For a few years now I have not been seriously digging.  When I took over the bottom half there was a lot of water running on it from the springs so I had to do some serious drainage.  The best way I have found of draining the allotment is to dig down about three spits and then to add lots of brushwood, shreddings and even logs.  This seems to keep the soil open and allow water to pass through the soil without coming to the surface.  It seems to have worked very well because there is no water on the bottom half although there is a stream flowing down the trackway next to the allotment.  Since I did this last year, I found that mixing the soil seems to have increased the yield from this part of the allotment.  I had four rows of Early Onward peas that had a fairly remarkable crop.  We still have margarine tubs full of them now.

I repeated the exercise in November last year burying a rambling rose from one of the houses that back on to my allotment.  It was seriously taking over the trackway.  I cut it back and buried it so I am hoping that this will aid in the drainage too.  I did not dig a small area by the shed because there were still some of the annual flowers flowering.  Now that they have well and truely died, I will dig these in and try to raise the allotment here to the same height as the rest of this area.  I will probably use some of the brushwood and shreddings  to do this but make sure they are buried very deep down.  This is the exact place where the water was running across the allotment all of last winter.  There is absolutely no water at all this year, however I still want to raise the ground about another 30 cm. if I can.  I have to be careful not to bank up the soil onto the shed though.  It will only encourage it to rot.

I have painted the shed with Cuprinol or whatever it is called.  I didn’t buy it.  It was given to me.  Well, I have painted it on the shed about three times and I still have half a can left.  I am blowed if I am going to throw it away.  It is a nasty old chemical and would only pollute the world.  I will continue to paint the shed  until it all goes.  I may well paint the bean sticks and the poles holding up the wires for the raspberries.   I still haven’t moved the raspberries from the top half to the bottom half.  This is starting to irritate me because it is getting a little late to start moving raspberries.  I will have to do it though because I have planned to grow runner beans where the raspberries are now.  I have already moved the large water butt although in the move it developed a big crack in the bottom and is now useless.  I will use it to store things in and get another bigger one.

On the top of the allotment, I usually just hoe the few weeds off and cultivate the top couple of centimeters with a claw cultivator and then plant into that without digging.   This year though I will dig quite a lot of the allotment.  I am going to dig in the green manure and possibly add a lot of leaves or other organic matter depending on what people leave in the bins by the gate.  I hope the bloke with the shire horses brings another big load of horse manure.  No matter what is in it,  it is all grist to the mill; particularly three spits down.

So, do I do a no dig system or do I begin to double and triple dig again?  I might just run out of time and have to revert to no dig.  The brassicas  like to have a firm soil to grow in.  I think that this may help to deter the cabbage root fly ( Delia radicum ).  So I am not too worried if I cannot dig  the brassica area over.  I have not walked on it since I took the beans and the sweetpeas down last year, so the worms would have had time to soften it up a bit.  Going over it with a hoe, claw cultivator and rake will be good enough to prepare it.  I will also be liming this area I think.  It has not had lime on it for about four years now.  A good liming will help  to prevent club root (Plasmodiophora brassicae.)  I keep to a strict rotation and it has been about four years since I grew brassicas  on this part of the allotment.  Now  that I have the bottom half, I will be able to have a six year rotation.  It makes rotation much easier if each of the beds were equal in size.  This is why I am moving the slabs on the top allotment and making it exactly the same size as the other beds.  I will also relay the path to the tap, taking out the topsoil and replacing it with stones to make a soak away under the path.

This should even things up so that I do not have those irritating little areas where it is not worth planting anything.

I will  have to find somewhere good to plant my viburnum because it is just where I will be altering the path.  There are a lot of bulbs there too which will have to be moved.

This reminds me.  I need to take down the large plastic bags to put my old brassicas in to bring home and put into the green bin.  I should not have left the stumps in the ground because it encourages Plasmodiophora brassicae to spread throughout the soil.  I think that spores from this fungi can stay in the soil for a number of years and it is a devil of a job removing it from a planting area.    I have been fairly successful in keeping it off the allotment until this year.  I have found that the new soil that the council bought has club root in it.  I just hope that it does not spread through the rest of the allotment.

I don’t burn the stumps.  I really don’t think that a damp, smoky, foul smelling fire will be good enough to kill off club root spores. So taking them home to put in the green recycling bin is the best option for me.

Mixing the soil through digging seems to be effective in distributing and reestablishing nutrients from lower in the soil towards the top.  No  dig might be alright for a few years but I think that a jolly good digging once in a while would increase yields - especially after twenty eight years of continuous cultivation.

I am still getting really good crops off the allotment though so I can’t  be getting a lot wrong…

Got down to the allotment around 11 ish and started on the winter digging right away.  I dug a trench four spade widths across and three spits down.  I wanted to bury some of the shredded laylandii.  It is not just laylandii; it is also other woody material however it is mostly laylandii.

Dug the trench out fairly quickly now that I have a system for putting the soil where I know which spit it has come from.  Topmost in front of me on the dug soil, next spit on the left side on undug soil and the final spit gets put on the end on the left too. Even at this depth the soil did not really look any different to the top soil so I have to be careful to replace the soil in the correct order. The bottom of the trench got a good forking over.  I got four barrow loads of shreddings and put them at the bottom of the trench.  I make sure that I meet up with the shreddings that I put into previous trenches by cutting the soil right back to the previous trench.

I covered this with the third spit soil using the cone piles method of mixing.  I build up a cone of soil when I am replacing soil in the trench.  It was the way that I was taught to mix soils at the Glasshouse and Crops Research Institute when I was working in the glasshouses there.  The main reason for digging like this is to mix the soil completely so that nutrients are fairly well distributed throughout the soil.

I leveled out the mixing cones of soil in the trench and then went to get some leaves.  Two barrow fulls of leaves were put into the trench and then covered first with second spit soil and then with first spit soil.  It left a bit of bump in the soil and I have taken my rake home to make some new lawns so I could not level it out very well.  I could have used the claw but I wanted to carry on with the digging.  I did the same procedure three times which I felt was quite good going particularly as the shreddings and leaves were so far away and I had to wheel barrow them up the hill.

Yesterday, I picked some Brussel sprouts, dug up some leeks and parsnips, took them home, washed them and had them cooked for tea.  They tasted really good.

I really do not know how people can eat Brussel sprouts any other way.  They taste foul if left for even one or two days.

 Not more on terra preta Tone!!!!

I was thinking, if the terra preta is reliant on Amazonian or rain forest species of fungi and earth worm, would we be able to replicate this kind of soil in our temperate climate?

Will we just be a poor copy of the soil in the rain forests or is there a possibility that this soil is replicable. We would have to substitute fungi and earthworm for those that can survive the temperate climate.

If we can then this is a remarkable resource that can be carried around the world. If not then whoever is attempting to make terra preta – and the Germans seem to be ahead of the pack in this department – is doomed to failure.

I think that increasing fertility of soil with the use of charcoal may be as far as we can go…

Here is a good

reminisce. My allotment on 2nd February 1982 just after I had taken it over. I had cleared and dug almost half of the allotment.  You can see I am skim digging.  The weeds that I have skimmed off were buried in the trench.  I took out a spit deep of subsoil, left it on the trackway and put in the weeds.  I took out a spit deep of subsoil further on in the trench and covered the weeds leaving a hole which was filled with weeds.  This is carried on until the end of the trench when I fetched the subsoil on the trackway and covered the weeds at the end of the trench.

Needless to say it does not look like this now.

The view from the other end.

And the soil.  Needless to say that it is not like this now.

Also known as Amazonian Dark Earths. After watching The secrets of El Dorado on http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/secret-el-dorado,  I now have a new project.  I want to begin to work on developing ADE on my allotment.  It is not just down to charcoal though.  There is a complex interaction between charcoal, nutrients, organic matter and mychorrihzal fungi. I have to thank Uriel 13 for putting me onto this.  His suggestion is that it is not mychorrhizal fungi but yeast that is important in producing this kind of soil.  He is suggesting sour dough yeast.

Whether it is mychorrhizal fungi or not, yeast is another avenue to follow.  I don’t know where to get sour dough yeast from, however my local garden centre sells mychorrhizal fung.
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 am  going to dry the resulting mixture to produce a powder because this will be easier to mix evenly though the top soil.

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) pyrene).  I am going to set up a proper comparison plot with several sections.  Another problem is what proportions should be used to make the most efficient soil additive.  I am going on the assumption that it is the adsorbsion of nutrient into the charcoal that is the inportant factor.  Also the provision of micro habitats for bacteria and fungi may be important.  The provision of very small crevices within the charcoal may prevent predation by other microorganisms.   As yeasts can be very small, as other fungi, they may find a sanctuary within the charcoals labyrinth. The trial plots will be:

• 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 :-)).

I will  grow peas on the different plots.  They may confuse the issue because they have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots, however it will be the same for all plots and that is my rotation so get over it…
Trying to think of ways that the soil remake itself may not be too problematic.  The increase in microorganisms within such a fertile soil may cause it, if they are produced in enough numbers.  Any nutrient from decomposition seems to be adsorped 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.

If the film’s suggestion is correct and the plots are set up like the ones reported then I should get enough information to convince myself of the value of this method of soil management.  I doubt very much whether it is properly scientific, however it is good fun.

There have been changes in the climate since the Earth formed. Ice ages are a good example. They were probably caused by fluctuations in greenhouse gases and radiation from the Sun. Just like today.
Science does not prove things one way or the other. Scientists leave proof to mathematicians. Science does not deal in facts although lots of scientists would argue with that. Good scientists go with the data, their measurements and try to interpret them as reasonably as possible.
Let me give you an example. I could grow a row of peas measure their height and the weight of peas I got from them. I could measure the amount of nutrient added to the soil. I could relate that to the weight of peas obtained. Yet you could come along and say you don’t believe in my peas and you are not going to look at the measurements because the peas do not exist. Your belief does not alter the existence of the peas one way or the other. The problem comes when your belief makes you walk across my allotment as if the peas were not there and destroy them all.
Science does not prove things; it just interprets data, hopefully reasonably.
Bad data produces bad interpretation. Any scientist worth their salt would have questioned, and did question, the Himalaya assertions. I don’t think that they based their report on any scientific data whatsoever. They just believed it to be so.
But it was basic physics that enabled us to question those assertions. Questioning data is a fundamental part of science and is going on all the time not just with silly assertions about Himalayan glaciers. That’s what they were doing in the leaked emails. They were talking about how they were going to challenge someone’s data. Very legitimate part of science.
How could you do it any other way without waiting until 2030? You cannot use science to shoot science down.
Fiddling the facts is not part of science. It may be part of corporate business, government spin, and people’s financial gain. Again, though just because they are doing this does not change the data. The measurements are the measurements. People are wrong to do it and there are a lot of scientists out there that are much cleverer than I am that will shout their objections very loudly; just as they did with cold fusion. To say that things are not happening because you believe a tabloid newspaper or Jeremy Clarkson does not alter the data either. The truth will out…
The most reasonable interpretation of the data is that the climate is warming. Don’t take my word for it just look at the graphs on http://www.realclimate.org/ for yourself. I would wish a lot more people looked at the data for themselves rather than rely on a television presenter for their views. There is also increasing evidence that human activity has caused this temperature increase. There is further evidence that this increase in global temperatures is affecting low lying ocean islands due to rise in sea levels. Expansion of the Sahara desert in Africa is a lot more serious than whether you have to pay more tax for your lawn mower petrol.
This is just the beginning. As Jesus said: there is none so blind as those that cannot see.

Potatoes straight from the ground are beautiful. With a little freshly picked mint and sometimes with a little butter you will rarely taste anything more wonderful. If you can serve them up with a few carrots and freshly podded peas, you could want for nothing more.

As for breaking up the ground - potatoes don’t break up the ground - you do; digging in manure, digging trenches, and hoeing them up. However all this exercise produces some lovely vegetables.

I never water my potatoes and get some fairly big ones. The RHS did some research a few years back and found that watering vegetables did increase their weight and size. If you can I would water them at least twice a week, however this depends on how many you have. It would be impractical for me to water because I have so many. We cannot use hoses or sprinklers.

I have rubbed off all the eyes in past years and got a really good crop. I only do it if the shoots become drawn - I left my seed potatoes in the dark one year and they produced long white stems. I have also reduced the number of eyes to two or three in the past. I think that this helps to produce larger spuds but that might just be me whishfully thinking. I wouldn’t rub them off if they are the small,dark green ones.
I always put my late potatoes in before my earlies . That way they get a good long maturing period. I try to plant when there is less chance of frost. Early April maybe.

 There is  a difference between humus and dead organic matter in the soil.  Humus is a dark coloured amorphous colloidal liquidy material that leeches out of a compost heap.  It seems to have a very complicated chemical make up and is formed when dead plants and animals decay.  Animal excrement also seems to be important in its formation.  By animals I mean all the mini beasts that live in the litter.  It is a colloid and this enables it to retain water and this helps to improve the water holding capacity of the soil.  A colloid is a mixture but not exactly a solution of one finely divided material suspended within another material.  Humus is usually a colloidal solution.  Humus also increases soil fertility and makes it more friable.  Humus that is made from more acidic materials such as coniferous trees is called mor.  This type of compost is made mainly by fungi decomposing the material.  Humus that is more akaline is called mull and is the type that is more likely to be found in allotment soil.  Mull is much more likely to encourage earthworms and other small soil organisms.

Really this is what we want to obtain from the compost heap. When  the heap goes that friable black soil like material it contains a lot of humus.  Putting it on the soil allows microorganisms to  finish off the decomposition and turn the humus into nutrients.  However, this is a very long process and some material will spend years if not centuries locked up in the soil.

Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of making raised beds if they don’t need to?  The only reasons that I can come up with is to help to drain the allotment or for people who cannot bend down easily.

I have raised the whole of my allotment to get running water off it.  Being near the top of a hill means that springs emerge in several places.  I have burried two 6 inch diameter pipes across the allotment to drain them and with 3 soak aways under the paths this is coping with the water and the top is rarely too wet to walk on.

In the past I have sunk up to the top of my wellingtons, if not more, at this time of year.   Eric suggested a long time ago that I should raise the allotment with upright slabs.  They were more than adequate.  The only downside of them is that they allow little trickles of soil to escape through the joins.  This really is skirting around the fact that they are blooming heavy and take a lot of heaving about to get them planted in into the soil with any kind of asthetic effect.  I would not advise you to do this particulary around a 30 by90 allotment.

At its lowest the allotment is about 18 inches above the trackway.  At its highest it is about 2ft above the trackway,  although where I have burried the brushwood it is much higher in the middle of the allotment.  It looks quite dome shaped.  The streams bubble out under the slabs and onto the path so you can imagine the state of the path at the moment.  Still it keeps the nutters off the allotments because they don’t like walking through quagmire.

One of my next jobs is to take all the slabs out along the path to the tap and make sure that this bed is square.  It is really irritating that, when planting rows of vegetables there is a triangle of soil that is useless to plant in effectively and  is left to the weeds.  I just need to straighten up this bed and then I will move the path over a little.  This old path was laid on top soil so I am going to take a spit out where the path is going to go and replace it with stones removed from the Council soil.  Both Don and Tony, who got the Council soil too, have been removing stones avidly and leaving them by my allotment.   I will have plenty especially as I am going to bury the old greenhouse concrete foundations too.   I will use the topsoil to raise where the greenhouse used to be because it is a little low.  I might put slabs along the other side of the path too because this soil is getting high and falling onto the path in places.  It will get even worse when I take out the apple mint and the raspberries.

I have got to find somewhere good for the apple mint.  I planted it here because, when I walk up to the tap, I crush some of the mint leaves and it smells really good.

Aromatherapy  - gardeners had this a long time before it got fashionable.

Which brings me back to raised beds - as opposed to raised allotments.  Is this just a fashion too or is there some good horticultural reason for using them.  There are too many paths for me to be doing with.  If I am paying for the ground I want the maximum to be for growing.  I have three paths.  One to the tap and used to be to the greenhouse before I took it down.  Another is to the new shed.  The third is to two big water buts and along the raspberry row.

So why raised beds?  Has anyone done any comparison of yeild from raised verses ground level gardening?  Is there a relationship between the hight off the ground and the yeild you get from the raised bed?  Should we be building 8ft, 12ft or higher beds?  Should we be putting vegetables into a large wooden box and raise it up into the air with a tower crane?  Should we be suspending raised bed boxes from hot air balloons.  Maybe the best effects would be on the Space Station… What do I know?  I’m just a simple allotment gardener.  Keep talking bull shit - it is good for the allotment, Tone.

I woudl suggest, and I only have anecdotal evidence for ths, that gardeners that go to all the trouble of making wooden skirts for their beds are also those that have a lot of time on their hands and spend it carefully cultivating their works of art.   If you are going to all the trouble of making easy access beds then you are going to make sure that you easily access them as often as you possibly can.  This is what produces large yeilds of beautiful vegetables.

In my opinion yeild is all down to the enthusiasm of the gardener.  Those that put the hard work in will reap the rewards of a good harvest. And this will be regarless of elevation.

Which brings me to Roundup…

New allotmenteers are sometimes discouraged because their allotments are covered in brambles, nettles and couch grass.

There seems to be three camps for allotment clearing.

•  Spray, slash and burn
• Cover with black plastic and wait for a couple of years.
• Do a bit of gardening and dig the weeds out.  It is harder work but far more satisfying.

So, what do we have an allotment for?  Do we put in that much work for chemical covered vegetables that we could easily buy down at the nearest supermarket?  Do we go down to the allotment to breath in noxious chemicals that we can easily breath in down by the nearest main road?

I would rather put my hands in good rich soil that is not contaminated by man made chemicals.  I would rather eat vegetables that do not have to grow in contaminated soil.

I am in the hard work camp.  Get your spade and fork out and do some graft.

Now some will moan that they do not have time to dig out all the weeds.  Well if that is so, why are you cultivating an allotment in the first place because it does not get easier.

If you have no time to clear, you have no time to maintain.  They are equally time consuming.  Chemicals will do things sooner but why not cut out the middle man and go direct to the supermarket because you will get the same…

To  all you chemical fiends - not near my allotment please.

Snow has all gone  now.  The water hasn’t  though.  Very wet.

This blog has been read by 100,200 people.  Now come on folks you don’t think I have read my blog that many times…

Sometimes I despair about the way that misconceptions are readily passed on in education.   I look  at quite a few gardening sites and it is remarkable how many of them just repeat the same advice without any reference to where it originally came from.  I think that a lot of this is self perpetuating and feeds off itself.  I have just found  this again on  crop rotation.  AHHHHHHHH! I have rotated crops every which way but loose and have never found any difference in the way that the vegetables grow.  Just don’t grow the same crop in the same area year after year if you can help it.  I have a six year rotation and I am fairly strict about not planting brassicas in the same place for at least 6 years.

Too many so  called scientific facts are based on little empirical data or evidence.   Don’t just repeat: make sure that you do  it yourself or at least  look at the data and make up your own mind.  Science is not  the recalling of facts.  It is the interpretation of data and evidence.  While anecdotal evidence is anecdotal at  least it is evidence which can be interpreted.  Repeating facts unquestioningly means that you are not making a judgement about their worth.  This is the problem with the public understanding  of science.  People do not understand that science  is not a body of facts.  It is a body of best interpretation of data.   And that interpretation will change as more data is obtained.  The most sensible interpretation of the data is that Jeremy Clarkson, TV presenter, is wrong.  Global  warming is happening and human augmentation is significant.

I hear that nowadays you can become a master composter.  My word, I don’t know how I could possibly have successfully gardened for fifty years without this accolade.  I have been piling up vegetable matter into a heap, leaving it for a while and digging it in every year since I started gardening, when I was eight years old.  Some compost was better than others and I must admit, if the layer technique; which I learnt from the old Victorian books, was used I got fairly good friable compost.  However, just piling it in a heap did more or less the same job with much less time and effort needed.

Who makes up these awards and what authority do they have  to  hand out these qualifications?

The layer technique was:

• Put a good layer of brush wood at the bottom for drainage.
• Start  the  compost off with a 1 foot layer of difficult to decompose material like straw, hedge cuttings,  woody perennial  material, leaves and  woody weeds etc.
• Next put on  a 1 foot layer of easily decomposable material like annual weeds, lawn  grass cuttings, vegetable  peelings,  cow, pig, chicken and pigeon manure etc.
• After that put 1 foot of sieved garden top soil.
• Dust the topsoil with a couple of handfuls of lime.
• Then  put  a new layer of difficult to decompose material maybe shredded  paper this time and then repeat the process  again

There were several reasons why I never was able to do this kind of composting.  You never have the right kind of material at the right time.   During  the autumn and winter  I  have lots of difficult  to  decompose material and in the summer I have tons of the  readily decomposable material.  Secondly, where am I going to get good top soil to put on a compost heap?  Digging holes in the allotment and using precious top soil was never an option for me.  I have used poorer soil and subsoil on the compost to try and improve the soil and use it on the allotment. It  has worked to some extent but it made the compost very stony.

Now I have made the heretical assertion that you should put leaves on a compost heap.  Shock and horror.  By leaves in this context I do mean tree leaves.   For some unknown reason they should not be added to the normal compost heap but should always be composted on their own.

I think that this is because in the Victorian age  the  estate gardeners would use rotted tree leaves as  a potting compost.  It does make a really good friable medium for seed compost and when mixed with sieved topsoil and grit will make a very acceptable potting compost. Yet there  is  no law  that states that  you cannot put tree leaves on  an ordinary compost heap.  I have heard people say that tree  leaves are rotted down by fungi.  That’s true, but so  is virtually all the other things  that you put onto  a compost  heap.  If you don’t believe me look  at grass cuttings  after  they have been on the compost for a while.  They have  the  tale, tale signs  of white threads running  through them.

There are few composts that  will add appreciable amounts of nutrient  to the soil.  However, plants do not necessarily need an  awful lot of nutrient.  Just as  long as you put back what you took  out you can’t go  wrong.   In  addition to compost from the compost heap,  I  add cow,  horse,  pigeon,  sheep and goat  manure when I can get it.  It’s all  grist  to the mill.

For  many years I did  not have a compost heap at all.  Now I  have  three that I put up last year.   Before, I liked  to bury all the compost material directly into a trench between the comfrey plants and I may continue to do this this year now that the comfrey has established itself again.  I was always cautious about adding grass cuttings that people had left near the  gate because you never knew what  noxious substances they had been putting on their lawns.  Allowing it to first  be processed by comfrey plants seemed the best thing to do.

I was up the allotment today for the first time  in  about three  weeks  to  do some serious work.  I  have  been harvesting  the Brussel,  parsnips  and leeks but doing nothing  else.   The bloke with the shire  horses on the common brought some horse muck over and when he was tipping it out got the trailer stuck in the mud.  The amount of  running water on the surface is phenomenal although I have seen this before when  there has  been  a thaw.   I said that I would help by taking off as much of the horse muck  as I could to lighten the trailer.

Well he tried several times to get the trailer out and it was stuck fast.    He went off to get a four wheel drive big tractor while I and two other blokes from the allotment tried to offload as much as we could.

We must have emptied about a third of the trailer before he came back and it took  a couple of seconds for the big tractor to extract the trailer.  The rest of the manure was dropped off and he left.

I think  that the new concrete bins are  far too far back from  the trackway and this means that the trailers need to cross the soft ground before they can be off loaded.

Still I got some  manure and put it around  the black current bushes.   I  had a good look at the bushes because I thought that I had some big bud. (Eriophyes ribis).  Now I don’t think I have.  They are  just good big plump buds.

I think that a lot of people  dig out a runner bean trench and put peelings, lawn  mowings and other composty things at  the bottom  of it then  backfill.   I have done  that with impunity for years, never having  any problems with the beans. I may not have time  to  do this this year because I still have not transplanted the raspberries yet and this is where I have decided to put the runners.   Having said this,  I will dig a trench if I have the  time.   I don’t know if it makes any difference to  the crop  you get and I have never compared trenched with untrenched.

Some people  line their trench  with newspaper.  I don’t  do this mainly because I never  remember to take newspaper up the allotment at the appropriate time.

I  am sure that while the newspaper will inevitably cause nitrogen  to be removed from  the  soil for a while, (while the bacteria are decomposing the paper) at this depth it would not adversely affect the runner beans.

What amuses me is, although these people do  this for their beans,  they criticise me for doing it with the whole allotment.  If it is good enough for beans why is it any different for the other vegetables? I don’t use newspaper.  I use brushwood.  I expect it does a similar job.

My runner beans this year will be “Aintree”.   It cropped really well last year and the year before.  Although I do have a soft spot for “Scarlet Emperor” and grew if for a great number of years, it does not do as well as Aintree.

At about 12 o’clock today I harvested several parsnips,  leeks and  some brussel sprouts.  They were washed and cooked by 4 this afternoon and  eaten for dinner.   By jove the taste was wonderful…

Makes it all worth while.

Beetroot seems to have gone over.  They  were affected by the snow.

You know I  really do have a great respect for the agricultural and horticultural knowledge of the ancient South  American  indian civilizations.    I think that  the jury is out as to whether the terra preta soils were deliberately produced or just resulted from  humans throwing out their waste materials.  I would  like to think that they were making these soils consciously.

There seems to be some  advantage to  adding composted activated charcoal to the soil.  Looking at the  properties  of activated charcoal, it  seems to be able to adsorb large amounts of organic compounds and this  characteristic seems to allow it  to  contribute to the fertility of the soil - for  hundreds if not thousands of years.  This interests me because apart from contributing  to the fertility of my allotment it would also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Now previously in these blogs I have berated people for  lighting smoky fires  and  allowing  the  smoke to  blow over my allotment.   However, do I have to modify my opinion of fires now?  I don’t think  so.   Charcoal burning  may well be a good way of increasing  and  sustaining  the fertility of the soil but not near my allotment.

I am told there are charcoal producers that prevent noxious fumes from  venting  to the atmosphere.   I  am dubious… However, in the spirit of scientific or at the least horticultural exploration I will indeed try composting some activated charcoal  and see  if  it adds to the fertility  of the allotment when I dig it in.  Maybe  I  will also  put some under the peas because it  seems to help with the nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Snow  has gone now and I am looking forward to  digging on the allotment again.  I will continue with my Montezuma method because I think that this will also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Charcoal and compost I can cope with.   I doubt very much if I will make my own especially if it involves burning fish and  bones.  How about mixing it with blood fish  and bone?  Worth thinking  about Tone…