I have started to prepare the ground for the garlic and the winter onions.  Now you should know my feelings about bonfires.  People are gathering wood brush for November the  5th and leaving it on the car park by my allotment.  I am using this to make my Montezuma beds.  I dig down at least two spits and bury as much woody material as I can.  The subsoil is replaced and then compost, manure or lawn mowings are  put on top of that and finally the topsoil covers this.  It raises up the soil and makes a kind of hot bed for the onions.  I will have to cover the onions with enviromesh because last year they were very affected by the onion fly that infects the allotment.  It does not worry me but it is extra work.  Who ever thought that we would have to cover onions and leeks to keep insects off?The sweet peas were a disaster this year.  Every time they bloomed it would rain and damage the flowers.   I think that some of the seed had been infected with virus and this was then transferred to the other plants.  All the plants started to yellow at the bottoms and it slowly traveled up the stem.   I eventually took the lot out and put them in the green bin at home.

I will be planting new sweet pea seed  in a couple of weeks.  I am planting in plastic trays with compartments.  When they have germinated I will transfer them to those fabric pots with no bottoms.  When I do this I will add mychorrhizal fungi to the roots.

Blooming good year for runner beans.  The Aintree was spectacular again but the white runner  Desiree did not do quite so well.  The crop is starting to get a lot less now thank heavens.  All the summer onions were lifted last month and put onto strings in the shed.  I will take them home as and when we need them.  Spuds did reasonably well although not as well as last year.  A lot of the allotment gardens were affected by this weed killer aminopyuralid and my allotment was no exception.  I thought that I was going to be lucky because I got my muck from a friend that has horses.  It must have been in the bedding straw for the horses.

It did not affect the potatoes too much but it was not what I wanted.

Lovely crop of carrots this year.  Big ones too.  I left the enviromesh on them and did not take it off  this month like I did last year.  I did not think that the carrot fly would still be laying eggs at this time of the year but they are.  It helps to keep the slugs off them as well.

The foliage of the parsnips is very big; however, as I said to Don, it is not the tops we eat.  I just hope that this is a symptom of what is growing underground.

I have moved all my strawberries into one place on the allotment now.  All the new ones were given mychorrhizal fungi and they seem to be growing well.  I put a line of American land cress and rocket in for leaves during the winter.  I finished off the packet of spinach but there were only a few so I finished off the row with green manure.  I have bought a mixture of green manure this year.  Nevertheless, I am experimenting with just using normal rye grass for green manure.  It is coming up well so will be dug in next spring.

I spent a few hours in the last few weeks taking all  the cabbage white caterpillars off the brassicas.  I doubt if I got them all but I think that I made a big dent in the population so that they will not totally devastate them like they did last year.  I took the nets off them because they restrict access and I wanted to weed, feed and take off the yellow leaves.  I may have to put them back on because the pigeons start to eat them  if they get hugry during the winter.  I have been picking calabrese and purple sprouting for all of August and they are still coming now.  I will leave the purple sprouting in until next year because it should be coming next spring.  The new soil that they are in is very poor in nutrient so I was thinking of moving my grapes there.  Grapes like a very poor soil.  The leeks are here as well and they are growing very well considering the state of the soil.    I will buy a couple more stakes and put wire across like I have for the new raspberries.  I am in two minds whether to keep the old raspberries or throw them away.   I was given them about 30 years ago when I first had the allotment.  They are not the biggest cropping raspberries but they did do very well this year.  I think that every one of them is a differnent variety and some are very small almost like wild ones.  Their flavour is exquisite though.  I did not take any raspberries home this year because I ate them all at the allotment.

Now that I have my new shed, I am becoming much more domesticated.  I have a kettle and a little primus stove.   Now,  I keep  forgetting to take milk down to the allotment - I have tea - so I have taken to picking off the flowers of the chamomile and brewing up chamomile flower tea.  It is a mild sedative and keeps sending me to sleep. The comfy chair I have does not help either.  Fresh chamomile tea is perfection though.

Tomorrow I will continue to dig the onion and garlic bed.  I will probably find a lot of other things to do as well but I cannot think of them now.

Now I may be a grumpy old man but I do find the need to light bonfires at the slightest excuse really irritating.  Gardens do not need fires.  They are the  antethesis of gardening.

The whole point of gardening is to get out into the fresh air, give yourself exercise and grow some good wholesome vegetables. Or that is what I thought but what do I know.  Autumn seems to be the season of fire lighting.  A season that culminates on the 5th of November where people vie to get the largest most dangerous pile of flammable material that they can and then proceed to burn it all.

Not only that but insult is added to injury by firing off of fireworks.  As if we did not have enough pollution.  Why not add a little more heavy metal contaminated smoke to the atmosphere?

‘Oh’ I hear you say, ‘but aren’t they beautiful?’  No.  Flowers are beautiful.  Gardens are beautiful.  People are beautiful.

Garden fires produce carcinogens - cancer producing substances.  You loose the nutrients locked up inside the plants when they burn.  It adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere unnecessarily and it dumps pollution onto surrounding allotments.  You do not get rid of stuff.  It is still there - just changed- and some of it gets onto other people’s allotments.

What do you do with diseased plants?  Well one thing I would not do is heap them into a smelly, smoke ridden pile of wet plant material because I will guarantee that you will not destroy  pests or diseases in this way.  Heat is one of the ways of killing microorganisms, however I would be surprised if the heat generated and the achitecture of a normal smoky garden fire would be a reliable way of safely disposing of diseased material.

There are alternatives to having fires.  You could use your green bin if your local council provides one, you could take it to the tip or you could bury it on the allotment.  Ah but… I hear you say - regardless of the ‘buts’ there are alternatives.I have never met a problem that shredding, burying or composting did not solve.  Burning is not the answer.

I have experimented for several years now burying large logs and tree branches.  The accepted wisdom is that this practice will remove nitrogen from the soil. Bacteria and fungi rotting the logs need nitrogen and they absorb it from the surounding soil.  Now this may be the case, however, if the logs are buried below the normal root run of vegetables any nitrogen that the microorganisms remove would not be available to most vegetables anyway.  I am talking here about burying at least two spits down in  subsoil.  Nitrogen is usually leached from the soil and this may be a good way of trapping this nitrogen and giving us the potential of recycling it into the top soil when the logs have eventually rotted away.  In my experience the rotting process is relatively quick and the soil formed is very friable.  I call this the  Montezuma method. These South American indians knew what they were doing.  They were excellent horticulturalists and agriculturalists.  They built vast floating gardens that fed cities.  They floated gardens on logs and brush wood. In any case, it does not seem to have any adverse effect on my vegetables.

Earlier in the year I buried a leylandii tree two spits down by double digging and burying it under the subsoil.  I have just dug down to see what has happened to it and I cannot find any trace of it.

Burying  logs has several advantages.  It raises the soil above the surrounding area.  As there are two springs on my allotment, raising the soil level means that the water flows below the soil and into the subsoil.   The surface 6 to 8 inches are normally well drained.  The logs and brush wood seem to leave drainage spaces in the soil which water can flow through easily.  I am burying carbon that would otherwise be converted into carbon dioxide and add to the carbon load of the atmosphere.  While carbon dioxide and methane are produced from the rotting process, I would suggest that most of the carbon will be left in the soil.  There is evidence that soil could be a carbon sink and buried carbon in the form of logs and brushwood could stay in the soil for hundred or even thousands of years.