most of the weeds.  However, I am experimenting with using the hand fork because I have seen Don use it very effectively to take off weeds from his allotment.  Not only does it enable you to hand weed more effectively, it also makes the soil very friable.  The soil looks very good when you have forked it over and broken all the lumps.

It does not necessarily make plants grow any better but it is pleasing to see neat rows with smooth, clean soil between.

There are several reasons for covering the soil with a green manure.

Using a fibrous rooted grass like grazing rye produces a really good soil  tilth when it is dug in.  The roots are incredibly adventitious and the soil in between them is fine and sandy.  These roots seem to be ideal for gleaning nutrients from the soil and fixing them within the structure of  the plant preventing  loss from leaching by heavy winter rain.

Although the leaves of grazing rye are soft and not very robust they are very effective in forming a barrier that is fairly impenetrable to light.  This will  prevent germination of weed seeds keeping the soil clean during the autumn and winter months.

Rye grass is used as green manure because it rots down quickly adding carbon and  nutrients to the soil speedily.

The tares forms a symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria such as Rhizobium leguminosarum biovar viciae  which can fix nitrogen from the air.  Rhizobium leguminosarum biovar viciae  can infect several leguminous plants including peas. Nitrogen is reduced through the action of several enzymes; the most important for this process being nitrogenase.   Nitrogen is an important plant nutrient.

So the Rhizobium captures the nitrogen from the atmosphere and passes it onto the plant that uses it for growth.  This process occurs within the plant root nodules and only benefits the infected plant.  Some say that nitrogen can be passed to other plants when growing close to an infected leguminous plant. I cannot see how this happens because of the intimate nature of the symbiosis.  However, there is a large turnover of roots in most plants and as the roots die they must give up their constituent nutrients to the soil which then could be used by other plants.

The only way that other plants can benefit from this symbiosis is when the infected plant dies and rots down releasing nutrients; including the nitrogen that was fixed by rhizobium.    The fixed nitrogen is transported and used throughout the plant and this means that all the plant should be dug into the soil to get the full benefit.

Some might say that rhizobium bacteria may well continue to fix nitrogen in plant roots even when the tops of peas, beans and tares have been cut off.  I would question this because nitrogen fixation is a very energy intensive process.  The energy to promote nitrogen fixation in the root nodule of legumes comes from the plant.  While there may be a small amount of stored food in the roots this will quickly be used up by the nitrogen fixing process. Once the energy from the food is used up, nitrogen fixation will cease because there are no photosynthesizing structures to replenish the food.  Any nitrogen that is fixed will pass straight into the root and will only be released when the roots decompose.

The benefit only comes when the dug in tares breaks down in the soil releasing nitrogen that was initially captured from the air.

Moving the strawberry bed and planting green manure

Spent the day digging over the old brassica bed.  I have taken out the swedes and kolhrabi and put them in the store shed.  There are not that many left and the ones that are will be eaten over the autumn.

Comfrey leaves have been dug into the trenches because strawberry plants seem to grow better when this is done.  I also dug in some pigeon manure.  After digging over the ground was consolidated by shuffling over it and raked as flat as that part of the allotment would allow.  I went around looking for some well rooted stolon plantlets in the strawberry bed and transplanted them into the new area.

 I planted four lines with about 15 plants in each line.  The plants were spaced about 30cm each way.  I could have offset the planting but didn't mainly because I didn't think of it but also because it is easier to hoe when the plants are in lines both ways. A little mychorrhizal fungi was added to each of the planting holes and    each plant was watered in with a little comfrey liquid.

I am going to plant another two lines of the year old strawberry plants because they will still be fruiting well next year.

There will still be room left on this bed so I will plant some rocket, lambs lettuce and American land cress for winter salads.

This will still leave a considerable number of old strawberry plants unused.  I will dig these into the ground they are occupying now adding some pigeon manure as well.  Then the grazing rye and winter tares green manure will be planted in rows to cover this area.

This will mean that two whole allotment beds will be covered in green manure.  I am hoping that I will be able to cover much more of the allotment in green manure before I run out of seed.  

I have put most of the onions into the store shed as well.  They have got to a reasonable size despite the onion fly and the cold wet weather.

Planting the green manure

Rather than creating my own green manure seed mixture, I have bought some grazing rye and winter tares seed already mixed.

The grazing rye forms an incredible fibrous root system that holds moisture and nutrients within the top soil.  It forms a dense mass of leaves that cover the surface of the soil an protect it from winter rain.  Both the roots and the leaves are a reservoir of  nutrients that will break down quickly when dug into the topsoil during the spring.

Tares and rye green manure 

The winter tares are in the leguminosae family which form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen fixing bacteria.  Nodules of bacteria form on the roots and provide the plant with nitrogen which is incorporated into proteins within the tares's cells.  (NB the apostrophe is in the correct place)

Green manure planted in rows goes further
and forms a weed suppressing canopy
regardless.

All the green manure has been planted in rows.  It gives
the opportunity to hoe out weeds when the green manure is
small like this.

It grows best if sown in the late summer
- late August or September in the UK

This green manure has grown well but
later sowings have been attacked by
slugs and snails.

Planting in sucession

 As crops have been harvested the ground has been dug over, manure added and carefully raked to make a seed bed.  So, this ground had the early peas in the background with the later maincrop in the foreground.

The green manure canopy is closing over - not many
weeds evident

If you look carefully you can see seedlings of Sinapsis alba 
and Veronica agrestis.  So not all the weeds have been
hoed out

But you can't see 'em when the green manure forms a canopy
October 2012.  It looks a little more untidy in December 2012
because of winter rains and frost but it is doing its job. 

 This green manure will only be dug in at the last minute before next years crop plants are planted or sown.  There is some suggestion that there may be an allelopathic effect so digging in about two or three weeks before planting may be the best strategy.  My idea is to get the maximum effect possible and that means leaving the green manure until late spring before digging in.

Green manure on the old onion bed.  

Green manure on the old Lathyrus odoratus bed

I am trying to catch the nutrients from the dug in sweet pea plants because they fix nitrogen from the air.  This is an addition of nitrogen and is probably significant for a small allotment like this.  If the nutrients and the carbon can be captured in the green manure plants then there is a chance that it could be used by crop plants when they are dug in.  (The carbon will only be used to produce a really good root run here, although it can be utilized by mychorrhizal fungi in other parts of the allotment.)  This is the new brassica area so no mychorrhizal fungi will be used here in the new season.

Late sowing like this means that the plants have not grown
very much and no canopy has been formed yet

When winter tares are dug in the nitrogen that has been fixed by the bacteria and passed to the plant returns to the top soil when the tares rots down. Tares will rot down relatively quickly.

After digging over the potato bed to remove any little potatoes that I missed and added pigeon manure, I have sown green manure in rows.  There is some thought that green manure should be sown broadcast.  I see no good reason for doing this and several reasons for not doing it.

I want to keep the green manure as free from weeds as possible.  This is difficult when sowing broadcast.  When planted in lines I can get to weedy areas and remove the unwanted plants.  I can keep the green manure watered with comfrey liquid and hoe between the lines to keep the soil open and free of weeds.

I have also put this mixture of green manure on the old pea bed after adding pigeon manure.  I still have one line of Hurst Green Shaft that is producing peas so I will not be able to cover the whole area yet.  I also want to put green manure on the old leaf and root bed.  The carrots, parsnips and beetroot will stay in the ground but a lot of the leaves have gone over now so I will be removing them to put the green manure in.

Most of the vegetables have cropped much better than I thought they would.  The potatoes are washed, dried and bagged and waiting to go into the store shed.  Onions and leeks are starting to swell up and make decent plants.  The sweetcorn has produced some good cobs and the pumpkin and courgettes are producing  fruit now.  No squashes yet and no cucumbers either.

I have taken out all the stems that fruited from the raspberries and tied in all the new canes.  I await the autumn raspberries.  They will be fruiting soon.

I am leaving the sweet peas to go to seed which I will collect and plant in the autumn.

I need to take more of the swedes and kohlrabi or they will go woody.   I am finding it difficult to keep up with them. I need this area to plant the new strawberry bed so they will have to be harvested soon.  I will put straw around the strawberries again next year.  It was a great success this year.

A few more of the cabbages are ready for harvest now.

The runner and climbing French beans are cropping now.  I am getting quite a few runners even though it is a really late year.

Most of the Florence fennel and celery that is left has gone to seed.  No matter they will make good green manure.

 Carrots and beetroot are being slowly cropped.  The carrots are a little forked this year and I am not too sure why.  I did not add any manure to this bed this year.  They did get a lot of green manure and pea plants dug in last autumn though.

So overall not as bad as I thought it was going to be.  Probably the most disappointing were the sweet peas.